Dave Karraker: Porting games from Xbox 360 to PS3 means additional effort
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?
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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