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Another angle worth considering is the economics of porting titles. If you take full advantage of specialized hardware like the PS3 had, it could have a strong

Another angle worth considering is the economics of porting titles. If you take full advantage of specialized hardware like the PS3 had, it could have a strong influence on the implementation of games- possibly even pushing down to choices in aesthetics and game mechanics. As a result it may be very difficult to get a comparable experience on another console. If a game is designed and written to more-or-less cater to a common denominator it is more straightforward to later port the game to other consoles or PCs- including platforms that might not exist at the time the original game was created- and mop up sales from those other userbases.

Narishma 9y ago
I'm not sure I agree. It was much easier to develop your game around the PS3's heterogeneous architecture, then port it to a more conventional architecture like the Xbox 360 or PC and get good performance than doing it the other way around.
- RodgerTheGreat 9y ago
  In very broad strokes, compared to the other consoles of its generation, the PS3 offered a large compute capacity via SPEs and was starved for RAM and memory bandwidth. I think you're conflating the technical impact of a heterogenous architecture with other differences in specs. If you tailored a game to work within the memory footprint of a PS3 and did not take advantage of SPEs, a port is easy- you've aimed at a lowest common denominator. If you designed your game with the expectation that you'd have more RAM, you'll have to make some painful decisions to cut the game down to size. If you designed your game to actually take advantage of SPEs, there wouldn't necessarily be a comparable compute resource on the platform to which you would like to port.
  - vvanders 9y ago
    Just a small nit that the PS3 and X360 had the same amount of RAM, it was just split on the PS3. X360 had a unified memory model which was a lot easier(PS3's is closer to a PC and X360 your mobile phone). We still did clever things like putting music in GPU memory and then streaming it back to system memory since the bandwidth wasn't large and read patterns were very predictable.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Yup, and when you did that you got a huge perf-bump on non-PS3 platforms since you already had things built in a way that were memory-locality friendly.

Narishma 9y ago

I'm not sure I agree. It was much easier to develop your game around the PS3's heterogeneous architecture, then port it to a more conventional architecture like the Xbox 360 or PC and get good performance than doing it the other way around.

RodgerTheGreat 9y ago
In very broad strokes, compared to the other consoles of its generation, the PS3 offered a large compute capacity via SPEs and was starved for RAM and memory bandwidth. I think you're conflating the technical impact of a heterogenous architecture with other differences in specs. If you tailored a game to work within the memory footprint of a PS3 and did not take advantage of SPEs, a port is easy- you've aimed at a lowest common denominator. If you designed your game with the expectation that you'd have more RAM, you'll have to make some painful decisions to cut the game down to size. If you designed your game to actually take advantage of SPEs, there wouldn't necessarily be a comparable compute resource on the platform to which you would like to port.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Just a small nit that the PS3 and X360 had the same amount of RAM, it was just split on the PS3. X360 had a unified memory model which was a lot easier(PS3's is closer to a PC and X360 your mobile phone). We still did clever things like putting music in GPU memory and then streaming it back to system memory since the bandwidth wasn't large and read patterns were very predictable.
vvanders 9y ago
Yup, and when you did that you got a huge perf-bump on non-PS3 platforms since you already had things built in a way that were memory-locality friendly.