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Original post by Daaark What is the RSX performance like? It's obvious from just booting up any game that it's not in the same league as the 360's GPU, but how big is the gap?

To get a *very rough* idea, you can look up PC benchmarks for ATI X1900 vs nVidia 7800.

Xenos has some interesting properties:
- As well as being the GPU, it's also the motherboard's northbridge (the CPU's gateway to RAM), meaning that system/video memory are actually the same thing.
- eDRAM is awesome, but not always big enough, meaning sometimes you've got to break the frame-buffer up into tiles, which means running vertex shaders (etc) once for each tile.
- unified shaders (same transistors process pixels and verts) means less bottlenecking.

RSX has some interesting properties:
- no pixel shader constant registers -- uniform variables must be hard-coded into the compiled shader microcode. This means that changing a variable requires applying patches to the compiled code (which either stalls the RSX, or requires complex SPU<->RSX communication).
- can read from both main and video memory. To get peak performance you actually have to optimally split your data between both banks and exploit this feature.
- non unified shaders, and very weak vertex shading performance -- you're forced to do a lot of your vertex processing on the CPU (SPUs).
- larger shader branch penalties than the Xenos.

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Do people hate programming for the Cell because of the chip's architecture, or just Sony's API in general?

It's just very different. You can't do 'traditional' multi-threading, as the there's only one "real" CPU core (PPU). The other CPU cores (SPUs) are NUMA meaning that all your old code isn't going to perform well on them. The RSX is underpowered, meaning a lot of your shader code has to be re-written in C/C++ and moved over to the SPUs.
So basically, if you've got an existing engine, large portions will have to be re-written to make use of the PS3. In comparison, the 360 behaves a lot like a regular multi-core PC, and being DX-based, your existing engine will probably port quite easily.

I personally have an XBOX 360 which I wish I didn't have. After going on active duty for a year xbox refused to refund my live membership after confirming my account was inactive for 11 and a half months. That kind of pissed me off.

Anyways I will be trading the 360 in for a PS3.

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Original post by Hodgman RSX has some interesting properties: - no pixel shader constant registers -- uniform variables must be hard-coded into the compiled shader microcode. This means that changing a variable requires applying patches to the compiled code (which either stalls the RSX, or requires complex SPU<->RSX communication). - can read from both main and video memory. To get peak performance you actually have to optimally split your data between both banks and exploit this feature. - non unified shaders, and very weak vertex shading performance -- you're forced to do a lot of your vertex processing on the CPU (SPUs). - larger shader branch penalties than the Xenos. Quote: Do people hate programming for the Cell because of the chip's architecture, or just Sony's API in general? It's just very different. You can't do 'traditional' multi-threading, as the there's only one "real" CPU core (PPU). The other CPU cores (SPUs) are NUMA meaning that all your old code isn't going to perform well on them. The RSX is underpowered, meaning a lot of your shader code has to be re-written in C/C++ and moved over to the SPUs. So basically, if you've got an existing engine, large portions will have to be re-written to make use of the PS3. In comparison, the 360 behaves a lot like a regular multi-core PC, and being DX-based, your existing engine will probably port quite easily.

How do SPU shaders run in comparison to native GPU ones?

I've got some games were the PS3 port looks HORRIBLE. Like an upscaled early PS2 game, and then there's games like Uncharted 2 that look amazing, and run in 1080p. The artwork in Uncharted carries it a long way, but there is lots of technical stuff going on in there. Nice shaders, constant DOF effects, etc...

On the other side of the coin, we can't even get Rock Band in 1080p on PS3.

Just give it some time before they start getting full developer attention, some AAA games and hopefully even existing PS3/Xbox 360 games (if bought by Sony/MS).

Actually, it may take a few years, but it is the future.

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Original post by shurcool Just give it some time before they start getting full developer attention, some AAA games and hopefully even existing PS3/Xbox 360 games (if bought by Sony/MS). Actually, it may take a few years, but it is the future.

Maybe, if you like RPGs and other slow moving games. But for anything critical, where you may need to time a jump or use quick-time actions, you're hosed.

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20483

minimum latency between pressing a button and seeing something happen on the screen is going to be 20ms for a round trip. And thats not an infrastructure issue, thats the speed of light.

Maybe if the games were cheap, but they aren't. Maybe if storage space was a concern, but it isn't. Maybe if system performance was a huge problem but it's not.

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Original post by KaptainKomunist Maybe if the games were cheap, but they aren't. Maybe if storage space was a concern, but it isn't. Maybe if system performance was a huge problem but it's not.

The game prices aren't fixed, they will undoubtedly change over the course of years. They're having a Thanksgiving sale now, but it'll take them a while to catch up to Steam for example.

Latency will become less of an issue once data-centers are placed in most big cities. Many TVs these days have horrible input lag, so what's another 10 ms.

It's actually very nice having a thin client. You can play from any computer in your house (or elsewhere w/ fast internet), while all your save-games and settings are saved in the cloud. You can try games in less than 60 seconds, and buy them equally fast. Or rent for 5 days. Immediately. No waiting for a 8 gb download.

Edit: Case in point, the article you've posted is almost a year old. Things have improved *significantly* since then.

[Edited by - shurcool on November 26, 2010 3:59:31 PM]

xbox is always better