Valve’s Gabe Newell comes down hard on PS3
Straight from Joystiq: “Valve’s Gabe Newell has been pretty open about his displeasure with the PS3 in the past, and it’s clear from a recent interview that time has not softened him, calling the system “a waste of everyone’s time” in Edge magazine last week. Newell continued, saying, “Investing in the Cell, investing in the SPE gives you no long-term benefits. There’s nothing there that you’re going to apply to anything else. You’re not going to gain anything except a hatred of the architecture they’ve created. I don’t think they’re going to make money off their box. I don’t think it’s a good solution.”"
What does that mean “Investing in the Cell, investing in the SPE gives you no long-term benefits.”?
What are the Cell and the SPE and what do they do?
Warren
October 11, 2007 at 10:32 am
The Cell is the microprocessor for the PS3. SPE stands for Synergistic Processing Elements. They are processing cores. Each Cell contains 8 SPEs. In simple terms, the Cell processor is an 8 core system; so each Cell basically has 8 small processors inside of it. They can run individual tasks, or team them up to run a complex task much faster.
What Gabe is getting at in this article is that if you invest your time into developing for the PS3, you can’t easily port that over to other systems. That’s why quite a few games are first made for the Xbox 360 and then ported to the PS3. The problem with that is the PS3 isn’t usually being used to its max computing capacity. I believe that the new Madden runs at a solid 60 frames per second on the Xbox 360 and only 30 FPS on the PS3. Place them side by side and you see a difference. It’s not that the PS3 can’t run it at 60 FPS, but it was developed on the 360 and ported.
So do you develop mostly from scratch twice, or just once and port it? That’s Gabe’s point as I understand it.
Jason Jeffrey
October 11, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Ah. Now I get. Thanks Jason.
Warren
October 11, 2007 at 2:35 pm