Interesting insight into why the PS3 gets worse multi-plats
Posted: Mon Jan 10, 2011 1:45 pm
This is an excerpt from an interview with one of the developers of Sacred 2. He was the one responsible for writing the PS3 rendering. This is no doubt why the PS3 version of a multi-platform game is often the worst. It's nothing we didn't already know/suspect (i.e. developers lack time or inclination to utilise the PS3 properly), but it's interesting to hear it in a technical light...
The full interview can be found here.Tobias Berghoff wrote:As to what we missed, it's the 30FPS part. At least on the PS3, it is really a CPU issue. Unless you throw something truly unfriendly at it, the renderer is able to run at 30FPS, but the CPU is holding it back. It is really the classic problem of having PC code and struggling to get it onto the SPUs. On a 33ms frame, you have something like 200ms of SPU time available, of which we use maybe 50ms, so there is still plenty of power available, we just did not have the time to rewrite more systems. On the Xbox, you can basically do the same multi-threading tricks as on the PC, so that's easier for gameplay code. You do however lack the raw power of the SPUs, which makes it harder to offload GPU tasks.