Sony Slashes PS3 Development Costs

When games cost millions (or tens of millions) of dollars to produce, a saving of $10,000 up front is hardly going to be the deciding factor over whether a project gets greenlighted or not. But every little helps I guess.

Well said, Sony could give away these kits and still developers would have to think twice. Why? Well lets not forget that its a FACT that it costs 2x more to make a game on the PS3 than the 360.

Hence why multiplatform games are 99% of the time made on the 360 first then ported to the PS3 and this will always be the case, why? Well you should all know that its the 360 that has the high end GPU and more memory available to make games.

But yes some decent games that last more than 5hrs hours would be great.

Do you have a source for that fact? Not trolling here, just interested.


Yeah, I know why. It's because the 360 has a larger install base and has been around for longer. Therefore the devs are more familiar with coding for it. This means they build their game engine on the 360 and then port it to the PS3. This can lead to shoddy ports.

When game engines are written from scratch for each platform, the results are equally good on both. Just look at CoD4, it looks excellent on the PS3 and 360, same with Assassin's Creed.

There was an article about it ages ago that making a game costs 2x more than a PC and the PS3 costs 3x more than a PC, and PS3 costs 2x more than the 360 its on the net somewhere.

Those 2 games you mentioned funny enough look better on the 360, I have done a side by side comparison and the 360 wins again.

270,000 polygons per second rendering on the PS3 and 500,000 a second on the 360 along with advanced features the PS3 RSX is missing.
Which I believe what is costing the devs more because they are having to software emulate missing features like HDR+AA and multi texturing.

I find it strange that the PS3-games costs 2 times more then a X360 game since publishers always say when comparing to the Wii, they need to sell two-three times more copies to break-even on the X360 and PS3 then on the Wii.

I think the extra-cost of making a PS3-game is the initial investment to figure out the system, afterwards i think the difference in cost between the X360 and PS3 are minimal.

And the Xbox360 and PS3 have equal memory module sizes, they just use them differently.

Wikipedia says different;

About the RSX

About the Xenos


Looking at your figure for the Xenos, I'd say you were a power of a thousand out, but I have no idea where you got 270 from for the RSX.

Oh and also from those pages;
RSX: Maximum shader operations:100 billion shader operations per second
Xenos: Maximum shader operations: 48 billion per second

RSX: Maximum Dot product operations: 51 billion per second
Xenos: Maximum Dot product operations: 24 billion per second

And as for HDR, the RSX has "128-bit pixel precision offers rendering of scenes with high dynamic range rendering (HDR)" (WIkipedia page again) and Bungie had to use two output buffers to render the HDR in Halo 3 (look for "You Owe me 80p!") so you don't get it "for free" on the 360 either.

Now I'm willing to admit that the above are just a set of numbers and the RSX wins on some and the Xenos wins on others. I've said before what I've heard from developers here and there; the two chips are much of a muchness apart from the procedural stuff the Xenos has built in and you can do that in Cell if you wish.

However, the reason that devs have been doing the 360 version first is exactly what I stated before, user base and familiarity, it's why the PS2 version was written first last generation.

Emm had a nose around and found a someone on gamespot forums talking about it also, yet could not find the information relating to 'Per frame' I could have been incorrect and actually meant in the millions and not thousands.

But in relation to hardware technology the 360 GPU offers FREE Anti Aliasing 2x on a HDTV and 4x on a SDTV from what I read a while back.

The 360 GPU is able to do HDR+AA at the same time whilst also offering a unified shader which the PS3 cannot do since it the RSX relies more on the CELL and work in conjuction with each other hence the cost side of things.

Both systems have a total of 512mb of memory however the 360 has unified memory the PS3 does not, the PS3 also has more system memory allocated to the interface i.e. 96mb as apposed to 32mb with the 360.

No problems, they're both big numbers, but your proportions were off based on the figures I found. The Xenos still comes out ahead, but not by such a large magin.


Again, from Wikipedia, both GPUs can do AA on chip.
RSX: Maximum anti-aliasing sample rate: 8.8 GigaSamples per second
Xenos: Maximum anti-aliasing sample rate: 16 gigasamples per second

So Xenos does AA twice as fast as RSX, but not really "for free" just not in software.


The unified shader architecture just means that the Xenos is more efficient because each shader pipeline can do both vertex and pixel shaders so if one type is in high demand, they can be farmed out to more pipelines wheras the RSX may stall due to not having enough pipelines for the required type.

However, the RSX is faster at processing shader instructions 100B/s versus 48B/s for the Xenos so the problem shouldn't arise too often. All in all, they are probably pretty close in terms of performance again.


And in addition, the Xenos has 10Mb DRAM on the daughter card for faster processing without having to hit the main memory. I cant find any figures for the RSX, so I'd have to assume it doesn't have this type of memory.

However, half of the PS3's memory is clocked to the CPU speed of 3.2 GHz with the rest clocked at 700 MHz, the same as all of the 360's memory. This is the reason for having a non-unified architecture. It means things like physics, AI and any part of the graphics processing the Cell is doing can be performed on fast memory leaving the "slower" memory to the RSX.

Note that the Cell can make use of both banks of memory, so can prepare data for the RSX to work on without having to send it directly to the GPU its self, this very similar to the way the 360 will work with its unified memory. The only issue with the banked approach is that it's more difficult to dynamically allocate memory between the CPU and the GPU, but the speed of the CPU-specific memory can make up for that in some part.

All in all, graphically, the systems are pretty much the same with the PS3 winning in some places and the 360 winning in others. Sure the PS3's architecture may be more difficult to get the same performance from, but it also has a higher theoretical maximum performance due to the Cell.

Until devs get more familiar with the Cell/RSX combo, the 360 will be the lead platform for multi-platform releases due to its install base and ease of use. However, the process is already starting with a lot of the code written for the "supercomputer" applications the Cell is being put to being sent to IBM and Sony and from them to the 3rd party devs through Sony's code sharing initiatives.