Developers Criticize the PS3
Why would John Carmack, programming superstar of id Software fame, prefer developing on the Xbox 360?
Sony would have us believe that the PS3 is the best electronic device ever invented,
certainly superior to the foul X360 and puny Wii, but they do have a bit of a vested interest in the matter. More important to us as gamers is the opinion of game developers, for they are the ones who must enter the arena and wrestle with the beast before emerging triumphant with the games we will come to know and love. Ars Technica recently featured an interview with Matt Lee, a developer in the Xbox division over at Microsoft. Squeezed in between paragraph after paragraph of gushing praise over the Xbox can be found his opinions on the PS3; in short, hes unimpressed.
Lee concedes that the two systems are pretty equally matched in terms of total processing power, but goes on to say that the design of the Cell processor at the heart of the PS3 is more suited for processing audio/video streams than for game code. This statement is actually corroborated by Sir Howard String himself, Chairman and CEO of Sony Corporation; in a speech given in early January of this year, he emphasized that the Cell processor is designed to support broadband consumer applications and HD video streams.
I dont see mention of gaming anywhere in there, do you?
All of this lends weight to the idea that Sony is focusing on the PS3 as an entertainment centre, not just a gaming console. Lee goes on to claim that not all of the PS3s overall processing power and memory will be available to games, due to the way resources are allocated.
The PS3s memory banks are split between graphics and system, unlike the Xbox 360's unified memory architecture. Again,
good for watching movies, but not necessarily for playing games.
The X360s real advantage, according to Lee, is the ease of development on the platform. Microsoft has had plenty of time to improve the development environment and tools, which makes things a lot easier for X360 developers, and which Lee believes will result in superior games. Happy developers = better developers isnt the kind of math I can disagree with. John Carmack, superstar developer of id Software/Doom fame, agrees.
In an interview with G4 TV last month, Carmack revealed that the PS3 not as optimal of a development platform as the X360. He went so far as to claim that development will be twice as difficult as it should be when optimizing code for the PS3. This is a pretty grim picture, indeed.
No need to despair quite yet, though; Carmack believes that plenty of people will still develop for the PS3 simply because they have no choice, due to the sheer market power and weight Sony currently enjoys. Sony themselves have proclaimed that they are riding on the goodwill and success of the PS2, which makes them sound a bit arrogant.
Admittedly, neither one of these gents has ever developed on any Sony hardware, and Lee probably never will, so their opinions are just that; opinions. Lees comments in particular should be taken with an extra-large grain of salt, working as he does for Sonys biggest competitor in the console race. The people who could really shed light on this matter are the developers currently working on multi-platform games, but so far they have kept silent, probably because they are too busy actually making their games to waste time talking about it.
As it stands, we are left wondering whether the PS3 is, in fact, a really expensive BluRay player that also happens to run games. Lets all keep our ears and eyes open, and when November rolls around, the proof will be, as they say, in the pudding.
http://consoles.gwn.com/articles/article.php/id/725/
