It’s clear from one of the opening statements that the author considered it a failure for developers, not in the absolute sense you are pointing to. It’s not that far into the article.
> The PS3 failed developers because it was an excessively heterogenous computer; and low level heterogeneous compute resists composability.
I’m not even sure that’s entirely true either though. By the end of the PS3 generation, people had gotten to grips with it and were pushing it far further than first assumed possible. If you watch the GDC talks, it seemed to me that people were happy enough with it by that point (relatively speaking at least) and were able to squeeze quite a bit of performance out of it. It seems that it was hated for the first while of its life because developers hadn’t settled on a good model for programming it but by the end task based concurrency like we have now started to gain popularity (eg see the naughty dog engine talk).
Is cell really so different from computer shaders with something like Vulkan? I feel if a performance-competitive cell were made today, it might not receive so much hate, as people today are more prepared for its flavour of programming. Nowadays we have 8 to 16 cores, more on P/E setups, vastly more on workstation/server setups, and we have gpu’s and low level gpu APIs. Cell came out in a time when dual core was the norm and engines still did multi threading by having a graphics thread and a logic thread.
Naughty Dog has always been at the forefront of PlayStation development. Crash Bandicoot and Uncharted couldn't have been made if they didn't have a really strong grasp on how to use it. I love rereading this developer "diary" where they talk about some of the challenges with making Crash: https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/
Cell was a failure, made evident by the fact nobody has tried to use it since.
Comparing the SPEs to compute shaders is reasonable but ignores what they were for. Compute shaders are almost exclusively used for graphics in games. Sony was asking people to implement gameplay code on them.
The idea the PS3 was designed around did not match the reality of games. They were difficult to work with, and taking full advantage of the SPEs was very challenging. Games are still very serial programs. The vast majority of the CPU work can't be moved to the SPUs like it was dreamed.
Very often games were left with a few trivially parallel numerical bits of code on the SPEs, but stuck with the anemic PPE core for everything else.
Yea its not true. 7th gen was the last generation where quirks was commonplace and complete ports/rewrites were still a thing. More recent generations is more straight forward and simplified cross-console releases.
The PS3 was a technical failure. It was inferior to its siblings despite having more capable hardware. This was super obvious any time you’d play a game available for both Xbox and PS3. The PS3 version was a game developed for Xbox then auto-ported to run on PS3’s unfamiliar hardware. It’s an entirely fair hypothesis.
Maybe in 15 years someone crazy enough will be delving in and building games that fully utilize every last aspect of the hardware. Like this person does on the N64: https://youtube.com/@kazen64?si=bOSdww58RNlpKCNp
Heck PS3 had even trouble with some PS2 remasters because it couldnt do the same graphical effects as PS2 with its insane fillrate. MGS having frame drops during rain and the rain looking worse etc..
> The PS3 version was a game developed for Xbox then auto-ported to run on PS3’s unfamiliar hardware.
Yes, especially exclusives like Uncharted, Demon Souls, Heavy Rain, Ni No Kuni, Metal Gear solid 4. They were definitely developed for Xbox, that version was kept secret and only the PS3 version was published due to Sony bribes.
I'd like to thank the above devs for going through the pain of developing those titles that entertained me back then...
You joke, but I read stories at the time of developers saying their studio did just that. I shit you not. Because developing a “traditional” pc-like game for pc-like hardware on a pc is what their teams were tooled to do. Studios didn't sit down and train up new teams of devs on how to maximize the cell architecture. The result is games that are very poorly optimized for the PS3. Even some of the exclusives (though I was only specifically calling out the cross-console games as an obvious example).
There were some gems. I owned a PS3 and had tons of fun. Nothing in this discussion speaks directly to the entertainment value of good Sony exclusives or cross-console ports. Many people don’t care one ounce about a minor performance deficit. Deep breath.
Maybe I'm just pointing out the world is full of crap ports but it's the exclusives that sell consoles, not the hardware specs... did I really have to spell it out?
> The PS3 failed developers because it was an excessively heterogenous computer; and low level heterogeneous compute resists composability.