Why was the Sony PlayStation 3 so hard to develop games for ? | MVG

Gabe newel only said it was difficult because it has a 3

I once dreamed about writing a Sega Saturn emulator for PS3 and optimize the use of the SPEs to run the Saturn's multiprocessor architecture. Then I woke up from this nightmare.

I remember someone explaining once that the PS3's Cell was like hiring a bunch of guys to work for you, but rather then being able to tell quickly telling them what they need to do that day when they clocked in, you had to hold a meeting, complete with a power point presentation. But then tools came around that essentially made the powerpoint for you.

That SPE hello world example does a great job of demonstrating the complexity involved in coding for them. That's exactly the kind of content I love from this channel!

I LOVE how you actually integrate architecture concepts like Out-of-order execution. As a Computer Science student I really appreciate you taking the time to explain these concepts and not dumb your videos down to make them more accessible. You made me personally interested in building emulators and homebrew.

The best PS3 games were developed either by Sony themselves or by one of their subsidiary studios. They knew the architecture and capabilities of their system much better than any third party developer so they could optimize their games very well. Even today, most Sony titles are extremely hard to run on an emulator due to these optimizations. Cell is indeed a pretty strange architecture. No wonder many third party developers hated it. Xbox 360's Xenon was based on Cell's PPE cores, but without the SPUs. It was a much simpler processor.

when you've got amazing hardware vs. deadlines, the latter usually win.

This has to be the most convoluted " Hello World " ever. 144 lines of code?

Really enjoying this series with the low level approach.

It should be also mentioned that the memory layout was widely different between them. Both offered 512MBs of memory, but PS3 had a hard divide offering 256MBs for each system and video RAM. While on 360 you could use whole 512MBs for whatever you needed.

Great video! The PS3 processor is always such an interestingtopic

This sounds eerily like the criticisms of the Sega Saturn.

144 lines of code to output hello world from the spu, good lord, my brain hurts just thinking about having to code using those, calling it a nightmare was not an exaggeration, wow.

Your explanation of what went on behind the scene in the gaming development world is simply brilliant. Some of the most interesting gaming content on YouTube. I always look forward to your vids.

A few more things: - Sony threatened with "consequences" if they released games on Xbox 360 first before Playstation 3 if they needed more development time. (Because it would give the end-user thoughts that may be Microsoft had a 'exclusivity deal' with the publisher) This resulted in many games being delayed while the Xbox 360 version was well and done (and sometimes even leaked in Asia months before release because the "gold" disc was already with the factory) - Sony spend A LOT of money to fly "cell developers" all over the world to third-party big shot developers like Infinity Ward to help development just so that the Playstation 3 version of the game would atleast look equal to the Xbox 360 version. This rarely gets mentioned as Sony kept this (mostly) quiet. - The difference between Forza 2 and Forza 4 is also insane. Developers learned to code for multi-threaded processors during this generation after years and years of single-threaded performing hardware. It's not limited to Playstation 3 only.

Me: I couldn't care less about why PS3 was hard to develop for. MVG: Uploads video about Why PS3 was hard to develop for Me: Wow I was always curious about that!

as a software engineer, I love that you walk through code, makes the problem easier to conceptualize!

Short answer: Many devs treated the PS3 as a single-core Xbox 360 and ignored the SPUs

As a computer geek i will always love the cell and if the industry had caught on and cells were made it would a very interesting i mean multi core and low latency thats basically were computing has been moving for the last 15 years anyway

MGS4 looks fantastic still in 2019