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Discuss anything programming-related here, whether it be XNA or Collada. Just remember to keep it on-topic please.
Citizen
Well, this is the first time I've visited this section of the forum in the months - I'm surprised by all the Closed threads! Anyway, this is definitely great news - Especially after hearing the anti-PS2 remarks from Mikami, the creator of Resident Evil. Assuming the PS3 gains as much momentum as the PS2, we can expect more high-quality titles (Or more games in general.) and, hopefully, more praise from popular third-party developers.
Citizen
I know both deadmeat and cpiasminc both disagree with me here, but I still say the PS3 programmers won't have to feed each Cell core separately. The Cell is supposed to be scalable and feed off of other Cells. As a programmer you're never going to know how many Cells are going to be at your disposal. There's no way you can create code to send data to Cells that may or may not be there. I believe all this code routing will take place within the hardware itself, to be aided by the development enviroment that Sony will provide (ie. Colada and more). Without having to code in assembly the PS3 should be just as easy to develop for as the XBox, XBox2, PC or any other high level language.
Penguin... Penguin... Penguin!
What? When did Mikami make those remarks? Got any links?!?! :shock:Originally Posted by Pumster
"Please understand that in cases where the OS itself is acting in an unstable fashion, this software could behave in unpredictable ways. Unfortunately, this happens to be the case at all times with Microsoft OS's." - Japanese PC game disclaimers!
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Like PSP, PS3 will have inbuilt hardware and software that do a lot of the work. By that, dev. will have more time to focus on more important things rather than routine coding for the little parts. A person working on a PS3 title said to PSM that PS3 is VERY easy to develop for. Whether it would be easier than Xenon or not is to be determined later. In any case, such minor differences won’t be a major factor- look at the crazy PS2 support despite the nagging of numerous dev.
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AzianFury
I think it has more to do with the Sony-Capcom drama rumor. Mikami seems happy with the PS2 before he ditch Devil May Cry and went to Nintendo. He was complaining how the PS2 is hard to program, and he even go as far as saying Sony makes defective hardware (he said his PSX broke fast). I don't know how much Nintendo paid Capcom, but now they're moving back to Sony because they learned it's more profitable.What? When did Mikami make those remarks? Got any links?!?! :shock:
I can't provide any link, but I'll look in to it. BTW, this was a few years ago.
EDIT:
I guess he was just pissed for the fact that Sony is beating the crap out of Nintendo in terms of sales figure during that period. Meaning less money and stock for Capcom's so called "Big 5". Anyone remember that announcement? And Kingdom Hearts was for PS2 and has nothing to do with Nintendo what so ever. So what is he complaining about? And for the fact that it's an entirely new game compare to the REmake. It's almost the same game except the viewtiful graphics.Capcom's Shinji Mikami criticizes Sony and Square
Tuesday, August 27, 2002 - Shinji Mikami, producer of Resident Evil and Devil May Cry, strongly criticized Sony and Square in a recent radio interview in Japan.
Mikami accused Sony of purposely designing their consoles to break easily so that gamers will have to buy a replacement. He also said that Sony's high sales figures are helped by the fact that many gamers, himself included, have had to buy a second PlayStation and PlayStation 2.
From there, Mikami went on to accuse Sony of doing the same thing with their line of PCs, Walkmans, and cell phones. He asked why no one has complained about this and said that it was almost like cheating and committing a crime. The radio DJ tried to interrupt Mikami and shift the conversation to another topic, but when Mikami was asked if he thought Sony's customers are foolish, he replied, "Yes."
Next, Mikami said that Kingdom Hearts' strong sales are due to "aura purchase," meaning that customers are buying the game because their friends have bought it or like it, regardless of whether they like the game themselves. He said that Kingdom Hearts does not deserve its 780,000 sales or 6800 yen price tag.
Finally, he apologized to Square, saying he is upset that Kingdom Hearts has sold more copies than Biohazard for the Gamecube. He said that Biohazard is the better game, but Kingdom Hearts is not a bad game either.
Neither Square nor Sony has made any comments regarding Mikami's statements.
Source
BTW, I'm not a Capcom haters. I have been a big supporter of their series (RE, DMC, Oni, etc). They just need to stop being a Nintendo-nuthuggers. Which I think they already have because they are starting to support Sony again (VJ series, Killer 7, and RE4 are no longer exclusive to Nintendo). And hopefully this will continue on to PS3 development.
Signature is for the weak.
The ultimate wet blanket
I don't completely disagree with that. And in some ways, I expect it to be easier to code for than XBox2, because with the lower scaling limits of Xbox2, I'd expect the multithreading to be explicit in nature... e.g. actually managing your own thread pools and synchronization. While .NET languages (Comega in particular) provide some nice API tools for that, it's not a radical change, so much as a cleaner interface than say, pthreads.I know both deadmeat and cpiasminc both disagree with me here, but I still say the PS3 programmers won't have to feed each Cell core separately. The Cell is supposed to be scalable and feed off of other Cells. As a programmer you're never going to know how many Cells are going to be at your disposal. There's no way you can create code to send data to Cells that may or may not be there. I believe all this code routing will take place within the hardware itself, to be aided by the development enviroment that Sony will provide (ie. Colada and more). Without having to code in assembly the PS3 should be just as easy to develop for as the XBox, XBox2, PC or any other high level language
I'm not so sure about the code routing taking place at the *hardware* level so much as the *OS* level. It's implicit at the game code level and rather than containing a series of low-level code chunks, it would probably be more like normal procedures issued to different APUs as apulets, but the key here is that the programmer doesn't have to worry about which resources are available and which aren't. It would instead depend on the OS to do that, and just point to which data and which code to send. Now you could make everything completely transparent, which is what languages like Cilk do... and I would indeed love the idea of a Cilk interface to C++ or C#... but having distinct issue-points does make debugging a little cleaner.
In fact, I think the transparent Cilk-like approach would make more sense for a Xenon-like CPU or a dual-core CMP chip than for CELL in general. Primarily because CELL can scale up much much farther in the long run than 1 PE w/ 8 APUs, and explicit multithreading would be far too much of a load on the programmer's shoulders. Whereas something like a dual-core K8 is only going to ever so slowly go up to quad-core and then maybe 8 cores, but with the complexity of each core comes a lot of die space for each one you add, so it can only scale so far up at only so fast a rate. Whereas the APUs that CELL would use would be very simple and low-cost, albeit individually poor performers in practice, so the individual cost is small, and several size CELL MPUs can be made for various purposes even within the same process generation.
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total destruction
To tell you the truth, before XNA was brought up, I honestly thought the PS3 could have been a lot easier to develop for than the Xenon. But, all of that seems to have changed. With Microsoft involved, those odds are now a little uncertain to say at this time. I say that because this is an area in which I feel Microsoft are at their best. Inspite of that, I feel that one does not necessarily have to out do the other (so much as what it would actually seem on paper) to still maintain being a strong competitor. It's more than likely that if the API both Sony and Microsoft are working on is at least within a vicinity of one another, developers won't be nearly as reluctant to write neither side off. So, it won't really matter too much in the end once you think about it.I know both deadmeat and cpiasminc both disagree with me here, but I still say the PS3 programmers won't have to feed each Cell core separately. The Cell is supposed to be scalable and feed off of other Cells. As a programmer you're never going to know how many Cells are going to be at your disposal. There's no way you can create code to send data to Cells that may or may not be there. I believe all this code routing will take place within the hardware itself, to be aided by the development enviroment that Sony will provide (ie. Colada and more). Without having to code in assembly the PS3 should be just as easy to develop for as the XBox, XBox2, PC or any other high level language
Citizen
Yeah it doesn't make much of a difference.
Citizen
Programming the PS3 efficiently will be hard, no doubt. But the same goes for the Xbox2, it won't be as hard because it only has 3 cores but your average programmer rarely worries about where data is in memory. Your average programmer will spam the bus with requests, far too many times, not realizing what they are doing. The processors will all sit there stalling because of the horrendous number of memory accesses going on.
We'll need to shift the way we organize code and data to make it run efficiently on a PS3 and Xbox2.
Initially I imagine we'll tap only a small percentage of the power from both platforms, but especially the PS3 with its apulets. Both platforms will appear to be equally matched as most developers know how to use shaders these days and I'm guessing the GPU performance will be similar (PS3 will be better though :wink: ). But as time goes on and more parallel processing makes it into games, we'll see the PS3 fly past the Xbox2, which means they'll have to bring out the Xbox3 even earlier than planned.
I think the efficient use of apulets will be determined by the language used to program them. I can envisage a stream processor type approach where apulets work like shader stream processors but not specific to graphics. Knowing Sony though, that will be just one way you can use them, but I'm sure they will leave it relatively flexible. So you could utilize the apulets as threads spawned from you main code stream, describing the parallel sections using OMP or something similar, but I personally hope that is not possible. As I said before most programmers don't structure data correctly, in terms of locality. So if you can easily spawn apulet threads from main code (c/c++) to work on a loop or something, bus stalls will occur too frequently. The system will be used incorrectly and therefore inefficiently. The only way to force good structure is to take an approach similar to stream processors in shaders. You can only access very local data, i.e. stream input data and constants. And you can only output locally too, that local output is essentially buffered. To make these systems even more efficient, "pipeline style", they must use double buffering, so that 128K on an APU will need to be slashed in half. Now will Sony enforce a memory/buffer structure or allow the user to specify the structure? I'm guessing the later, it is more difficult to manage but much more flexible. It once again comes down to flexibility over ease of use.
Citizen
I don't think that programming the PS3 will be particularly hard, but more like different. They have a wonderfull opportunity here. It's a brand new chip, with a brand new design. It's not a patched up and repatched CPU with a million backward compatibility issues. We're talking about an opportunity to create a entirely new programming model that could have a simplicity we have not seen in a very long time.
Citizen
I agree with you. It will take some time for programmers to mature on taking advantage of this kind of parallel programming. When that happens, the PS3 should clearly outdistance itself from the Xbox2.Initially I imagine we'll tap only a small percentage of the power from both platforms, but especially the PS3 with its apulets. Both platforms will appear to be equally matched as most developers know how to use shaders these days and I'm guessing the GPU performance will be similar (PS3 will be better though :wink: ). But as time goes on and more parallel processing makes it into games, we'll see the PS3 fly past the Xbox2, which means they'll have to bring out the Xbox3 even earlier than planned
Don't forget this chip is also developed by IBM. They would, IMO try to adopt a more flexible model. Just a hunch.Now will Sony enforce a memory/buffer structure or allow the user to specify the structure? I'm guessing the later, it is more difficult to manage but much more flexible. It once again comes down to flexibility over ease of use.
Citizen
When I say Sony, I mean all of them, Sony, IBM and Toshiba. But Sony is the main client as far as I can tell. As for memory structure, that could be enforced via the OS.Don't forget this chip is also developed by IBM.
Programming the PS3 won't be that hard, but doing it efficiently will be. A big shift is needed in the way most developers structure their programs, there is a lot of legacy code out there which will take time to shed.
The CPUs (PUs) in the PS3 will not be that different from the CPU in the PS2, both are RISC, 32bit (128bit regs), with a few extras. You'll program them with the C/C++ language, the Xbox2 CPUs will be even similar to the PS3 than the Xbox. But the PS3 has these APUs which I consider as auxiliary processors, not the central or CPU part, or though they are all part of the BE. I doubt you will program the APUs with C/C++, well at least not in a conventional way. Learning how to harness these APUs and apulets effectively will be the hard part.
If the Xbox2 can do about 32GFLOPS, and the PS3 about 1TFLOP, I bet no one will actually get 32 times more processing out of the PS3. But if these figures are close to true it should be easy to process 4-8 times more on a PS3. But exactly what you can process is limited by the massively parallel architecture. It should be very well suited to realtime physics imho.
total destruction
I totally agree with you. I'm not sure how different the Cell' architecture is from the GScube, but I do know that the make-up of the GScubes architecture is what inspired the Cell's multi, parallel functionality. Yet, developers witnessed very little problems.
Citizen
Oh my god. Ps3 is not going to support OpenGL1.5 or 2.0 Read this news. :shock: Below news says that ps3 will support Sony’s API. I want to know more about Sony’s API. Can any one help me? :shock:
A report from Japanese web-site PC Watch suggests that the PlayStation 3 graphics processing unit will use NVIDIA’s technologies found in the current NV40 generation of its own chips as well as numerous techniques developed for the next-generation part known under NV50 code-name.
Still, despite of circuitries of the company’s desktop chips found in the GPU, according to NVIDIA’s chief Jen-Hsun Huang, the PlayStation 3 GPU has nothing to do with Microsoft Windows, Microsoft DirectX or OpenGL and will use Sony’s API for the console.
Naturally, the PlayStation 3 graphics processing units supports XDR DRAM memory developed by Rambus. While there is nothing new in Rambus memory for Sony, NVIDIA has never worked with memory by Rambus.
Source
Citizen
Sorry Amod. But no one can help you at the moment. Only the good folks that work for nVidia and Sony can. The fact is, that no one out of the loop has any clue about anything regarding CELL and PS3. Only the information realeased by them.
I never seen a project so well guarded as this one. I keep having these visions of these geeky engineers entering mysterious phonebooths only to slide down into some top secret facility 2 miles under the earth.
About this OpenGL rumor/news...it conflicts a little with what we heard earlier about nVidia providing the midware for the PS3. Or not. Whatever it is, sure hope it's really easy to use, and not too alien for developers, otherwise they'll suffer from heavy competition from the Xbox2/XNA.
Citizen
Yes, I think you are right. Let's wait and see.
The ultimate wet blanket
You can also interpret it a bit differently. It's as if to say that the GPU is not designed under the specific constraints of total compliance with certain versions of DirectX or OpenGL. Rather, it will simply support a feature set meant specifically to match what Sony has in mind.About this OpenGL rumor/news...it conflicts a little with what we heard earlier about nVidia providing the midware for the PS3. Or not.
For example, Sony can still use an OpenGL-esque API, but the thing is that there's no point in implementing several non-compliant features as API extensions the way you would on a PC since the hardware is anyway fixed. So many of what would otherwise be extensions would be rolled in as native features. At that point, it's not really an ARB-ratified version OpenGL anymore, but based on GL. SonyGL, for lack of a better name.
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Citizen
That would make sense. A SonyGL like (OpenGLesq) approach would garantee the developers a certain amount of familiarity and at the same time be able to impose certain OpenGL-incompatible features made specifically to take advantage of the PS3.
As to how will be the lower level programming, I don't have a clue.
I don't know if people on this board ever read this paper on CELL. I thought it was incredible, and if I was smart enough, knowledgeable enough in this area, and not as lazy (no for the three), I might be able to predict with more precision some possible low level programming models. It's also kind of old, so it's possible that it has some imprecise information that has been corrected in more recent releases.
The author was one of the VU coders at Naughty Dog ( Jak & Daxter ) for some time. Take a look:
EDIT: Removed the article and put a link to another copy of it.
Danji Edit: The link was taken down by the request of the author of the article.
PSINext forever
Wow, that article's awesome.
In any event, we'll know more or less whether he was accurate in his predictions a month from now. I don't know about the rest of you, but time really seems to be flying!
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