Article debunking the Inquirer claims about RSX and CELL

[pari]

"They've got the wrong end of the stick grasped firmly in both hands."

Senior developers working on PlayStation 3 titles have told GamesIndustry.biz that reports of serious problems with the system's Cell and RSX hardware are "misleading and uninformed."

Earlier this week, technology news site The Inquirer reported that the PS3 was "slow and broken", with a correspondent for the site claiming that massive flaws with the console's hardware mean that it is "hobbled" compared to Microsoft's Xbox 360.

The site based its assertions on a claim that the NVIDIA-designed RSX graphics unit has a slower triangle setup rate than the ATI-designed part in the Xbox 360, and on a slide from Sony's Devstation event a few months back showing the memory access speeds within the console.

............................


While dismissing The Inquirer's claims as entirely spurious - and pointing out that even if they were true, they would be flaws so serious that Sony would simply not be able to release the Cell chip in that state - at least one of our sources admitted that PS3 was taking some time to get used to, but perhaps not as much as some parts of the media have suggested.

"I'd say PS3 was a challenge to work on," he said, "but every new platform takes a while to get used to. Put it like this, I worked on early PS2 games, and those were a real nightmare - we're getting code up and running on PS3 much faster than we did last time around."

"Once people start doing really impressive stuff on PS3 and Xbox 360, they're both going to be much the same [in terms of difficulty]," he concluded. "Sony's giving us better tools this time around - they're still not great at communicating and there are some weird holes in their developer support, but they've learned a lot of lessons from PS2."


http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=17547

Pretty much Inquirer is running sensational news instead of real news or its astroturfing by Sony's competitor through Inquirer?

[VG Aficionado]

Inquirer's news are usually (bad and intentionally misinforming) opinions rather than real news.

+rep!

[Coded-Dude]

but people still post their articles and praise them as undying truth...its sad really.

[PhYmon]

+Rep, but at least we know that those claims are false..

[rog27]

Hahaha...I love it. All of the FUD. All of this is being taken out of context by people that haven't a clue what they are talking about. Here's my opinion on the matter:

People, as well as the Inquirer, are confusing the context of the phrase 'local memory' as portrayed on the slide in the Inquirer article. The Inquirer comes to this conclusion, which is hilariously misinterpreted:


Quote:
Originally Posted by Inq
If you can write at 250x the read speed, it makes Cell local memory just about useless. That means you do all your work out of main memory, and the whole point of local is, well, pointless.


'Local memory' in the context of the slide does not mean 'local store (LS)' that accompanies each SPE. 'Local memory' is referring to RSX's GDDR3 memory. The reason CELL would read anything from GDDR3 memory in the first place is beyond anyone's comprehension at this point (maybe something in the future) because it is faster for RSX to just write to XDR for CELL to read (if shuffling data back and forth between CELL & RSX). So, when the Inq article infers that the LS memory on the SPEs is useless...they haven't an f'ing clue what they are talking about. You should have stopped reading at this point. Inq = FUD.

And here's Tom with the weather....

I told you so.... :P

[Nameless]

I told you all this the other day...
This article is no surprise to me... Peace
Hell I deserve some +rep. LOL ;-)

[Jasonps3]

Once again, the inquirer doesn't disappoint, lol.

[yoshaw]

Good find. That should put the awful negativity around PS3 to permanent rest .... for the time being atleast. ;)

[Z]

we don't need another article to debunk anything Inquirer does. they do a good job debunking themselves in the same articles.

Inquirer's slogan: common sense is our greatest enemy!

[Applefiend]

Put the negativity at rest for another week perhaps. All so koo koo crazy. People just up and say no to Virtua Fighter 5, MGS4, Assasin's Creed, Heavenly Sword, FF13, Mercenaries 2, etc etc because of some BS article or a lousy $100 price difference.

Bandwagon jumping is so sad... Just switch your brain off. I get universally hated on multiplatform forums for saying how much I look forward to PS3 and it's games. Thank god for this island of sanity.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

As soon as it said 'inquirer' on it I debunked it.
It's sad that Sense isn't all that common.

[Zer0-Sum]

the Inquirer = Craptacular. Nuff said....

Peace...

[makeitlookreal]

The negativity is really partially Sony's fault for not being more open with us about the specifications. I am not saying people should not try to get their facts strait before they release stories, but it would be nice if the facts so far were already right there for us by Sony.

[Applefiend]

Well a lot of them not being more open with specifications is because they're not final. They're trying to give us the best PS3 they can for the money. Also Wii is not final so there's an interest in keeping information from Nintendo.

Actually when all these Cells are switched on November 17th, become SkyNet and destroy humanity we'll be thanking Inquirer for spreading all this disinformation. [Trad]

[CARTIER90]

regarding the inquirer piece, I read somewhere something about the cell struggling with open plan areas eg GTA - please someone allay these fears..!!!!, a certain irony there, considering that BD is perfect for such large amounts of data

[edoshin]

Can you blame Sony for not releasing final specs? The haters seem to latch onto everything they can, esp taken out of context, and then accuse Sony of "lying" when specs are modified either due to costs, or design considerations. It seems like there are people who believe the design process started and ended when the Sony first announced Cell, and every modification to those targets are somehow "failures".

Besides, I don't think Sony owes us anything .. esp since most end-users will mis-interpret the info and spread Inquirer type information around. The only people who need to know, already know since they have their hands on dev-kits, and have some idea of Cell and RSX's capabilities.

[rpgamer_2k5]

Regardless, 270m triangle set for 8 VS units isn't bad at all, especially when the Xenos would have to designate 50% of it units for vertex shaders. But I have a feeling that the figure is going to be well over the 7900GT level, maybe closer to the GTX level. However if Sony is hiding a 7950GX2-level GPU or one that is even better then it's all good. :)

[Olz]

we don't need another article to debunk anything Inquirer does. they do a good job debunking themselves in the same articles.

Inquirer's slogan: common sense is our greatest enemy!
Lol. What seems to becoming common sense is that The Inquirer gives biased views on subjects relating to things they don't like (or can't commit themselves to saying 'ok ok, we were wrong, there is a chance, just a chance, that the PS3 will be better than the Xbox360').

regarding the inquirer piece, I read somewhere something about the cell struggling with open plan areas eg GTA - please someone allay these fears..!!!!, a certain irony there, considering that BD is perfect for such large amounts of data
There could be a slight issue with the PS3 on large open areas due to the lack of memory on the PS3 that many developers seem to be going on about. However if they lowered the texture qualities or polygon count slightly, then i'm sure the PS3 won't have any problems. Sure BD (coupled with HDD) is great for storing data (easily enough space for GTA), but this has to be processed by the Cell and RSX. If developers don't think the PS3 can cope with large areas, then this is becuase of the Cell and RSX not the disc it is stored on (unless there is an issue with the 2x Blu-ray drive not being able to stream data off of the disc fast enough).

If you think about the graphics of GTA:SA on the PS2, and compare them with say....MGS2 or GT4, then they really are no comparison, but then neither GT4 or MGS2 really have to deal with such large open areas, and do such a large variety of things. The GTA engine hasn't up until now been very able to deliver amazing graphics (in comparison), but thats mainly becuase of hardware constaints.

[CARTIER90]

christ olz, youve said it like it is I suppose....Im sure they'll (R* will think of something (crosses fingers) )....

[woundingchaney]

Regardless, 270m triangle set for 8 VS units isn't bad at all, especially when the Xenos would have to designate 50% of it units for vertex shaders. But I have a feeling that the figure is going to be well over the 7900GT level, maybe closer to the GTX level. However if Sony is hiding a 7950GX2-level GPU or one that is even better then it's all good. :)
I seriously doubt that the RSX will match the 7900 GT and/or GTX in specs verse specs, but due to its console nature we can be assured that devs will get far more out of the RSX than the 7900 will ever produce.

[makeitlookreal]

I seriously believe we are going to get much more from the RSX than a slightly modified 7800. I am certain the "base" of the RSX is certainly a 7800 or 7900, but Sony went on and on how it was a custom chip. They went all the way with the Cell and I don't think they would just slack off when it comes to the RSX.

[woundingchaney]

I seriously believe we are going to get much more from the RSX than a slightly modified 7800. I am certain the "base" of the RSX is certainly a 7800 or 7900, but Sony went on and on how it was a custom chip. They went all the way with the Cell and I don't think they would just slack off when it comes to the RSX.
We pretty much know most of the architecture and build of the card, the only thing left in the air is some of the other console specific feature associated with the chip.

-This is of course unless Sony/Nvidia have completely variety the specs and design that was given previously (which is somewhat doubtful).