Hynad
09-30-2007, 12:16 PM
I found an interesting article over at neogaf.
And to me, it seems like the PS3 is just like I suspected. Not badly customized. Just different, and because of that, developers have to update their methods.
Read it and I'm sure you'll understand. So far, the only thing that was definite about the comparison between the PS3 and the 360, as far as graphics go, was that the GPU of the 360 is more powerful than the one in the PS3.
After you read this, you'll probably understand that the unique architechture of the PS3 makes it so it doesn't require a GPU as powerful as the one in the 360 to push better graphics than those found on the 360.
PS3 games list & SPE usages
According to IBM the bulk of the PS3's processing power is located in Cell's SPE. Without using them games development is very similar to developing a game on a decent specced single processor PC or Mac (so not really difficult at all like some developers claim, funnily those who do not even use the SPEs the porting process should then actually be pretty straight foward (with of course the advantage of being able to optimize for a single uniform configuration). PS3 exclusive devs who are using the SPEs claim it's not more difficult to develop for and that it's much easier to develop for than for the PS2. Considering more and more games start to utilize these SPEs I thought it would be interesting to list those games and possibly deduct those which don't.
SPE usage doesn't per se make a good game, neither not using them per se makes a bad game, for example simple games such as distributed on the PSN don't really need that much performance with the exception of Super Stardust HD, which is quite impressive with so many effects and things going on at once. However IMO for games which greatly depend on performance, not using the SPEs IMO don't make these games genuine PS3 games to judge the power of the platform on, but should rather be viewed as far from optimal ports.
Beyond3D Motorstorm interview: "Scott Kirkland: Cell’s SPUs provide a huge amount of processing power. Early adopters tended to bias usage towards either RSX or PPU support (we fall into the latter category). I’m confident that over the coming months, exploitation of this resource will become far more balanced."
PS3 games that are known to use the Cell's SPE
1) Resistance:Fall of Man
"Animation and calculating collisions between objects are perfect fits, says Hastings. So those are the primary jobs Resistance doles out to the SPEs.."
Source: Spectrum online
2) Ratchet and Clank Future
"We were using the SPUs and that's a key to having a game that runs fast on the PS3, but there were a lot of things that we knew we could improve, and we have been improving them on Ratchet. And even with Ratchet, we're still seeing more and more things we can do; it's kind of like peeling off the layers of an onion."
Source: Gamedaily
3) Motorstorm
"SPU usage is a good example. The progressive development of corresponding debugging and profiling tools made thorough exploitation of this powerful resource quite challenging for the less technically biased members of the team. In the aftermath of MotorStorm, with mature tools at our disposal, we’ve been developing mechanisms to make the PPU and SPU’s power and parallelism far more accessible to our entire team, re-thinking data organization and algorithms in the process. MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we’re aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!"
"Our SPU exploiting systems consist of:
i) Havok physics.
ii) Determination of object visibility.
iii) Concatenation of hierarchies.
iv) Billboard object culling and vertex buffer creation.
v) Updating of particles and vertex buffer creation.
vi) Updating of vehicle dynamics.
vii) Updating of vehicle suspension constraints.
viii) Audio (MultiStream).
ix) Video decoding."
Source: Beyond3D
4) Formula One Championship Edition
"We don't really use the concept of reserving certain SPUs for specific tasks. Instead we employ the concept of prioritized job lists that are executed by the SPUs whenever one is available. We use the SPUs for the following jobs: audio effects, particle system, physics (landscape collision, narrow phase and collision resolution), rain effects (rain droplets and rain splashes) and various render side jobs. The game logic is driven largely by the PPU. We use the SPUs together to collaborate on working through each frame that's displayed by the game. The SPUs are extremely versatile so they can be used to accelerate any in-game system."
The SPUs are heavily involved in the graphics pipeline and do an enormous amount of work to eliminate inefficiency before anything arrives at the PPU and RSX. For example, the SPUs are powerful enough to decompress and check every triangle [polygon] before passing it on to the RSX. Triangles that are facing away from the player, or that are not on the screen can be 'trimmed' away by the SPUs, which hugely reduces the amount of redundant work sent to the RSX. This in turn lets the RSX get on with what it does best--drawing stuff on screen.
The SPUs can also be used to augment the RSX vertex shaders, making far more vertex-heavy tasks possible which is very useful for character animation. Additionally, the SPUs can be used to implement behavior very similar to geometry shaders--F1 CE uses them in this way to render seamless interpolated levels of detail for some scene elements. So in answer to the question "Do the Cell and RSX work together?" the answer is a resounding "Yes," and I think this is one of the real strengths of Playstation 3 that we'll see increasingly exploited by development teams going forward.
Source: Newsweek
3) Super Stardust HD
"We are able to get over 10,000 active objects with physics and collisions and over 75,000 particles simulated and drawn @60fps. That said, we were unable to use all the available processing power from Cell for this game, so for the next game there are still plenty of reserves left"
Source: IGN
4) Heavenly Sword
5) Lair
"We have all of our animations running on the S.P.U.s of the Cell's chip because you couldn't draw armies or basically animate armies of that amount and size without it. And our physics are completely on there. We are also doing fluid dynamics for the first time in a game, as far as I know. Water is not basically a sheet of a base surface, but completely animated and sub-divided, and you actually can direct with it thanks to the Cell. We actually do part of our rendering on the Cell. Simply because it's so powerful, we spent months and months moving more and more systems onto the S.P.U.'s."
"Not a specific S.P.U. Our S.P.U. code works dynamically, so we are not locking up one S.P.U. and saying "OK, you are the A.I. S.P.U., but we instead say, "OK, here are these 15 things including A.I." We run them on the S.P.U., and the code automatically distributes them. And sometimes, yes, A.I. certainly can take up a full S.P.U."
Source: Gamepro
6) Killzone 2
"In this talk, we will discuss our approach to face this challenge and how we designed a deferred rendering engine that uses multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA). We will give in-depth description of each individual stage of our real-time rendering pipeline and the main ingredients of our lighting, post-processing and data management. We’ll show how we utilize PS3’s SPUs for fast rendering of a large set of primitives, parallel processing of geometry and computation of indirect lighting. We will also describe our optimizations of the lighting and our parallel split (cascaded) shadow map algorithm for faster and stable MSAA output."
Source: Killzoneunit
7) Final Fantasy XIII (uses SPE enabled White Engine)
"The White Engine reportedly uses four of the six developer-available synergistic processing elements (SPEs) of the Cell microprocessor to achieve near-pre-rendered CGI quality in realtime." Source: Play UK through Wikipedia
8) Gran Turismo 5
9) Warhawk
"Although I would say it’s the sum-total of all of our natural phenomenon in the game. Our clouds, procedural water, atmospheric scattering, terrain, etc. All of this stuff runs in parallel on all 7 SPUs simultaneously every frame – I’m still not sure if the game community is giving enough credit to just how fast the SPUs really are."
Source: PS Blog
10) Untold Legends
11) Uncharted: Drake’s fortune
12) Infamous
"For us, the most exciting part of the PS3 has been the cell processor, the SPUs specifically. In our highest density scenes right now, we are currently using about 30 percent of the SPUs' capabilities--with the SPUs doing lots of heavy lifting for us on rendering, visibility, particle systems, skinning, animation blending, and so on...this with scores of pedestrians, cars, fires, etc., all going on. And the best part? We've not made any significant attempts to even optimize the SPU code. I think it's reasonable to guess we could put 10 times as much stuff on the SPUs and still make our frame budgets. It's really pretty amazing."
Source: Gamespot
13) The Getaway 3 - Tech demo
14) Unreal Tournament 3 - Sony developers helping Epic.
Retail PS3 games confirmed or thought not using the Cell's SPEs (correct me if wrong, I will update both lists)
1) Genji: Days of the Blade (Great visuals, mediocre game, confirmed by developer not to be using the SPEs)
2) Half-Life 2: Orange Box (Confirmed by developer)
3) Splinter Cell
4) The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Great game, looks better than on XBox 360 combined with reduced loading times, but this mainly due to harddrive caching)
5) Fight Night Round 3 (overall still a good improvement over the XBox 360 version)
6) Full Auto 2: Battlelines (Mediocre, still an improvement over the original and 1080p)
7) Ridge Racer 7(OK game, overall a good improvement over RR6 and 1080p)
8) Madden NFL 07
9) Madden NFL 08
10) Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas
11) Enchanted Arms
12) F.E.A.R.
13) Sonic the Hedgehog
14) Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07
Basically, what it means is that games ported from the 360 to the PS3 will (almost) always look less polished, if they are not made to exploit the SPEs. Reason being that if they don't use the SPEs, then the RSX is doing most of the graphical work alone and thus shows its limitations (limitations when it comes to using the "regular CPU"/GPU configuration).
And to me, it seems like the PS3 is just like I suspected. Not badly customized. Just different, and because of that, developers have to update their methods.
Read it and I'm sure you'll understand. So far, the only thing that was definite about the comparison between the PS3 and the 360, as far as graphics go, was that the GPU of the 360 is more powerful than the one in the PS3.
After you read this, you'll probably understand that the unique architechture of the PS3 makes it so it doesn't require a GPU as powerful as the one in the 360 to push better graphics than those found on the 360.
PS3 games list & SPE usages
According to IBM the bulk of the PS3's processing power is located in Cell's SPE. Without using them games development is very similar to developing a game on a decent specced single processor PC or Mac (so not really difficult at all like some developers claim, funnily those who do not even use the SPEs the porting process should then actually be pretty straight foward (with of course the advantage of being able to optimize for a single uniform configuration). PS3 exclusive devs who are using the SPEs claim it's not more difficult to develop for and that it's much easier to develop for than for the PS2. Considering more and more games start to utilize these SPEs I thought it would be interesting to list those games and possibly deduct those which don't.
SPE usage doesn't per se make a good game, neither not using them per se makes a bad game, for example simple games such as distributed on the PSN don't really need that much performance with the exception of Super Stardust HD, which is quite impressive with so many effects and things going on at once. However IMO for games which greatly depend on performance, not using the SPEs IMO don't make these games genuine PS3 games to judge the power of the platform on, but should rather be viewed as far from optimal ports.
Beyond3D Motorstorm interview: "Scott Kirkland: Cell’s SPUs provide a huge amount of processing power. Early adopters tended to bias usage towards either RSX or PPU support (we fall into the latter category). I’m confident that over the coming months, exploitation of this resource will become far more balanced."
PS3 games that are known to use the Cell's SPE
1) Resistance:Fall of Man
"Animation and calculating collisions between objects are perfect fits, says Hastings. So those are the primary jobs Resistance doles out to the SPEs.."
Source: Spectrum online
2) Ratchet and Clank Future
"We were using the SPUs and that's a key to having a game that runs fast on the PS3, but there were a lot of things that we knew we could improve, and we have been improving them on Ratchet. And even with Ratchet, we're still seeing more and more things we can do; it's kind of like peeling off the layers of an onion."
Source: Gamedaily
3) Motorstorm
"SPU usage is a good example. The progressive development of corresponding debugging and profiling tools made thorough exploitation of this powerful resource quite challenging for the less technically biased members of the team. In the aftermath of MotorStorm, with mature tools at our disposal, we’ve been developing mechanisms to make the PPU and SPU’s power and parallelism far more accessible to our entire team, re-thinking data organization and algorithms in the process. MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we’re aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!"
"Our SPU exploiting systems consist of:
i) Havok physics.
ii) Determination of object visibility.
iii) Concatenation of hierarchies.
iv) Billboard object culling and vertex buffer creation.
v) Updating of particles and vertex buffer creation.
vi) Updating of vehicle dynamics.
vii) Updating of vehicle suspension constraints.
viii) Audio (MultiStream).
ix) Video decoding."
Source: Beyond3D
4) Formula One Championship Edition
"We don't really use the concept of reserving certain SPUs for specific tasks. Instead we employ the concept of prioritized job lists that are executed by the SPUs whenever one is available. We use the SPUs for the following jobs: audio effects, particle system, physics (landscape collision, narrow phase and collision resolution), rain effects (rain droplets and rain splashes) and various render side jobs. The game logic is driven largely by the PPU. We use the SPUs together to collaborate on working through each frame that's displayed by the game. The SPUs are extremely versatile so they can be used to accelerate any in-game system."
The SPUs are heavily involved in the graphics pipeline and do an enormous amount of work to eliminate inefficiency before anything arrives at the PPU and RSX. For example, the SPUs are powerful enough to decompress and check every triangle [polygon] before passing it on to the RSX. Triangles that are facing away from the player, or that are not on the screen can be 'trimmed' away by the SPUs, which hugely reduces the amount of redundant work sent to the RSX. This in turn lets the RSX get on with what it does best--drawing stuff on screen.
The SPUs can also be used to augment the RSX vertex shaders, making far more vertex-heavy tasks possible which is very useful for character animation. Additionally, the SPUs can be used to implement behavior very similar to geometry shaders--F1 CE uses them in this way to render seamless interpolated levels of detail for some scene elements. So in answer to the question "Do the Cell and RSX work together?" the answer is a resounding "Yes," and I think this is one of the real strengths of Playstation 3 that we'll see increasingly exploited by development teams going forward.
Source: Newsweek
3) Super Stardust HD
"We are able to get over 10,000 active objects with physics and collisions and over 75,000 particles simulated and drawn @60fps. That said, we were unable to use all the available processing power from Cell for this game, so for the next game there are still plenty of reserves left"
Source: IGN
4) Heavenly Sword
5) Lair
"We have all of our animations running on the S.P.U.s of the Cell's chip because you couldn't draw armies or basically animate armies of that amount and size without it. And our physics are completely on there. We are also doing fluid dynamics for the first time in a game, as far as I know. Water is not basically a sheet of a base surface, but completely animated and sub-divided, and you actually can direct with it thanks to the Cell. We actually do part of our rendering on the Cell. Simply because it's so powerful, we spent months and months moving more and more systems onto the S.P.U.'s."
"Not a specific S.P.U. Our S.P.U. code works dynamically, so we are not locking up one S.P.U. and saying "OK, you are the A.I. S.P.U., but we instead say, "OK, here are these 15 things including A.I." We run them on the S.P.U., and the code automatically distributes them. And sometimes, yes, A.I. certainly can take up a full S.P.U."
Source: Gamepro
6) Killzone 2
"In this talk, we will discuss our approach to face this challenge and how we designed a deferred rendering engine that uses multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA). We will give in-depth description of each individual stage of our real-time rendering pipeline and the main ingredients of our lighting, post-processing and data management. We’ll show how we utilize PS3’s SPUs for fast rendering of a large set of primitives, parallel processing of geometry and computation of indirect lighting. We will also describe our optimizations of the lighting and our parallel split (cascaded) shadow map algorithm for faster and stable MSAA output."
Source: Killzoneunit
7) Final Fantasy XIII (uses SPE enabled White Engine)
"The White Engine reportedly uses four of the six developer-available synergistic processing elements (SPEs) of the Cell microprocessor to achieve near-pre-rendered CGI quality in realtime." Source: Play UK through Wikipedia
8) Gran Turismo 5
9) Warhawk
"Although I would say it’s the sum-total of all of our natural phenomenon in the game. Our clouds, procedural water, atmospheric scattering, terrain, etc. All of this stuff runs in parallel on all 7 SPUs simultaneously every frame – I’m still not sure if the game community is giving enough credit to just how fast the SPUs really are."
Source: PS Blog
10) Untold Legends
11) Uncharted: Drake’s fortune
12) Infamous
"For us, the most exciting part of the PS3 has been the cell processor, the SPUs specifically. In our highest density scenes right now, we are currently using about 30 percent of the SPUs' capabilities--with the SPUs doing lots of heavy lifting for us on rendering, visibility, particle systems, skinning, animation blending, and so on...this with scores of pedestrians, cars, fires, etc., all going on. And the best part? We've not made any significant attempts to even optimize the SPU code. I think it's reasonable to guess we could put 10 times as much stuff on the SPUs and still make our frame budgets. It's really pretty amazing."
Source: Gamespot
13) The Getaway 3 - Tech demo
14) Unreal Tournament 3 - Sony developers helping Epic.
Retail PS3 games confirmed or thought not using the Cell's SPEs (correct me if wrong, I will update both lists)
1) Genji: Days of the Blade (Great visuals, mediocre game, confirmed by developer not to be using the SPEs)
2) Half-Life 2: Orange Box (Confirmed by developer)
3) Splinter Cell
4) The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Great game, looks better than on XBox 360 combined with reduced loading times, but this mainly due to harddrive caching)
5) Fight Night Round 3 (overall still a good improvement over the XBox 360 version)
6) Full Auto 2: Battlelines (Mediocre, still an improvement over the original and 1080p)
7) Ridge Racer 7(OK game, overall a good improvement over RR6 and 1080p)
8) Madden NFL 07
9) Madden NFL 08
10) Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas
11) Enchanted Arms
12) F.E.A.R.
13) Sonic the Hedgehog
14) Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07
Basically, what it means is that games ported from the 360 to the PS3 will (almost) always look less polished, if they are not made to exploit the SPEs. Reason being that if they don't use the SPEs, then the RSX is doing most of the graphical work alone and thus shows its limitations (limitations when it comes to using the "regular CPU"/GPU configuration).