Soldato
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Err, there's Lucasarts & Midway quoted in those links also
, not just Sony, end of the day pretty much everyone agrees (apart from the uneducated) that when you take the time out to develop games properly on the PS3 it does yield some very good results, this was same on the PS2, the only difference this time around is Microsoft made better relations with the big dev houses giving them very user friendly development kit's early on and also offering them good support, apparently Microsoft approached many dev's up to 2 years earlier then Sony this time around, asking them in the R&D stages what they would like to be done to make the 360 easier and more user friendly machine for development, did you know for example that the 360 was originally only going to have 256mb of memory like the PS3, but they changed it specificity to suit developers needs, many developers requested that the 360 should have 1gig of ram so Microsoft chose to compromise by doubling it to 512 from 256, they were really on the ball this time around, they saw all the mistakes they made on the original xbox (in terms of development relations) and pro-actively went out of their way to rectify past mistakes and I'll commend them for that at least, but not for the poor quality control on their product due to their desperation to cut into the market early, more and more proof is surfacing every week that proves that Microsoft knew early on that the failure rate on the 360 was reaching the high 50's in terms of percentages, but they chose to ignore it,Anyway for the PS3 it was a different story, they were behind on development, even at the 06' E3 show for example they didn't even have any 'finalised' working PS3 on show, they were using their dev-kits for the demonstrations, then not only behind on general development of the PS3 but they then run into serious supply issues of the blu-ray diodes, this pushed back the release date of the PS3 even further, by this time many dev's had already gotten very familiar with the 360 development kits and were halfway through developing new games for the 360, now according to some developers around this time they still hadn't even received a PS3 development kit, so it's no wonder that the 360 become the lead platform for the majority of games, not only because the console was out 1 and a half years earlier but because developers had already had their hands on the 360 dev-kits 1/2 years earlier and where already very familiar with it, and not only that a lot easier to use.
Now we have the PS3 out at this present day after hitting our EU shores on March 23, 2007
eek, and in that short time it has already proven itself to be one of the most graphically capable machines by way of WipeoutHD, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4, Gran Turismo Prologue, and now Little Big Planet, these are all games that get quoted around the interweb whenever people are asked in a poll/thread 'what are today's most graphically impressive console games', not because the PS3 has the best GPU, it doesn't, but because of the cell, the cell and it's SPU's allows avid programmers to adopt new ways to be able to take advantage of the cells architecture to make up for the PS3's short comings in memory and GPU performance, the very fact the there are multi-platform games that run practically as well on the PS3 after being ported from the 360 is a feat of engineering itself tbh, especially considering it has only half the memory,I can promise you one thing, like the PS2 did the PS3 will improve every year graphically, you think back and compare the early PS2 games to the likes of God Of War 2 etc, they are worlds apart, now you do the same for the xbox, Halo was the release title, how did the games evolve graphically beyond that release title, it didn't, that's because the architecture was rigid, similar as it is in the 360 today, if you read up on how 'Naughty Dog' overcame many of the obstacles in with the PS3's architecture in creating the game Uncharted you wouldn't believe it, it took really imaginative programmers to think outside the box to take advantage of the spu's and off load the RSX,
""The main thing about the PlayStation 3 is the Cell processor and more specifically the SPU's. We are only using 30 percent of the power of the SPU's in Uncharted. We've been architecting a lot of our systems around this and we were able to take full advantage of that power. A big part of our systems is running on SPU's: scene bucketing, particles, physics, collision, animation, water simulation, mesh processing, path finding, etc. For our engine, the cool thing about having the SPU's is the fact we can minimize what we send to the RSX (the graphic chip), it allows us to reject unnecessary information and get the RSX to be very efficient. "
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Here are a few more interesting examples of how developers are learning to make good use of the Cell architecture and the reason why the PS3 will continue to evolve not only graphically, but in terms of physics and AI,
Resistance: Fall of Man
"Animation and calculating collisions between objects are perfect fits, says Hastings. So those are the primary jobs Resistance doles out to the SPEs.."
Source: Spectrum online
"SPU System:
Animation
Audio (NextSynth and LR1)
Bucketer sort
Collision (separate broad and narrow)
Dynamic DB
Dynamic joint
FX update
Geom Cull Clip (for shadows and decals)
Glass
Moby constants
Physics collision
Physics simulation
Particle (weather fx)
Render mats
Static DB
Water (FFT)
10-20% total SPU utilization" (uses 5 SPEs, Resistance 2 uses 6 SPEs)
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Resistance 2
"Propriety game systems are now being heavily farmed out to the PS3's SPUs, keeping the central PPU as a sort of traffic cop that organizes what gets attention at any given moment. In simple terms, the game is taking much better advantage of the untapped potential of the console. In regard to visuals, the expanded use of the SPUs means more enemies on screen, significantly more complex AI from all of those foes and dramatically expanded options for special effects."
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Super Stardust HD
"We are able to get over 10,000 active objects with physics and collisions and over 75,000 particles simulated and drawn @60fps. That said, we were unable to use all the available processing power from Cell for this game, so for the next game there are still plenty of reserves left"
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Uncharted: Drake’s fortune
"Like the PS2 the PS3 is a sophisticated and powerful piece of hardware. Our engineers are working very hard at making specific optimizations to take full advantage of the Cell and its SPU's. However, there is so much depth to this machine, that much like the PS2, you will continue to see developers squeeze more and more out of it over the course of what I am sure is going to be a lengthy life-cycle."
"We are utilizing all SPUs in Uncharted for AI, animation and lots of other systems. We are however just starting to tap into the power of the Cell. In future games I can promise even more utilization of the Cell which will result in more of everything, including game play."
Source: Ars Technica
"As far as the Cell processor is concerned, we're actually using about a third to half of that right now, so there's still a bit of untapped potential there."
" I would say number one thing is animation, and the fact that the Cell processor has so much raw horse power that you could just throw more and more at it and it doesn't break a sweat. Our animation system is very complex, and we layer on dozens of frames of animation so you have that fluidity of movement where Nathan Drake can be running across a courtyard, stumbling over a rock as he's ducking under a hail of gunfire, reloading his weapon and rolling into cover, and all of these animations can happen simultaneously. "
Source: GameSpot
"The PlayStation 3 has a lot of power. When we started Uncharted we were really ambitious and had no idea what the PS3 would give us. Once we got the first devkits, we realized quickly that we could do everything we had planned to. The three main points for me are the Cell, Blu-Ray and the hard drive. We’ve been using the Cell for pretty much all our systems: rendering, particles, physics simulation, collision detection, animation, AI, decompression, water simulation, etc … and to give you an idea of the power of the PS3, we're using only 30 percent of the Cell processor.
In terms of Blu-Ray, we just couldn’t have made Uncharted without it; with Uncharted we have almost filled it (91 percent). We're also using the hard drive to pre-cache data from the Blu-Ray disc. That allows us to stream up to 12 streams for sound, load level data super fast and more importantly to stream textures constantly to guarantee high-res quality on the screen. "
Source: Ars Technica
"Basically, in Jak I we had somewhere in the vicinity of 300-350 animations for Jak and everyone was really happy with the fluidity of his movement and the response. In Uncharted, Drake has got more than 3500 animations and the difference is we're now taking the cell processor and we're taking say two dozen of those animations, like we've got his running animations, flinching animations, reloading animations, rolling animations, just dozens of animations all at once being layered on top of each other and then the cell processor recreates on the fly the single frame of animation that you need to be able to play the game at that moment and the fact we can just dump more and more work on that processor and its SPUs just means we can free up our CPU to do more general purpose tasks. "
Source: PALGN
"We’ve solved most of our memory problems by relying on the SPEs to perform compression, both at load-time and at run-time, using techniques developed by ICE, SCEA Tools&Tech and the SCEE ATG group."
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