So, after 3+ years of having a PS3, I finally like it.....

[Oyeve]

I got a PS3 around 3.5 years ago. I also have like 3 xbox 360s. I got the PS3 for the BR and bought a couple of games for it, namely FF13, MGS, and uncharted. I was never impressed with the gaming aspect as I already was using my PC and 360 for games. And to be honest I hate hate hate the ps3 menu system. So, blowing off gaming on it for years I recently purchased the last of us. Holy bat-crap! I love the PS3! This game looks and play amazing! I also recently got into the indie stuff like Journey, flowers. Great stuff.

 

[Arkaign]

I think a lot of people are of a similar opinion.

Menus never bother/matter to me much, so long as I can get to what I want quickly and launch it. 360 and PS3 both work great for me in that regard (though nothing close to kb/mouse on PC, lol)

But yeah, the PS3's 'theoretical' power with the Cell and all that is really put to good use in a few titles. It's a shame it was so hard to dev for. Looks like Sony really learned their lesson with PS3, and made the PS4 better in every possible way in terms of development and production ease.

Playing stuff like Uncharted 3, The Last of Us, these games literally look next-gen compared to the launch titles and most of the chaff of the past 5+ years.

With the PS4/XB1, I don't think we'll see anywhere near that level of change throughout the console's lifespan. The architecture is already very well known and easy to dev for, so we should be getting near-max capability right out of the gate, with tweaks not taking it very far beyond what we'd expect down the line.

 

[Tweak155]

I got a PS3 around 3.5 years ago. I also have like 3 xbox 360s. I got the PS3 for the BR and bought a couple of games for it, namely FF13, MGS, and uncharted. I was never impressed with the gaming aspect as I already was using my PC and 360 for games. And to be honest I hate hate hate the ps3 menu system. So, blowing off gaming on it for years I recently purchased the last of us. Holy bat-crap! I love the PS3! This game looks and play amazing! I also recently got into the indie stuff like Journey, flowers. Great stuff.

Only game I beat for PS3 was Uncharted 2. Even that game I didn't want to finish due to the gameplay, but the story kept me going.

I want to get TLOU but my buddies tell me it is mostly sneak & survive. Just sounds boring.

 

[purbeast0]

i actually like the ps3 xmb better than the 360 dash, by a lot. it's a straight forward layout and it is fast and responsive, with organization when you start digging into the options. the 360 one has differently laid out submenus, which is annoying, and again, they are unresponsive as shit.

as far as ps3 games, ps3 has many many great exclusives, more so than any of the current gen consoles imo.

and while i think that the last of us was the best game of this gen BY FAR, it was actually the first game that i played on ps3 that is actually bottle necking the ps3 and making the ps3 start to show it's age. don't get me wrong, it looks fantastic and probably the best looking game to date, but i also noticed that it did have quite a bit of slowdown at some parts, and the ai wasn't nearly as "smart" as i'd wish it would be. this could also be though because a week before i got it, we were seeing ps4 and x1 games and they do look noticeably better.

 

[American Gunner]

i actually like the ps3 xmb better than the 360 dash, by a lot. it's a straight forward layout and it is fast and responsive, with organization when you start digging into the options. the 360 one has differently laid out submenus, which is annoying, and again, they are unresponsive as shit.

I agree with you. I wish I could take the organization from the XBL store and put it in PSN, but I do like the easy laid out look on the PS3. I never felt that way, but now I either have to pin my games and apps to the home page, or I am having to scroll through a bunch of tiles to get to them. On the ps3, I just go over to either games or the video app section and choose what I want.

 

[exdeath]

Cell is not hard to dev for. Its really not even a huge change from PS2; a bus/DMA centric system with independent processors decoupled from each other with their own private memory.

It makes things slightly more complicated to cross platform dev but Cell in and of itself is not "hard" for any competent programmer.

Anybody with PS2 experience writing pipelined double and triple /quadruple buffered VU1 code with its 16k should feel right at home and damn near godly with SPUs with 256k each.

PS2 VU1 16k had to be quadruple buffered for incoming DMA for the next data set, current VU work set, output for the current work set for the next GIF packet, and the GS outbound GIF packet of previously processed data at any given time in order for everything to be running concurrently without stalling. That means a given data set was crunched 4k of data blocks at a time. Cell is just a huge expansion of that packet driven bus saturation model.

 

[clok1966]

menu- 3-5 seconds of time yet stops people from playing games? its like I don't watch tv cause the remote it lost, i don't go to the store a block away cuz i cant get a ride.. we are talking a menu system here.. not brain surgery. Absolutely nothing wrong with disliking it, but not using it? they both actually work the same, up/down, left right scroll.. there is fundamentally no difference, visually yes..

me I don't play console games much at all, i dislike the gamepad ( "I" suck with it, hence dislike it), but as I enjoy any good game, i play um. Sorry, if i sound harsh.. but menu system hate sounds so 5 year old to me....just my opinion..

 

[Arkaign]

Cell is not hard to dev for. Its really not even a huge change from PS2; a bus/DMA centric system with independent processors decoupled from each other with their own private memory.

It makes things slightly more complicated to cross platform dev but Cell in and of itself is not "hard" for any competent programmer.

Anybody with PS2 experience writing pipelined double and triple /quadruple buffered VU1 code with its 16k should feel right at home and damn near godly with SPUs with 256k each.

PS2 VU1 16k had to be quadruple buffered for incoming DMA for the next data set, current VU work set, output for the current work set for the next GIF packet, and the GS outbound GIF packet of previously processed data at any given time in order for everything to be running concurrently without stalling. That means a given data set was crunched 4k of data blocks at a time. Cell is just a huge expansion of that packet driven bus saturation model.

I just have to take it for granted with feedback from insiders. One of my great old friends has worked in the industry since the early 90s, and worked with PS1/PS2/PS3/PSP, he's a huge Sony fan overall. But he says that PS3 development was tragically filled with landmines, design limitations (memory being a massive one), and just overall a huge PITA.

http://gamingbolt.com/developer-exp...loping-for-each-console-ps3-being-the-hardest

^^ simplistic, but has some cool summaries

 

[cmdrdredd]

i actually like the ps3 xmb better than the 360 dash, by a lot. it's a straight forward layout and it is fast and responsive, with organization when you start digging into the options. the 360 one has differently laid out submenus, which is annoying, and again, they are unresponsive as shit.

as far as ps3 games, ps3 has many many great exclusives, more so than any of the current gen consoles imo.

and while i think that the last of us was the best game of this gen BY FAR, it was actually the first game that i played on ps3 that is actually bottle necking the ps3 and making the ps3 start to show it's age. don't get me wrong, it looks fantastic and probably the best looking game to date, but i also noticed that it did have quite a bit of slowdown at some parts, and the ai wasn't nearly as "smart" as i'd wish it would be. this could also be though because a week before i got it, we were seeing ps4 and x1 games and they do look noticeably better.

I did not notice slow down in last of us but I noticed limitations in texture memory and physics. Some small details using higher resolution textures and some physics effects on papers strewn around and the enemies could have made it just a touch better visually. Really though I am surprised that a 7 year old piece of hardware is doing what this game does to begin with.

I agree I like the streamlined ps3 menu better because it organizes my content in a more user friendly manner. It may not look as fancy but it is easier to find my games and movies.

 

[exdeath]

I just have to take it for granted with feedback from insiders. One of my great old friends has worked in the industry since the early 90s, and worked with PS1/PS2/PS3/PSP, he's a huge Sony fan overall. But he says that PS3 development was tragically filled with landmines, design limitations (memory being a massive one), and just overall a huge PITA.

http://gamingbolt.com/developer-exp...loping-for-each-console-ps3-being-the-hardest

^^ simplistic, but has some cool summaries

There was a debugger for the main CPU (R5900). It worked pretty OK. For the rest of the processors, you just had to write code without bugs.

Lulz so true.

Sending a screen space single triangle GIF packet to GS is pretty trivial. The first time you get a world space triangle sent to VIF transformed and clipped by your uploaded VU1 program and xgkicked to GIF/GS from VU1 memory to get the exact same thing for 10 times the effort is just orgasmic.

 

[Midwayman]

I think the most interesting thing to come out of it is how everything is going to be optimized for GCN in the future. That'll have some ramifications on the PC side.

 

[Oyeve]

menu- 3-5 seconds of time yet stops people from playing games? its like I don't watch tv cause the remote it lost, i don't go to the store a block away cuz i cant get a ride.. we are talking a menu system here.. not brain surgery. Absolutely nothing wrong with disliking it, but not using it? they both actually work the same, up/down, left right scroll.. there is fundamentally no difference, visually yes..

me I don't play console games much at all, i dislike the gamepad ( "I" suck with it, hence dislike it), but as I enjoy any good game, i play um. Sorry, if i sound harsh.. but menu system hate sounds so 5 year old to me....just my opinion..

Well yay you, aren't you just perfect?

The menu system is laid out retardedly and dont even get me started on slow updates. Every time I want to do something on it, whether netflix or whatever there is a new update that take a stupidly long time.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I think the most interesting thing to come out of it is how everything is going to be optimized for GCN in the future. That'll have some ramifications on the PC side.

Not really...not when 60% of the market is not using those GPUs.

 

[Midwayman]

Not really...not when 60% of the market is not using those GPUs.

Wishful thinking. There will be support for GCN compute features and optimization like there isn't now. Not like Nvidia is going to become unplayable, but I think the dev support balance of power is going to shift the other way. PC is a drop in the bucket compared to console even if the majority aren't AMD gpus right now. AKA stuff you see supporting things like nvidia's 3d tech or physx, etc will instead probably support the AMD version of those techs. Or at least non-nvidia proprietary versions.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Wishful thinking. There will be support for GCN compute features and optimization like there isn't now. Not like Nvidia is going to become unplayable, but I think the dev support balance of power is going to shift the other way. PC is a drop in the bucket compared to console even if the majority aren't AMD gpus right now. AKA stuff you see supporting things like nvidia's 3d tech or physx, etc will instead probably support the AMD version of those techs. Or at least non-nvidia proprietary versions.

Uh...so you think everyone is going to put in AMD's 3D tech now? What are you saying cause it makes no sense.

Nvidia has a majority of the discreet GPU market. You are not going to see a sudden "shift" as you like to call it. There's a reason DirectX can be run on everything. There's zero reason to used locked down features at all.

 

[Arkaign]

*discrete* not discreet lol

But yeah, this won't hurt NVidia. In fact it will benefit them and the entire PC gaming world with cross platform being so easy now that we'll see tons of awesome ports. Win/win for all of us.

 

[cmdrdredd]

*discrete* not discreet lol

But yeah, this won't hurt NVidia. In fact it will benefit them and the entire PC gaming world with cross platform being so easy now that we'll see tons of awesome ports. Win/win for all of us.

I do hope we see more great games coming to PC. I do understand the token Forza, Halo, Uncharted, Gran Turismo etc will not cross over, but...yeah potentially we get better titles and more often.

 

[Pottuvoi]

Lulz so true.

Sending a screen space single triangle GIF packet to GS is pretty trivial. The first time you get a world space triangle sent to VIF transformed and clipped by your uploaded VU1 program and xgkicked to GIF/GS from VU1 memory to get the exact same thing for 10 times the effort is just orgasmic.

Love all the great stories of a development on ps2, found this a while back.
http://robertoconcerto.blogspot.fi/2013/03/my-hardest-bug.html

 

[Oyeve]

Love all the great stories of a development on ps2, found this a while back.
http://robertoconcerto.blogspot.fi/2013/03/my-hardest-bug.html

i thought the PS2 was fantastic for its gen even with, IMO, the weakest GPU.

 

[exdeath]

Love all the great stories of a development on ps2, found this a while back.
http://robertoconcerto.blogspot.fi/2013/03/my-hardest-bug.html

Never had anything that hellish.

Worst for me took a day. My Gameboy Advance demos worked on emulators but not on real hardware.

Finally narrowed it down to DMA code and it worked in C but not inlined asm, and only occurred on back to back transfers as when loading a title screen or any map (tiles/charset, nametable, and palette).

DMA looks like:

Write dest address to DMA channel DST reg
Write src address to DMA channel SRC reg
Write flags, etc, and start the DMA to DMA CTRL reg

Doing this back to back works fine because no cache in GBA, CPU is automatically halted when DMA takes the bus, so no need to wait/check DMA status on consecutive transfers.

Turns out GBA requires two cycles for DMA to latch the CPU accessible DEST/SRC internally to the address counters so CPU gets off two more instructions after a write to DMA CTRL.

So

write src
write dst
write ctrl ; tiles
write src
write dst
write ctrl ; nametable
write src
write dst
write ctrl ; palette

CPU was writing new src and dst as DMA was still latching the previous values causing a hardware lockup.

Simply adding two NOPS between consecutive DMA uses solved the problem. It worked in C because the epilogue/prologue code and return provided the sufficient 2 instruction wait before attempting to access DMA again.

I think this might have even been documented in the official manual, but we have to find stuff like that ourselves the hard way when doing homebrew.

 

[Arkaign]

Very interesting! Is it true that the GBA is much like a mini-SNES, minus some of the specialized chips?

 

[Arkaign]

I do hope we see more great games coming to PC. I do understand the token Forza, Halo, Uncharted, Gran Turismo etc will not cross over, but...yeah potentially we get better titles and more often.

I think we definitely do.

The marquee titles that they want as exclusives to bolster the brands, first party stuff, that's obviously still not coming (it would make more $$ for them to go with the other consoles first anyway instead of PC, though that would simultaneously make their own console look worse).

So throw the major 1st-party IPs out the window, and you get the major and even midrange 3rd-party titles. Well with X360/PS3, porting these over to Windows was a moderate to high expense. Sure you could do a crappy port, but to do it well took some real effort.

With the new x86-based platforms being across the board, with GCN to boot, we should see more ports simply due to how trivial it will be to bring them to PC. We'll probably see a frequent release gap so that the consoles get first 'spin' at new titles, but when they've dropped off the seller list, releasing them on PC will mean a small amount of effort in exchange for decent sales opportunities.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I think not getting it day one is stupid anyway. We all know there are more people with consoles than a good PC for gaming. So holding it back to sell more console versions is strange to me when they will sell more of that version to begin with.

 

[exdeath]

i thought the PS2 was fantastic for its gen even with, IMO, the weakest GPU.

PS2 GS had tremendous fill rate. What it lacked was VRAM; 4MB vs Dreamcast 16MB, etc
By the time you do a 480p front/back/depth buffer you had < 1MB VRAM for textures.

Most programmers are taught bus is bad keep textures in VRAM so reduced texture resolution and color depth ensued to fit it all in the 4MB. But the PS2 is designed around GOBS of bus bandwidth. You're supposed to use that VRAM as a immediate texture cache for the currently used texture and upload the next one and the next mid frame as needed. Sony called it a streaming architecture. The bus was NOT a bottleneck unlike PC.

This is hard to grasp from decades of being trained to avoid it but the PS2 and even PS3 are specifically designed around damn near unlimited bus bandwidth. Streaming textures one at a time to VRAM while rendering makes a PC programmer cringe but on PS2 you'll cap the GS fillrate before the bus gets in the way.

 

[exdeath]

Very interesting! Is it true that the GBA is much like a mini-SNES, minus some of the specialized chips?

Yes very similar. Everything is more general though, you dont have a lot of the exclusions of features in certain background modes, fully independent sprite and BG palettes, no banking scheme of the 65816, etc, But yeah they are very similar. GBA is much less restricting and "flatter", Eg iirc scaling and rotation of all BG modes not just the planar bitmap "mode 7", stuff like that.

Sound chip though is much weaker. SNES had a stand alone fully independent sound CPU/Sony DSP sampler with 8 channel 16 bit PCM/wavetable synth and its own program and sample RAM. while GBA has a NES style "function generator" (square/tri/noise) with a single PCM channel. SNES style music requires writing a software mixer /module player on the ARM and using interrupts to stuff the output into the PCM channel.