Sony Slashes PS3 Development Costs

8 comments on-line.

First comment

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.

Latest comment

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.

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