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Dave Karraker: Porting games from Xbox 360 to PS3 means additional effort |
Listed in: PS3 Tags: Havok, Sony
An article on Doctor Dobb's Programming Journal looks at the many advantages and disadvantages of programming for the Cell processor. After all of the tech talk and the analysis were done, the conclusion is such:....The Cell offers an impressive potential for performance.
However, due to its architecture and limited support offered by the
compiler, you can't expect to exploit this potential by just
recompiling your current applications. Applications must be radically
redesigned in terms of computation and data transfers.
Of course, this caveat of "radically redesigning" applications for the Cell only means that game developers will have to spend some more if they want their multiplatform game to show up on the Sony PlayStation 3.
What's amusing about this is that Sony seems to agree. GamePro reports that Sony Senior Director of Corporate Communications, Dave Karraker, had this to say in his blog:
If your game starts on Xbox 360 you will have to re-engineer aspects of
the game to run properly on PS3. This means additional effort. Some
developers have been complaining about this but I donÂ’t believe we can
solve that.
Now this doesn't directly mean that Sony is leaving the developers to figure things out for themselves. Karraker does hint that they're doing what they can to help developers along. While talking about online capabilities, Karakker said: "XBL provides more and better standard libraries for online gaming to developers. For the same features on PS3, developers have to do some extra work. WeÂ’re catching up, but there is a difference."
Also, thanks to Sony we already know that starting games on the PS3 is just as costly as starting games on other platforms. "If a game starts life on PS3, then man-hours per feature or costs related to asset production are comparable with industry norms," or so says Sony officials to GamePro.
But what about multiplatform games? How long do we have to wait for the PS3 to be friendly to porting? Karraker says they've already done some steps. He says that this is what the SCE offered to devs so far:
Middleware tools like Havok and other specialist graphics tools are now customized to exploit CellÂ’s SPUs. These mean that developers donÂ’t have to reinvent those particular wheels themselves. Also, PlayStation Edge does some very difficult and performance-critical aspects of the graphics pipeline on the SPUs: geometry processing, animation, compression - delivering performance unachievable on other systems. This is available for free to all developers from SCE.
Sony better get more of those tools out. More tools only mean more potential games on the system, and that's what we all want, right?
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i,m interested in the playstation edge,its utilized in killzone 2,is it allready available to developers and when we will start to see actual benefits
easier development and and a more afforadable price,together with with better software and service is the key to succes
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Developing games on the 360 and PS3 is *very* hard work, and many gamers seem to forget that. Things are better on the 360 because it is easier compared to the PS3 (note: easier, not easy).
This means it requires much more work on the PS3 to achieve the desired goals, but failure to reach that goal is not usually due to laziness, just as failure for YOU to reach your own goals despite putting in 110% is not due to laziness on your part.
The greater the difficulty, the more likely you are to fail, therefore things will not change until developers learn more about the PS3 and until Sony and middleware products makes the PS3 as 'easy' to develop for as the 360.
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the problem when porting is the architectural diferences, the diference of memory(distribu ted or not) if the code will split to run in diferente cores
the dev are lazy in most of the cases and they just want recompile instead of use anothers much more system specific api's
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so if the made the game on the ps3 it would be the same as makeing it on the 360 1st except its easyer to port a ps3 game to the 360 than the other way round
it cost the same and it takes the same to make a game for the ps3 as it would for the 360 so y not go for the ps3 1st then?
i only bought a ps3 for the exclusives like gt, socom, mgs ect so i dont care anyway lol
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think before you talk BIZNITCH
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Developers need to take their time researching about the PS3, if they're ever going to start developing PS3 games let alone porting them...
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