Bethesda: We Can't Make Dawnguard Work On the PS3 371
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Geek.com:
"PS3 gamers may now never get access to the content in Skyrim's Dawnguard DLC. That's the news coming out of Bethesda via their forums. Administrator and global community lead Gstaff posted an update on the state of PS3 DLC for the game, and it's not looking great. Gstaff explains that releasing sizeable DLC is a complex issue, and it seems like for the PS3 it might be just a bit too complex. No detail is given as to what the specific problem is, but Bethesda is preparing PS3 gamers for the reality that Dawnguard, and for that matter any other Skyrim DLC, may never reach the platform. I'd like to know what the exact problem is they can't overcome, but I'd also like to know if this is a failing on Bethesda's part or a shortcoming of the PS3 architecture. Maybe Sony should pay Bethesda a visit and see what's going on."
In other Skyrim news, a mod for the game that attempted to recreate J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, has received a Cease & Desist letter from Warner Bros, causing development to stop.
Bethesda is just incompentant (Score:2, Informative)
The simple answer is they are incompetent. After all the issues I had with Fallout and New Vegas I will never buy another Bethesda game. The crashing, the stalling, the slowing down of the game as you get farther along.
Games are my time to relax, not be frustrated with the amateur hour programming Bethesda seems to employ.
I've played Bethesda games (Score:2, Informative)
so I'm not surprised it's too difficult for them.
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant (Score:1, Informative)
Open world sandbox games are more difficult to code properly than a level based game. A level based game can forget most of what you did after you completed the level. An open world sandbox game however has to constantly remember and check against almost everything you did throughout the game, in case you return to an old area or talk to an old npc again.
It's no surprise then that Bethesdas games are buggier, they have many more variables they have to work with.
I've developed for the PS3. (Score:5, Informative)
It's a strange architecture. Most modern machines are symmetric-multiprocessor (SMP). That means programming is very straightforward - all the processors share the same memory space and each processor can do any work you like, so you just have to worry about the normal threading issues (race conditions, deadlocks, etc.) but it's otherwise just standard multithreaded programming.
The PS3 is not SMP - it has one main processor with 256MB of non-video RAM (a big chunk of which is reserved for the OS) and a lot of smaller coprocessors that have very limited RAM (256K). If you can fit chunks of work nicely into 256K, then the thing screams. If you cannot, then you have to do most of the work on the main processor, in less memory than is available on the Xbox360. In other words, you've gone from 6 hardware threads on the Xbox to 2 on the PS3. The combination of less general-purpose processing power and less usable main memory is a really hard problem to solve.
Now, for a lot of games, the Cell is great. Fighting games, puzzle games, art games, ARPGs, JRPGs, platformers. Any time you can offload individual character animation or rendering to the SPEs, you win. The PS3 can animate and render a whole lot more mobs in a scene than the Xbox360 can. If you have a physics calculation like waves on water or swarm movement that is easily separatable into small chunks, the PS3 is also superior.
But think about an open-world game - especially one with the sort of wide-open spaces and anyone-can-go-anywhere gameplay of Skyrim. We did open-world games and we constantly had trouble because physics and AI could interact over a long distance. We broke the world up into cells and aggressively limited the range of some computations to avoid this problem, but still, a lot had to run on the main processor because once the size of a physics calculation or a pathfind exceeded 256K, you couldn't do it on the SPEs. And believe me, pathfinding data alone in an open-world game is always going to be larger than 256K! AI in modern games is expensive, and we know that Bethesda takes their AI very seriously.
Maintaining a large, persistent world also means keeping track of lots of stuff, and that means memory. On the PC, you have practically unlimited swap and tons of main RAM, so it's not an issue. On consoles you have limited RAM and swap space and fragmentation can kill you if you dead. To be honest, I'm surprised the game runs as well as it does on the Xbox360, but again, you have more memory there and they have the ability to "steal" RAM from graphics if they need it, whereas you can't on the PS3.
So while I wish Bethesda had overcome the technical hurdles and made the game workable on the PS3, I can hardly fault them for coming up short. It's just not a platform well-suited to the type of game Skyrim is.
Re:The RAM is the issue. (Score:5, Informative)
The PS3 only has 256 megabytes of RAM compared to the 360's 512 megabytes.
It's not as simple as that - PS3 has 256MB CPU RAM and 256MB GPU RAM, where the 360 has 512MB shared by both CPU and GPU. In real terms, the memory available is more or less equal.
Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3? (Score:4, Informative)
At one point during the Steam summer sale, Skyrim was ~$30. I'd expect a similar (or better) price drop on Steam either during Black Friday or just after Christmas.
Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3? (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect that Shivering Isles isn't a terribly useful comparison. It's fairly large, in terms of quests and art assets and whatnot; but it is only modestly more demanding than any other part of Oblivion in terms of other resources.
For the PC versions, the minimum-recommended specs for Oblivion GoTY(Oblivion+all official expansions) are fairly modest:
Processor: 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent
Memory: 512 MB
Graphics: 128 MB Direct3D compatible video card and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver
Hard Drive: 4.6 GB
The minimum recommendation for Skyrim, no DLC, is substantially higher:
Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor
Memory: 2GB System RAM
Hard Disk Space: 6GB free HDD Space
Video Card: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM
And, if you actually want it to look nice and play properly at higher resolutions, the recommendation is double that on both system and GPU RAM, and a punchier processor.
Obviously, direct comparisons are a bit tricky, since the Cell is sort of an oddball; but the PS3 only has 512 MB of RAM total, which must be a nasty constraint to work under(and it seems likely that Bethesda is having some trouble coping, even on the PC side, they cut the various battles in the civil war questline right down to the bone, with barely a handful of soldiers on each side and magic fast-disappearing corpses, in order to keep things running).
I am a trifle surprised that Bethesda can't get a gimped version of Dawnguard running on the PS3(ie. no improvements to poly counts, texture quality, environmental detail, etc. over the original release; but with the new items and quests and arrow-crafting); but I'm rather more surprised that Skyrim ever managed to be released for the PS3 at all...
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant (Score:2, Informative)
The large-scale stuff isn't where Bethesda put bugs, though. It's all the close-range stuff like conversations not triggering properly, leaving you stuck in one location forever, or the infamous "dragons flying backwards" bug.
Or cliff racers.
Re:I've developed for the PS3. (Score:5, Informative)
For one, if you're worried about SPU local store memory size, there are tricks to do double/tripple/etc... buffering. There are also libs doing software caching if you're inclined. At the end of the day, you just have to realize that local store latency to main memory isn't all that different from an L2 cache hit on a "normal" CPU - they're both around 500-1000 cycles. Only difference is that for SPUs, it's manual work to DMA it over from main memory and syncing. But really, that's only 4 extra lines of code that you can wrap up into two macros.
But I think the real trouble isn't the hardware architecture, but your project's data layout. If the code accessing data all over the place (e.g. "over long distances"), then you're getting crappy performance anyway. It's not like the CPU has great prefetching (that you can't unwrap and do in the SPU anyway) or any out-of-order execution. So if you're just getting L2 misses all over the place (in your PPU), you're just stalling the CPU for those 500-1000, plain and simple.
If anything, the SPUs make you VERY concious about your data layout. At the end of the day, you're going to get much, much more improvement in speeds via good data layout (as a first step anyway) than, say, doing super-low-level assembly programming. The L2 latency wayyyyy outweighs the 10 cycles you're going to save on your tight inner loop after going to ASM. The real benefit of ASM is if you have all your data laid out in a way that you don't stall, then the throughput really matters.
For reference, people at my workplace have done AI updates on the SPU. They've also done full screen SPU post processing, animation (like you said), physics, etc...and even pathfinding! I'll even take your example. Do you need all 256k? Can you not cull out data on the PPU that you know won't be needed off hand? If you already compartmentalized each cell, then you certainly have enough information to work for a while on one cell. Then you can grab the potential references to each adjacent cell as you path to them and stream them in as you continue working. You can even predict which cells you need ahead of time and prefetch them, and discarding them when it doesn't look like you'd need them as you process more of your current cell. It's not like your A* isn't operating on triangles anymore, so you always have a finite set of triangles that you have to compute through before you can do anything else.
It really is all about the data, man.
Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3? (Score:4, Informative)
No, but it could be due to RAM or processor issues.
Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 have roughly 512MB RAM.
The Xbox 360 has 10MB of eDRAM embedded on the graphics processor die, plus 512MB GDDR3 system RAM. My understanding is that it can allocate some of the system RAM to the video processor as needed.
The PS3 has 256MB XDR DRAM for its processors and 256MB GDDR3 RAM for its GPU. Yes, you read that correctly: the PS3 has as much video RAM as it does regular RAM.
If it wasn't clear, this means that the Xbox 360 has more RAM that games can use.
As for the processor, the PS3's Cell processor (and its 7-8 SPUs) is harder to optimize for than the 3-core PowerPC processor used by the Xbox 360.