"However, he did also say that there are places in RAGE where the PS3 works and performs better because the cells have more total processing power."
Ok, so what I've managed to gather from all these Carmack tidbits and interviews is that he prefers to develop on the 360 because of the superior dev tools and Microsoft's debugging process, but that the PS3 is extremely powerful, if not more so when used properly.
All I know is that I'm glad RAGE looks just as good on PS3, even if it was a pain in the ass for id to do it.
It's not really him. It's these sites taking what they want from his interviews and turning them into articles like this one.
If you believe any of the articles about Carmack lately, someone would believe that the guy has nothing positive to say and spouts crap just to keep his name in rotation. It's not him, it's these gaming sites and gullible people just eat this shit up. Look at a majority of the comments.
It's mostly people trying to lure and bait PS3 owners into the flames, but luckily, most are just letting this s**t roll off of their backs.
^^Silly hit the nail on the head. I was watching Carmack's keynote presentation from Quakecon, and the whole time I was just thinking "there's so much fodder for flamebait articles to use out of context here." The keynote was literally a gold mine for these dumbass sites!
John just rambles for pretty much 90 minutes straight, moving seamlessly from one subject to the next in an almost hypnotizing way--before you realize what happened, he's covered 4 different subjects while you were trying to make sense of what he just said a minute ago! The guy's a genius, and he doesn't sugar-coat anything. In context, it all sounds great, but if you quote him out of context you can very easily make it sound like he said whatever you want--especially if you're a fanboy.
Gears 3 doesn't look better than UC3 by any means. They're both pretty damn close, but gears relies on a bland color palette and a ton of motion blur to hide it's imperfections, whereas UC3 has a much sharper, colorful, and more vibrant image. Both are amazing looking games, however. I really like how Gears uses camera movement when following the player, it adds a nice immersion to it that you don't see in Uncharted. However, when you really look at the two side by side, you start to see the shortcuts gears takes to achieve it's look.
Your name says it all because it's universal that Reach is nowhere in comparison to other FPS such as Crysis 2, Killzone 3, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, etc. It was a decent looking game but please don't act like it's a graphical powerhouse especially when compared to other games such as Uncharted 2 or God of War III. Use some common sense.
I don't understand. How come whenever a multiplat has lesser resolution, framerate dips, no AA, screen tearing or glitches on one console then the other, it is a crappy port and that console is weaker. But then when some games release with a few or all these problems(Crysis 2), it is a brilliant use of the developers resources and a better fit for the game and these broken games are hailed for their amazing graphics?
@DaTruth - I asked that very question about Crysis 2 several times and never got an answer. There are still people on here that say C2 is the best looking game on consoles, despite the obvious technical problems.
Some people are so ignorant of technology that they think when he says the Cell has more theoretical peak performance that he is saying the PS3 itself is more powerful overall. This is completely false.
He has said quite clearly on several occasions that 360 has a more powerful GPU and better memory architecture, while also having more RAM to work with since the 360 operating system overhead is lower.
He then goes on to explain how the Cell has a higher peak theoretical performance, but makes it very clear that there is a big difference between theoretical performance and what is actually achievable in the real world given the time and budget constraints of game development.
Basically the 360 unequivocally has a more advanced GPU and better memory architecture, while the PS3's CPU can do some types of calculations better than the 360's CPU (but not all--branch prediction and other similar things are better on the 360's CPU).
you are correct. Its good to know that not everyone on n4g is technologically ignorant.
the 360s cpu beats that of the ps3 in 2 departments: 1)branch prediction 2)MIPS(number of instructions it can process per second)
both because the ps3 has 1 ppe while the 360 has 3 ppes. the spes are not real cores they are just used as execution units by the ppe so the ppe does the instruction decoding and sends the work over to an spe etc
Its true that theoretical performance don't equal real world performance an amd 6970 can do twice the flops as a gtx 580 but the gtx 580 destroys it in EVERY gane and benckmark because in real word performance the amd 6970 can only do less tahn half of its theoretical flops because of architectural weaknesses and inefficiency.
Some people on here don't realize that even a core 2 duo from 2006 is more powerful than the ps3 cell and the 360s xenon cpu anyone that thinks I'm lying should go read up on cpu architectures and go into programming and maybe they'll one day be smart enough to know why the core 2 duo is superior. I'm a computer and software engineer myself and I have worked on games so I know what I'm taking about but unfortunately most people on here haven't as much as written a pixel shader in their LIVES yet talk out of their arses bet mos people on here don't even know what a pixel shader is.
its really sad that people can be so ignorant as to believe that technology hasn't moved since 7th gen consoles released
anyways a 2006 high end pc is more powerful than ps3 and 360 combined, consoles have been holding back pc development since they launched.
I think your wrong about a lot of what you just said. It's quite sad since you sound like you should know what your talking about. And yes I have programed a pixel shader before. I'm pretty certain the Cell processor with 7 spu's can do way more instructions per second. Granted it can't do more general PPE instructions but that's not what MIPS means. For the most part I believe the main PPE core in the Cell is pretty much exactly like those in the 360 minus the VMX128 instructions. Branch prediction of the PPE vs 360's cores should be the same minus whatever cache misses get you since the 360 cpu has more cache. The PPE does not do the instruction decoding for the SPUs. It does send the initial program to the SPU though. SPU's are more like mini cores with only 256K of memory. They can DMA main memory into their local store but can only operate on one small chuck at a time. Now what the cell is bad at is a lot of programs that just use the PPE. This also means multitasking since you'll have multiple programs vying over the limited PPE. The SPU's are very powerful but the 256K at once memory limit makes their use limited to specific tasks.
As for a 2006 core 2 duo being more powerful, well that all comes down to the type of task you want to run. If your only crunching a bunch of numbers and the task is easily split across multiple cores then the Cell will win easily. If your trying to run Linux or any other general program the core 2 duo will win hands down. Its got gobs of silicon dedicated to do better branch prediction and out of order execution.
I think that it's funny that Carmack has reset this whole debate back to the year 2006/early 2007.
Carmack's opinion is just that, HIS OPINION! The guy may have made impressive games and contributed greatly to modern gaming, but usually one can say how "great" a console is by the quality of its games. Now seriously, compare the total lineup of games the two consoles have and seriously look at which has a better quality of games. Then, and only then, can you actually say which is the better console.
But Carmack's opinion is more based on the development PROCESS rather than the actual games. Of course a mostly PC developer is going to think that a console with a mostly PC architecture is the best.
@qwertyz - No, PC gamers hold back PC game development because PC game sales in general are far less than console sales year after year. Most devs don't want to take the time to max out their game on the newest PC hardware because relatively few people have that hardware.
Theoretical power and actuality are to different things, because systems will have a bottleneck. If you aren't careful in design, those bottlenecks will prevent you from using any power you may have on paper.
@MysticStrummer
***No, PC gamers hold back PC game development because PC game sales in general are far less than console sales year after year***
That is a fair assessment of the cause, but is undeniable that the console limitation is holding back PC development. If there were no consoles, surely more resources would have been put into the PC.
The CELL isn't based on an intel design it's based on PowerPC chips.
the difference is the CELL is meant to be running pure assembly code not C or some other language.
That is why IBM put in a special C language handler so the chip itself takes in C code and converts it to assembly code then processes it, assembly is the fastest code you can do but it's very hard for people to do stuff in it as your writing what all CPUs actually use so few people actually write assembly code.
The CELL has a way higher processing ability than the intel chips but when you combine what is a windows OS cut down to just the games stuff and have the Dev support of windows then it's easy to do stuff as 99% of stuff has already been made for you.
The PS3 won't have that support and you need to make everything yourself, the people who can do that will excel and those who can't won't as you can tell by the games put out.
Zag your out classed man. If you can write in assembly you are working on compilers for a CPU maker. No real developer can afford a true assembly programmer for such complex chips which is why we all waited for IBM to provide one. Yet Sony has money to burn on this. Problem is Sony isn't sending these guys out to everyone yet it's also know that everything can't be feed to the other cores.
It was a great idea even intel tried it for their larrabee. I was a supporter of both but both failed to be what they needed to be almost due to inexperience.
Carmack has his views but he is about results not PR. Sony would be wise to listen to him since he has a huge influence on their API OpenGL.
This is pretty much the same thing Carmack said years ago. He likes the 360 a bit better because of the development tools, but he also noted that the PS3 is bit more powerful. Multiplatform development would probably be tougher on the PS3. I would assume that developers have an easier time with exclusive PS3 games because they don't have to also make it run on other platforms.
Yes. This is only a rephrasing of what we've known all along. 360 is easier to program for than PS3. There is no evidence whatsoever that 360 is better than PS3 in terms of power, and Rage won't change that fact. There will be miniscule differences that one side or the other will jump on to prove their complete technical dominance. Meanwhile, the exclusives tell the real story. Of course, one side has been convinced that exclusives don't matter at all, which is a viewpoint that totally disregards gaming history.
"However, he did also say that there are places in RAGE where the PS3 works and performs better because the cells have more total processing power."
Ok, so what I've managed to gather from all these Carmack tidbits and interviews is that he prefers to develop on the 360 because of the superior dev tools and Microsoft's debugging process, but that the PS3 is extremely powerful, if not more so when used properly.
All I know is that I'm glad RAGE looks just as good on PS3, even if it was a pain in the ass for id to do it.