sony made a console so hard to develop for they can't even figure it out themselves
This is the actual truth. Revisiting the catalog of early cross platform games and it's evident that Sony engineers couldn't get anything running well on there for the first three years of its lifespan. The same games ran just fine on the Xbox360.
I still remember what Gabe Newell said about it
What was it?
The number 3 doesn’t exist at Valve
Why must you hurt me so?
its why bethesda games always had lots of problems on ps3 and their dlc was always delayed
Ah yes Bethesda. The company famous for releasing polished games with very few bugs.
KISS be like: am i a joke to you?
It is hard. PS3 has incredibly specialized hardware. Even game developers had trouble making games for it at the time because it’s so arcane.
Nah, that's still a bunch of bull, they designed it and have all the documentation. They know all of its functionality, hidden or otherwise, it's "undocumented" functions, it's quirk's, the very ins and outs of it. They probably still have original designers on staff. They have far more knowledge and experience of their own design than any game developers.
And yet RPCS3, an open source PS3 emulator based on reverse engineered research is able to achieve decent playability on most games.
Not to mention, they're a multi-billion dollar company, don't make excuses for them.
AFAIK, the documentation isn’t the main problem. I’m pretty sure PS3 is quite well understood.
The problem is how to translate the code to a typical X86 architecture. PS3’s uses a very different architecture with a big focus on their own special way on doing parallelism. It’s not an easy translation, and it must be done at great speed.
The work on RPCS3 incredible, but it took them more than a decade of optimizations to get where they are now. Wii U emulation got figured out relatively quickly in comparison, even if it uses similar specs to PS3.
The Wii U was just a souped up Wii so of course the emulation scene had a Wii U emulator in no time.
Having worked (as a designer, not an engineer) on a PS3 launch tile, this post also aligns with my understanding.
They probably have a bunch of developers like me: Dafuq did I do yesterday? 😵💫
Recent crowdstrike problem be like
There can be a lot of subtle changes going from one uarch to another.
Eg, C/C++ for x64 and ARM both use a coprocessor register to store the pointer to thread-local storage. On x64, you can offset that address and read it from memory as an atomic operation. On ARM, you need to first load it into a core register, then you can read the address with offset from memory. This makes accessing thread-local memory on ARM more complicated to do in a thread safe manner than on x64 because you need to be sure you don't get pre-empted between those two instructions or one thread can end up with another's thread-local memory pointer. Some details might be off, it's been a while since I dealt with this issue. I think there was another thing that had to line up perfectly for the bug to happen (like have it happen during a user-mode context switch).
And that's an example for two more similar uarchs. I'm not familiar with cell but I understand it to be a lot more different than x64 vs ARM. Sure, they've got all the documentation and probably still even have the collective expertise such that everything is known by at least someone without needing to look it up, but those individuals might not have that same understanding on the x64 side of things to see the pitfalls before running into them.
And even once they experience various bugs, they still need to be debugged to figure out what's going on, and there's potential that the solution isn't even possible in the paradigm used to design whatever go-between system they were currently working on.
They are both Turing complete, so there is a 1:1 functional equivalence between them (ie, anything one can do, the other can). But it doesn't mean both will be able to do it as fast as the other. An obvious example of this is desktops with 2024 hardware and desktops with 1990 hardware also have that 1:1 functional equivalence, but the more recent machines run circles around the older ones.
For profit corporations should not be trusted to preserve out culture. They would happily delete everything it if made then 1 dollar
I've worked at companies where the documentation was either non-existent, not digitized, or very poor in quality. Add 10+ years to that when nobody is left at the company who worked on the original project and it can cause this exact level of frustration.
Most of the games I've played on RPCS3 look way better and run much smoother than how they did on the console itself. And no long wait times to load into the console OS save menuz saving was nearly instant. So good.
Not to mention, they're a multi-billion dollar company, don't make excuses for them.
They pay someone handsomely to make excuses for them.
Yes it is hard, and that was their damn fault. I can’t believe they expected developers to have to program which processors take which loads with such granularity. Unbelievably stupid.
I don't think it being hard is really the issue. Sony is a billion dollar multi-national corporation and they don't get any benefit of the doubt whatsoever. Is it hard? Maybe it is, but maybe they should have thought of what they were going to do in the future when they were designing this. As was pointed out elsewhere, volunteers making an open source emulator are managing it so Sony not wanting to, or being unable to, isn't an excuse.
I remember how some PS3 models have like the entire PS2 hardware inside them and it could run both ps1 and ps2 games.
This is why PS3 is the last PlayStation that I owned, and I didn't even buy it retail.
After they discontinued the backwards compatible model I sought out and bought one secondhand, and swore never again to buy a PlayStation product unless they release one on which I can play all my PlayStation games all the way back to 1.
That model in the picture is one of them. I don't think all the fat PS3s could. But nearly all of them. Was why they were chonky.
Some of them did it partly in software, though - and they were less compatible. The European FAT models all worked like that.
Sadly, the fully-backwards compatible models are all ticking timebombs, unless you get the RSX chip replaced with a later model. It's a problem with the underfill on the chip which resulted in the YLOD, which is basically Sony's variant of the red ring of death.
I have an early FAT model and it still runs stable, but I'm afraid to use it because I know it will fail eventually if I do. It does look sexy asf though!
Thanks for the heads up. Recently took mine out of storage. Setting up a game room now that my kids are old enough to trust them. Did an SSD upgrade the other day. Will look into the chip issue.
I always wondered about the legacy of the Cell architecture, which seems to have gone nowhere. I've never seen a developer praise it, and you can find devs who love just about every silly weird computer thing. Like, surely someone out there (emu devs?) have respect for what Cell was doing, right?
I've never understood it. Multicore processors already existed (the X360 had a triple-core processor, oddly) so I'm not clear what going back to multiple CPUs accomplished. Cell cores could act as FPUs also, right? PS3 didn't have dedicated GPU, right?
Such a strange little system, I'm still amazed it ever existed. Especially the OG ones that had PS2 chips in them for backwards compatability! Ah, I miss my old PS3.
It was very experimental, that’s really the reason Sony went with it and it was at the genesis of multi threaded processing, so the jury was still out on which way things would go.
Your description of it is a little wrong though, it wasn’t multiple CPUs, at least not gore would be traditionally thought. It was a single dual core CPU, with 6 “supporting cores” so not full on CPUs. Kind of like an early stab at octocore processors when dual core was becoming popular and quad core was still being developed.
I remember that the ability to boot Linux was a big deal too and a university racked 8 PS3s together into basically a 64 core super computer. I’m actually sad that didn’t go further, the raw computing power was there, we just didn’t really know what to do with it besides experiment.
Honestly I think someone had a major breakthrough in multi-core single-unit processors shortly after the PS3 launch that killed this. Cell was just a more expensive way to get true multi threaded processing and a couple years later it was cheaper to buy a 32 core processor.
Maybe in a different timeline we’re all running Cell processors in our daily lives.
PS3 most certainly had a separate GPU - was based on the GeForce 7800GTX. Console GPUs tend to be a little faster than their desktop equivalents, as they share the same memory. Rather than the CPU having to send eg. model updates across a bus to update what the GPU is going to draw in the next frame, it can change the values directly in the GPU memory. And of course, the CPU can read the GPU framebuffer and make tweaks to it - that's incredibly slow on desktop PCs, but console games can do things like tone mapping whenever they like, and it's been a big problem for the RPCS3 developers to make that kind of thing run quickly.
The cell cores are a bit more like the 'tensor' cores that you'd get on an AI CPU than a full-blown CPU core. They can't speak to the RAM directly, just exchange data between themselves - the CPU needs to copy data in and out of them in order to get things in and out, and also to schedule any jobs that must run on them, they can't do it themselves. They're also a lot more limited in what they can do than a main CPU core, but they are very very fast at what they can do.
If you are doing the kind of calculations where you've a small amount of data that needs a lot of repetitive maths done on it, they're ideal. Bitcoin mining or crypto breaking for instance - set them up, let them go, check in on them occasionally. The main CPU acts as an orchestrator, keeping all the cell cores filled up with work to do and processing the end results. But if that's not what you're trying to do, then they're borderline useless, and that's a problem for the PS3, because most of its processing power is tied up in those cores.
Some games have a somewhat predictable workload where offloading makes sense. Got some particle effects - some smoke where you need to do some complicated fluid-and-gravity simulations before copying the end result to the GPU? Maybe your main villain has a very dramatic cape that they like to twirl, and you need to run the simulation on that separately from everything else that you're doing? Problem is, working out what you can and can't offload is a massive pain in the ass; it requires a lot of developer time to optimise, when really you'd want the design team implementing that kind of thing; and slightly newer GPUs are a lot more programmable and can do the simpler versions of that kind of calculation both faster and much more in parallel.
The Cell processor turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. The resources needed to work on it (expensive developer time) just didn't really make sense for a gaming machine. The things that it was better at, are things that it just wasn't quite good enough at - modern GPUs are Bitcoin monsters, far exceeding what the cell can do, and if you're really serious about crypto breaking then you probably have your own ASICs. Lots of identical, fast CPU cores are what developers want to work on - it's much easier to reason about.
I knew a Datacenter that had hundreds of ps3s for rendering fluid simulation and other such things that at the time were absolutely cutting edge tech. I believe F1 and some early 3d pixar stuff was rendered on those farms. But like all things, technology marched on. fpgpas and cuda have taken that space.
Cell definitely was heavily used by specialist/nichr industry though.
I wonder if I can find you some link to explain it better than the rumours I heard from staff that used to work in those datacentres.
Hmm hard to find commercial applications, probably individuals might have blogged otherwise here's what I'm talking about: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
Xbox One plays a number of 360 games fine.
Apple used QuickTransit for their PPC apps on Intel migration to great success.
I guess Sony just didn't want to pay the emulator tax?
The xbox one/series consoles run a good number of 360 games dispite the fact that the 360 uses powerPC and the newer consoles are x86.
Sony is out here getting shown up by rpcs3 having about 70℅ of their listed games working perfectly fine by hobbyists reverse engineering the ps3.
It's because they completely rebuilt and recompiled them for x86
Xbox 360 emulated xbox original games too, while Xbox 360 powerpc and Xbox original was x86
The PS3 is the epitome of "idiots admire complexity [...]" it was needlessly complicated with its cell architecture.
There are design decisions that I really don't understand why Sony made them. They do, however, make the PS3 the ideal piece of hardware if you're wanting to build an adhoc super computer
I would argue its what you get when you build hardware without any consideration for the people writing the software. Which is just as much as an epitome if a kind of silly.
I saved up and bought a reasonably beefy Mini PC, and turned it into an emulation console with Batocera. PS3 emulation runs like an absolute dream. But who needs backwards compatibility, when we can resell you the same game from 15 years ago, again, at full price???
Emulating a processor with a unique set of properties, including infinite scalability, is hard. You can't just put an emulation layer on top of x86 like you can with a processor that's a subset of x86 instructions
Imagine if Sony executives got their way and the PS3 had two cell processors and no conventional GPU. It would have been even more of a nightmare to work on.
Would that have even worked? I can't imagine you'd be able to get anything better than PS2 graphics with just an extra CPU.
The SPEs on the cell processor are actually pretty good at rendering graphics. In a lot of late gen exclusive PS3 games you can see that the developers utilised them more and more for graphics rendering. So the plan was to have the SPEs on both cell processors do all the graphics.
My 60 gb RIP after an ex left it on all night with sonic collections paused.
