Quote:
Originally Posted by railven
The RSX was almost a last minute switch to drive down production costs and also allow port code of Xbox 360 code. The Xbox/Xbox360 are built mostly on PC code (Direct X.) The original design for the PS3 had two Cells and no GPU, it was Sony's intention to do again what they did with the PS2, use a CPU to drive graphics.
Of course, being late ot the game and seeing the popularity of the Xbox 360 SDKs, Sony had to change things. In the end it cost them more since the GPU in the PS3 isn't really designed into the core as the GPU is in the 360. The 360 is built around the GPU, while the PS3 is built around the CPU.
This is a primary reason why porting ot the PS3 from the 360 is harder and produces worse code than porting from the PS3 to the 360. However, in both situations the lead console tends to have the better end result.
|
The RSX had to be added in or Sony's costs would have gone through the roof if they had to put the number of cell cores/units in the PS3 to be able to handle the 360's Xenos.
I wished that Sony would have chosen a better GPU in particular one from ATI as Nvidia's sucked at the time. But I strongly believe that they needed to put a GPU in so that they could compete.
The PS3 ended up being a very unbalanced game console with an overly powerful CPU bridled to a relatively (to the competition) poor GPU. The cost issue related to having the Blu-Ray ability in the PS3 may well have played a part in Sony further shackling the system with very little RAM. The power of the Cell as I mentioned before has however helped them since the cell has been able to offload some calculations from the RSX and help balance things out a bit. But as we are seeing from many titles.............. :
Excellent CPU + Mediocre GPU (PS3) < Good CPU + Excellent GPU (360)
Finally. The problem of PS3 coding is that it is brand new and whether complicated or not ................... it seems very complicated compared to the 360 and PC. The 360 coding is just too easy and the PS3 does not have the clout or marketshare that the equally hard to code for PS2 had. So dev teams are much less amused when PS3 coding makes a multiplatform game months late. As you mentioned, the late arrival of dev kits based on near production PS3s meant that many coders were still very early in the learning code at launch. The great ease of the 360 is that the dev kit is easy to use, has programming language and rules that are familiar to many devs and PC and 360 games can be made simultaneously! 2 games in the time and price of 1.