Battlefield Bad Company

[Jester]

http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/713/713943/imgs_1.html
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield:_Bad_Company
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It is going to be for XBox 360 and PS3 which are both capable of unified shading so it will be a DX10 engine so I am sure it will be ported to PC format and the new G80 and R600 will be the hardware of choice for the game along with Windows Vista.

[xNxGenious]

PS3 doesn't do unified shading, and both consoles are incapable of fully supporting dx10.  I will be highly surprised if EA ports it to the PC. 

[Jester]

Well I assumed PS3 was capable because of the G80 having unified shaders, as far as Dx10 it is needed to fully take advantage of unified shading which is why I said it sould be easily ported .

[Jester]

PS3 doesn't do unified shading, and both consoles are incapable of fully supporting dx10.  I will be highly surprised if EA ports it to the PC. 

You are correct about the PS3 as far as I can find it has graphics about as powerful as a 7800 with no unified shading that is a real shame for people who waited in line for that POS and those that are being beheaded on fleabay. Oh well Xbox360 we all new was the better machine and all Sony could rave about was cell technology which doesnt mean a thing because the code would be easier to port between machines without those things that afaik cant do x86. I assumed Sony at the last minute got a new chip to slap in there which was based on the G80 but I cant find anything about it. Back to the New Battlefield it will need this new engine to be a hit less the memory leaks that 2 had.

[Hellstorm]

From what I read in the past and present about BFBC is that it would be ported to PC, but released on console first. Obviously, there are no gauratees, only a possiblity.

[xNxGenious]

I'm working on a cross platform game for the xbox 360 and ps3 right now.  My last title was a pc game, and after that I did R&D for the playstation 3 (graphics library work).  I'm very familiar with all platforms.

Neither the xbox 360 nor the platstation 3 support anything remotely resembling x86.  Both use a power pc core; a stripped down one.  Out of order instruction is gone, as are some other features.  The cell architecture is awesome, but it doesn't come for free.  You have 256k per cel, and all program code AND data needs to fit in there.  This means lots of DMAs and lots of breaking data and code up.  It also means a lot of coding in assembly to bring the code size down, especially since the spu compiler is a big piece of shit.  But, this also means super fast memory access when you're working on the spu.  You can't beat 6 cycles for reading/writing.  It's also simd, and can execute 2 instuctions per cycle with even/odd instruction pairing, kind of like the VUs on the ps2, but better.  Still, the ps3 is a VERY difficult system to work with, especially when compared to Xenon(or xbox 360).  I only had a command line debugger to work with when I was doing ps3 dev.  Microsoft is VERY good with developer support.  The 360 is easier to work with than even the Dreamcast was, and that's saying a lot.

In terms of raw cpu power, the ps3 wins.  The 3 core PPU on the Xenon just can't compete with the spus.  However, it's a lot easier to juice the xenon to it's potential.  The gpu on the xenon is much better than the rsx though.  I've hated nvidia for a while now, with good reason.  Their 5xxx series graphics cards for the pc didn't even fully support directx9, which is pitiful given the time of their release.

Check ps3 prices on ebay sometime if you haven't recently done so.  I don't think the sharks are going to make the killing that they anticipated.

[Jester]

The cell architecture is awesome, but it doesn't come for free. <----- precisely and I never said that the xbox Xenon did x86 but the Cell is a chip we have cussed and discussed on the AMD forums ever since Sony announced they would use it and folks were wondering if it would replace the CPU's we use today in PC's because of it's raw power and bandwidth. That is awesome man I didn't know you were a programmer Kudos to you man now I know where to go for the skinny.  Now you said you were working on a cross platform wouldn't it have been easier if Sony would have used a chip closer to the architecture of Xenon as far as cutting it's expense for having to port games between the two systems since they are so different? I mean it just doesn't make any sense from a marketing standpoint.

Oh and as far as the nv30 aka FX chip it was a real disaster for nVidia and that "DX8" chip.. I say that because if it was forced to render graphics in DX9 it would get it right in the balls. Sad thing was a 9600XT would own a 5950 Ultra when forced to render DX9 that is a shame man and I owned one of those POS GPU's.

[xNxGenious]

I had an ati 9700 for the longest time.  Best graphics card to ever come out imo.  Fast as hell and did everything it was supposed to.  The geforce 1 2 3 and 4 (but not MX, that's another story entirely) were good.  Then for some reason nvidia entirely fell off.

Sony is too obsessed with changing the world to worry about compatability.  Let's look at their track record:  Beta (good, but huge), mini-discs (really cool), memory sticks(lame), VMD(or whatever it is that the psp uses, also lame), blu-ray (which will die).  The only format they have ever had success with were CDs, and they bought that tech from Philips.  Ken Kutaragi needs to step down as well, success has destroyed any bit of rational thought that he ever had.

To answer your question, it would have been much easier if both used the exact same processor architecture, but the fact is that the two platforms (360 and ps3) are closer than any two other platforms have been in the past.  They use the same basic cpu, just the ps3 only has one core and the spus replace the extra two cores the xenon has.  From a marketing standpoint Sony is out to prove they have the more powerful system by publishing games exclusive to the ps3.  I worked for a company called Naughty Dog, which was bought by Sony just to do exclusives and make their hardware look good.  Microsoft did the same thing with Bungie.  Cross platformers usually just resort to using the lowest common denominator of the platforms.  Some of the code is different between platforms, obviously, but for sanity's sake we keep platform specific code to a minimum.

How Sony could drop the ball on the ps3 in this dramatic a fashion is beyond me.  There are soooo many issues with that system, and the blu-ray has terrible throughput.  People are going to love it when their games take 5 minutes to load.

Nintendo made an interesting call with the wii: clock the processors up and add more memory.  Not a bad idea, I hope it works out for them.  While the rest of the world is waiting for shaders to solve all their problems the people working on the wii titles will just be building good content.

[Shoat]

The cell replacing X86?  Not likely.  Not even remotely likely.  I mean, people are having a hard enough time swallowing X64 extensions on X86 and they want to turn the architecture upside down?  Riiiight...because Intel, AMD and MS won't eat you for lunch...

[Jester]

Yeah you are correct in this gen being closer than the last because the last xbox was a 700mhz PIII and a Geforce 2 I beleive and the PS2 had some 128 bit processor setup I cant recall.

[xNxGenious]

It was running a 300 Mhz mips... well, that and the other 4 processors.

I miss working on the xbox.  It was just like working on the pc but with everything exposed and a fixed configuration.  Xenon is fun to, but when things become asyncronous they become a lot harder.

x86 won't live forever.  It's already outstayed its welcome by about 20 years.  It becomes more and more obvious every time someone straps on a new bus or bridge to work around an ancient architecture.