Firery thing in the sky

Not really much new to add here, the sun/son, a new car, yardwork all eat up my free time.

I did manage to finish EP1 for HL2 but decided to spend some time going through it again with the commentary turned on. The commentary part alone is worth the price of admission to EP1 to be honest. There is a LOT of good information in there that Valve talks about regarding how they designed the characters, certain scenes, development, etc. I was really impressed and I hope more developers spend time adding this sort of content to their games. I don't imagine it adds that much complexity to game development to add the audio and triggers to launch commentary and for those of us who really enjoy games it answers a lot of questions about the games we love.

I'm really looking forward to LOTR:BFME:2 as I haven't played a RTS game in eons and I really think Live is the perfect place to create RTS matches. (unified system, everyone on the same playing field due to hardware, limited RTS audience, etc)

I also am starting to hate Nintendo, not the company itself just the fact that most of their fans are so absolutely blind that they have lost all comprehension of reason.

Joon

Not much new worth talking about however I am sort of tired of playing Oblivion right now and so I'm taking a break. I started playing Halo 2 again, I bought the DVD on EBay a while back for $12 so I thought I'd actually try and finish the single player mode. Its decent but missing the certain "feel" that the first Halo had. Not to say it's a bad game, just that the single player version of Halo2 doesn't feel as good as the original Halo.

I bought the Episode 1 addon for Half Life 2 which so far I've really been impressed with. People bitch about the fact that the game starts off right where HL2 ended but that's fine by me, I thought it was appropriate and would have found it somewhat odd to start off in a totally different location. I guess people figure that if the episode features totally different locations that somehow the game is "more" worth the $20. Alyxs' AI seems even stronger in this iteration of HL2 and in some instances it's really impressive. I will agree with the commentary that making Alyxs' AI strong makes Gordon feel a little shallow, all they really needed to do was throw in some canned animation and he would have felt a lot stronger emotionally in the game. (eg: pat Alyx on the shoulder when she's sad/scared, put hand on elevator glass door when she does to try and convey some sort of connection with her (rather than point your gun at her since that is all you can do).
Overall the EP1 is really good and a worthy purchase if your PC is able to run HL2. Too bad HL2 still isn't on the 360 yet because HL2 is still one of the best (if not the best) FPS game ever created.

Still waiting on some new games for the 360, in particular Cloning Clyde and LOTR:BFME2 which both should be out in a month or so.

More RSX vs Xenos war notes

I really haven’t updated this damn thing in a long time.

Here is an interesting post I read at VE3D.COM regarding the PS3 hardware slow and broken article from the Inquirer.

..clip from the original article…

Then came the horrible news, RSX appears to be limited to setting up 275 Million triangles/second, anemic compared to the 500+ million in XBox360. When asked about this apparent thumping dished out by MS, the reply from one notable ISV relations boffin was a terse 'What a Piece of Junk'. Talk about a steak in the heart.

…VE3D.com post regarding the news article.

The GameMaster
Flood
posted June 05, 2006 02:12 quote:
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Originally posted by Dehnus Nörder:
What could be the case, is that what Gamemaster also claimed, is that the Cell does a lot of the Vertex and Poly pushing while the RSX is cut down on this to save money and/or get more pixels hading out of it. That that is why it can't do as many Poly's as a Xenos, but in combination with the Cell it would reach that number.

I don't know I just think there are always two sides to a story and there must also be to this one .
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You can't exactly split graphics processing like that, especially not on such dissimilar architectures that is the Cell and the Geforce. Meaning that you can't have the Cell do "Part" of the geometry processing and have the RSX do the other "Part. Now you could have the Cell handle all of the Geometry processing, but that means you have to basically dedicate nearly HALF of the processing power (in addition to the ~20-25% of the processor time taken by OS resources) to processing geometry in order to equal that found in a 8 vertex pipeline Geforce 7900GTX. This STILL would pale in comparison to that of Xenos's geometry processing capacity. This processor is quickly becoming overburdened even before any work has started...

Right now the games we have been shown are running on full fledged Geforce 7800/7900GTXs, what do you think is going to happen when we go from those 7800/7900GTXs with 24 pixel pipelines/8 vertex pipelines + 16 ROPs and 51GB/sec of graphics bandwidth to a GPU that is more akin to a 7600GT with 16 pixel pipelines and 4 vertex pipelines + 8 ROPs and roughly 22.4GB/sec of graphics bandwidth. The nightmare scenario is a GPU with no vertex pipelines... and reduced quantity of pixel pipelines.

I am sure developers have been dealing with that issue already, they just did not know what was going on until now. Now that they know what are their alternatives? The main alternative put forth is basically do the SPE work across system memory instead of local memory. This basically means the processor in the PS3 (which I previously did not consider very favorable for games to begin with) crippled.

If all of this is true... then you can expect to see many of these PS3 games (which only a handful could be considered XBox360 level to begin with) are going to have downgrades made to their graphics engines in the final product.

But wait! It gets worse...

Yields are still an issue for the Cell... what if they are forced to reduce clock speed back down to 2.4Ghz and/or disable another pipeline to get yield to an acceptable level? What about the BD-ROM drives abysmal performance (half the performance of a 12x DVD with 3 TIMES worse access latencies)? Will they even be able to put everything in the actual PS3 shell they showed off and do so without the system frying itself to a crisp?

Sony has got a lot of problems... and it is becoming more likely this system will not launch this year. If that is the case... how far back will Sony need to push the system in order to fix these problems?