Why does valve hate ps3

But the more we look at it, the more excited we get. So homogenous multicore is good but heterogeneous multicore is bad? Once you're splitting into the 64 or threads he talks about, wouldn't it make more sense to have a heterogeneous model for processing those threads -- branchy code on one type of core and streaming code on another.

Its really not clear to me how developing for Cell does not represent a useful intellectual property investment in multicore computing, but developing for the three-core Xbox does. EDIT: My comment about heterogeneous processor making more sense for a high number of threads only makes sense in the case like games where you've got different threads that have to do a variety of different things.

If you've got threads that all run the exact same code like in some scientific computing problems , then you obviously just want whatever type of core would run that code most efficiently.

I was getting ready for the 'gabe is fat' comments, but wasn't expecting it in the first post. Kudos to you. We don't want none of that here. To be fair he has been narrow-minded in the past. He argued vigorously for linear games without much optional explorability once, and he's argued against homogenous multi-core also. Still, this time he has a point. The PS3's processing power will not be adequately harnessed in time to make a big difference this generation. And since the PS3's branchy processing power is quite low, it will suffer in terms of AI but probably yield some rewards in graphics and physics in a year or two.

That will be too late to make the PS3 profitable. That is also a problem. The PS2 got away with being difficult to code for because it came out very many months before the XBox and because MS was an untested quantity back then that developers were reluctant to bet on.

And the PS2 was not priced more expensively than Xbox either. All of these things are reversed now, so the PS3, from the manufacturer and developer's point of view is a "bad solution" even if it does produce a few cracking games that are beyond the Xbox's capabilities in two years time.

It won't make a profit or not a big one anyway , it won't win the market-share war, and it is hard to develop for and it has soiled Sony's reputation.

All in all a bad solution. He's right. His weight is relevant because it makes his opinion "weighty". His opinion very fat ja? Besides, Randy Newman said "You can't fool the fat man! It's not that he's fat And besides, aren't all fat people supposed to be jolly? I seem to remember that in the movies, Jabba the Hutt had a great sense of humor and one less chin.

Fat people being jolly? Jabba the Hutt was just misunderstood. All he wanted was to rape the princess, not eat her I'd be much more interested in hearing what Micheal Perrson from Shiny has to say. Saxs has been around quite some time. He has quite some talent Sacrifice anyone? Matrix not withstanding, being that the wachowski bros' are some hardasses.

Valve has clout, but, to say that learning how a new architecture that is only a preview of the prevailing 'how things are going' trend is a waste of time and gives nothing back, like PS3, is just whinning. Whoever made that port for them learned what Valve didn't, and can take that knowledge, work for EA again, make a killer title off the Orange Box bankroll they got, and that money won't go in Gabe's pocket, which he'll deserve for complaining too much.

Gabe's pretty damned fat too, not that i have room to talk, but, lets say every year his success accumulates, LMFBU!!! So, Saxs Will anyone let the real geniuses speak please!?!?! Hey, fat people can be VERY awesome. Just watch the video of Kiene Lust on Youtube. And fat women are more motherly in my experience. Spending a lot of resources on a radically different platform which the Cell is might not make that much sense.

They can't ignore multicore PCs now and for the foreseeable future look pretty similar to the 's Xenon, but nothing like the Cell. That said, plenty of game companies focus on consolegames, and they have lived fine with radically different platforms each generation.

Sorry, but I have more respect for Gabe Newell now than ever before. His opinions are on the mark and, quite frankly, coming from an industry insider perspective that offers much, much more than anything I've seen on this thread so far. If he wants to bitch about Direct X 10, let him. Some people will bitch back but the rest of us will sit back and nod our heads in agreement. What you seem to miss is that Gabe has a pretty established history of hating anything new that's not a direct linear evolution of what he's already doing.

To me, he's poorly attempting to become like John Carmack. He's actually been quite influential in the development of gaming hardware, at least in the PC biz. Gabe simply bitches about new things and eventually caves in and goes with the flow once he realizes that everyone else has already gotten on board. Gabe's games may have influenced a lot of other games, but he's had virtually zero impact on the systems that run them. No, actually, the Xenon in principle is a G5, Generation 5, Power architecture.

That, I will give it. Nice little cpu, just needs more cooling. I certainly can't argue that PS3 and Cell are the odd man out in terms of its design, and that it is incumbent upon Sony to make the thing popular enough that developers have to deal with its design rather than vice versa, but it's not clear that it is as bad at 'branchy processing power' as all that. Cell is what it is because of memory latency issues. Each SPU can branch to its little heart's content using its large register file and high speed local store, without having to deal with any massive pauses due to unscheduled main memory fetch.

You have to branch on intersection testing , but that code will be very specifically tuned for Cell if it's to reach its potential, and that's a big cost for a small market share. As to whether the PS3 can be made profitable, that remains to be seen. The fact that Newell is so anti-PlayStation though isn't a huge surprise - Newell himself used to work at Microsoft and Valve is primarily a PC developer afterall.

He's not the only developer to criticise the architecture of the PS3 either, suggesting that the system is too complex to work with. I'd say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a do over. Just say, 'This was a horrible disaster and we're sorry and we're going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it , " Newell once said in an interview with CVG. What do you think of Valve and the PlayStation 3?

Let us know your thoughts in the forums. Getting on to the topic of Orange Box , the question of why Valve's development studios aren't handling the PS3 release came up. While Newell explains that the team's goal has been to create "a framework where all you need to do is recompile for each of those three platforms," the PS3 version was still outsourced to an EA team. The entire interview series is a worthwhile read if you want to hear the thoughts of one of the industry's leading figures.

Boastful as he is, Newell and the Steam platform represent a growing trend towards digital distribution, and Valve's software in general continues to be some of the most widely-played on PCs—and now consoles—out there.