Rock Band Dev Thinks PS3 Will Never Match 360
It seems like slamming Sony for the PS3 is a theme amongst game developers. 
The next up to bat is Jason Booth who is one of the people working on Rock Band. Jason Booth wrote a lengthy blog post declaring that the PS3 isn’t as superior in hardware as would like us to think. Unlike some of the other developers, however, Booth not only states his opinion of working on the PlayStation 3, but he fully explains why he feels it is at a disadvantage.
“So, the common theme is this; developers must spend significantly more time and resources getting the PS3 to do what the 360 can already do easily and with a lot less code.”
The rest of Jason Booth’s extensive argument is after the jump.
Jason Booth’s primary argument is that when it comes down to things, graphical finesse depends on a consoles fill rate, which Booth explains is the number of pixel operations that can be performed. According to Booth, the PS3’s fill rate is approximately half that of the Xbox 360.
“The fill rate on the PS3 is significantly slower than on the 360, meaning that games either have to run at lower resolution or use simpler shader effects to achieve the same performance. Additionally, the shader processing on the ps3 is significantly slower than on the 360, which means that a normal map takes more fill rate to draw on the ps3 than it does on the 360. And I’m not talking about small differences here, we’re talking roughly half the pixel pushing power.”
The next problem that he points out is that the multiple cell processors is an impractical hardware feature for game design. Since game elements are so integrated with each other, it’s difficult to split them up. Another reason Jason dislikes the multiple processors is that it doesn’t make up for the fill rate.
“Game code simply doesn’t split well across multiple processors. You can probably find a way to split a few things off fairly easily – put the audio on one processor, animation on another; but generally the breakup is always going to leave several of the SPUs idle or underutilized. On top of that, it’s usually not CPU speed that restricts the visuals in games – it’s fill rate.”
Booth doesn’t give Bluray a break either. He says that the 360’s DVD load faster, and are better at streaming data. Not only that, but Booth claims that developers are using Bluray’s extra storage space to make up for poor loading times by putting a game’s assets, like textures, on the disk several times so it can be accessed without having to go back to look for it.
In general, Jason Booth says the PlayStation 3’s advantages are simply used to make up for its disadvantages.