Developers Slam PS3 “Slow and Broken” Allegations

Earlier this week, we reported about the scathing PS3 hardware review made by a correspondent of the technology news site The Inquirer. The correspondent claimed that the PS3 was “slow and broken”, even saying that the console’s hardware was “hobbled” compared to the Xbox 360. Well, with such claims, he’s bound to get some slamming from senior developers working on PS3 titles.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz this week, several developers who are familiar with the PS3 hardware have dismissed The Inquirer’s report and branded it as “misleading and uninformed and “entirely meaningless.”

The Inquirer asserts that the NVIDIA-designed RSX graphics unit has a slower triangle setup rate, with 270 million triangles per second, than the ATI-designed part in the Xbox 360, with 500 million triangles per second.

The contentious figures came under fire. According to one programmer:

It’s just a pointless measurement. Where’s the context? How were these numbers measured? There are loads of different ways you can measure tri performance, and just putting up headline figures like that tells you nothing. In fact, the PS2 had better tri performance than the Xbox, on paper. Everyone knows that the Xbox was more powerful at running real games, but if you just wanted to fill a screen with 2D, flat colour, unlit triangles, then the PS2 was much better at that, so it looked great in benchmarks. That just shows how meaningless this measurement is – it’s really pointless.

But what really got the developers fuming is the claim that Cell is being “hobbled” by slow memory access. This assertion is based on a Devstation slide which shows only 16Mb/s read access to “Local Memory”, compared to other PS3 component and memory types which have 10-25Gb/s.

Another developer quipped: They’ve got the wrong end of the stick grasped firmly in both hands. I’m not even sure if they’re holding the right stick.

The developers are unanimous in saying that the claims are spurious and pointed out that even if there’s a germ of truth in the claims, they would be serious flaws that Sony would not simply release the Cell chip in that state. It’s taking them some time to get used to PS3, but they admit that coding for the PS3 is much faster than the last time they coded for the PS2: Sony’s giving us better tools this time around. They’re still not great at communicating and there are some weird holes in their developer support, but they’ve learned a lot of lessons from PS2.

I guess we’ll just have to see for ourselves.

Via GamesIndustry

Earlier this week, we reported about the scathing PS3 hardware review made by a correspondent of the technology news site The Inquirer. The correspondent claimed that the PS3 was “slow and broken”, even saying that the console’s hardware was “hobbled” compared to the Xbox 360. Well, with such claims, he’s bound to get some slamming from senior developers working on PS3 titles.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz this week, several developers who are familiar with the PS3 hardware have dismissed The Inquirer’s report and branded it as “misleading and uninformed and “entirely meaningless.”

The Inquirer asserts that the NVIDIA-designed RSX graphics unit has a slower triangle setup rate, with 270 million triangles per second, than the ATI-designed part in the Xbox 360, with 500 million triangles per second.

The contentious figures came under fire. According to one programmer:

It’s just a pointless measurement. Where’s the context? How were these numbers measured? There are loads of different ways you can measure tri performance, and just putting up headline figures like that tells you nothing. In fact, the PS2 had better tri performance than the Xbox, on paper. Everyone knows that the Xbox was more powerful at running real games, but if you just wanted to fill a screen with 2D, flat colour, unlit triangles, then the PS2 was much better at that, so it looked great in benchmarks. That just shows how meaningless this measurement is – it’s really pointless.

But what really got the developers fuming is the claim that Cell is being “hobbled” by slow memory access. This assertion is based on a Devstation slide which shows only 16Mb/s read access to “Local Memory”, compared to other PS3 component and memory types which have 10-25Gb/s.

Another developer quipped: They’ve got the wrong end of the stick grasped firmly in both hands. I’m not even sure if they’re holding the right stick.

The developers are unanimous in saying that the claims are spurious and pointed out that even if there’s a germ of truth in the claims, they would be serious flaws that Sony would not simply release the Cell chip in that state. It’s taking them some time to get used to PS3, but they admit that coding for the PS3 is much faster than the last time they coded for the PS2: Sony’s giving us better tools this time around. They’re still not great at communicating and there are some weird holes in their developer support, but they’ve learned a lot of lessons from PS2.

I guess we’ll just have to see for ourselves.

Via GamesIndustry