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The weird PS1/PS2/PS3 were because of Japan's heavy arcade culture, where quirky hardware/software designs were the standard. Xbox was approached from the "let'
by Jasper_ 7y ago
The weird PS1/PS2/PS3 were because of Japan's heavy arcade culture, where quirky hardware/software designs were the standard. Xbox was approached from the "let's make a DirectX Box" angle, from commodity PC hardware, and it wasn't until the PS3's initial huge cost blunder that Sony realized they needed to go the commodity angle.
> There's a persistent rumor that the Cell was so powerful that Sony had intended for the Playstation 3 to be equipped with two Cell chips, and no true GPU at all. But it seems Sony realized during development that their philosophy had no future.
The original plan was for no GPU at all, relying on the SPUs as pixel processor units. When they realized that that wasn't feasible for a few reasons, they quickly partnered with Toshiba to make a custom GPU, and that ended poorly too, so Toshiba scrambled and licensed an NVIDIA core. The final "RSX" chip was still a Toshiba design, but with NVIDIA at the center.
As games got more and more complicated, the amount of developer support & tooling did as well. The Xbox 360 had incredibly strong tooling (ask someone who worked on the device about 360's PIX, and they'll gush for days), and the PS3 had very little. The PS3 shader compiler infamously had a random search for an optimizer, and Sony's recommendation was to just run it continually with different random seed inputs in hopes it found a better optimization for your shader.
- anthk 7y ago>The weird PS1/PS2/PS3 were because of Japan's heavy arcade culture, where quirky hardware/software designs were the standard. MSX, PC98. The Nintendo uses a standard 6502 CPU with a PPU and the Mega Drive used the uberknown M68k.
- Jasper_ 7y agoI mean, the PS3's Cell uses PowerPC. We're not talking about the ISA here, but the architecture and bizarre stuff coming along with it, like the NES PPU.
- menzoic 7y ago> The PS3 shader compiler infamously had a random search for an optimizer, and Sony's recommendation was to just run it continually with different random seed inputs in hopes it found a better optimization for your shader. Sounds like machine learning with linear regression.
- octbash 7y agoHow is it like linear regression, considering linear regression has a closed-form solution, and even if you're using an iterative solver, is a convex problem.
- masklinn 7y ago> The weird PS1/PS2/PS3 were because of Japan's heavy arcade culture, where quirky hardware/software designs were the standard. TBF until the early aughts bespoke hardware was the only way to hit a suitable price target and get the performances and graphics snazz you wanted. The first "consumer" PCs which were competitive with consoles in terms of gaming (late 90s, starting with the Voodoo 2 or so) had the graphics adapter alone costing as much as a current-gen console.