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PlayStation (Games) Entertainment Games

Crossplatform Titles Shortchanging PlayStation 2's Performance? 82

Posted by simoniker from the less-bang-for-the-buck dept.
Thanks to GamerFeed for their new story noting that Sony Europe's research, using their 'performance analyzer', on the latest PS2 games. According to the piece: "The secret (or not so secret) way to unleash the PS2's power is to use its vector units (VUs)... of course, the games that used the VUs fared much better, and the game that scored highest did indeed use the VUs the most." An previous AnandTech analysis of the PS2's hardware explains a little further: "The power of the two VUs exists in the proper use of them as serial counterparts in handling the T&L calculations necessary during 3D rendering, but with the PS2 being... dramatically different from what most developers had seen in the past, getting the most out of the host CPU was quite difficult." The original article, in UK magazine PSM, concludes by pointing out: "A lot of the games that don't really use vector units are ports from other systems."
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Crossplatform Titles Shortchanging PlayStation 2's Performance? More

Crossplatform Titles Shortchanging PlayStation 2's Performance?

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  • While there don't seem to be any studies to back this up for the other consoles, I doubt that many cross-platform games found on the X-Box or GameCube have any optimization for those particular platforms.

    Really, I doubt the PS2 is the only console who's power isn't being fully used.
    • I think more what you'll find is the developers will take advantage of the features of one system, then port the game to the others, just leaving out things that don't directly translate, rather than trying to find ways to impliment them differently.

      I really noticed this with Grandia II. It looked great on the Dreamcast. But when the PS2 version came out. It really did appear that the developers did what I said above. Anything they couldn't quickly port, was just removed.

      Of course all the GCN ports no
      • Usually, a 3rd party is responsible for porting games. Unless it is a big development company or part of a bigger publisher, it just isn't feasible or worth it for one company to port the game to all platforms. Another company which only does porting is usually responsible for the port.
        • I really don't understand this. You can abstract out your programming enough to just allow the backend to be replaced with a couple simple T&L pipelines, or whatever you want on the PS2. It really is just the developers being ultrafucking lazy.

          • It isn't always this simple on console gaming platforms. Depending on the console you don't necessarily have a high level language that translates well between platforms. It isn't as simple as linking to the C++ standard library which is almost identical across platforms, or using qt GUI widgets, etc. Try porting highly optimized assembly code (or another low level language) to a different CPU. It is not trivial.

            • Well, but they wouldn't be porting the asm. Thats the point. They write the code with the assumptions that some functions will be filled in with the appropriate platform specific instructions, whether it be DirectX calls or VU asm. They know what it will be doing. They won't be porting they will be reimplementing, and it wouldn't really be that large a chunk of the program. And it would only be a one time effort. After that they have the codebase for optimized cross-platform game programming for reuse

    • I agree with you 100%, this should be filed right next to "Corels Wordperfect port to linux (a la wine, for those not in the know) is a hack!" in the /. Database of obvious revelations

      I don't know why the game maker wouldn't want to make their game good on all consoles. It seems that people would buy more of a game if it was good for the console they already own. I have a PS2 and really don't want to have to maintain 3 console game collections, but the GC is calling me. *Drool* Metroid, Zelda, and soon a

    • True-

      Just about any game that is multi-console will look best on the Xbox.

      But, just about any game that is multi-console will look worse on an Xbox, than an exclusive title will.

      Sony is whining about stuff that all of the consoles experience- they're just pissed because it always looks the worst on their system.

  • This is one of the reasons for Linux kit (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) * on Thursday January 15, 2004 @12:06AM (#7982389) Homepage Journal
    Sony is heavily promting development of software that uses the VUs through their Linux development community. I bought the kit a while back, but I don't really have the right skill set to play with them. I'd love to see if, say, a Distributed.Net client could be optimised for them.

  • The problem is the compilers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Thursday January 15, 2004 @12:23AM (#7982482) Homepage Journal
    Writing code for the Playstation 2's vector units is not exactly easy. There are no C compilers for the VU (Codeplay went out of business last year) so that means you have to sit down and write asm. Usually a game company will write some T&L code to go on the VU and then never touch it again, doing most the work on MIPS core. The VU can be used for a heck of a lot more than that. Unfortunately no-one can afford to do large amounts of programming on the VU because VU-asm programmers are hard to come by and the software they produce is impossible to maintain.

    What would be perfect is a compiler that could take ordinary C code and turn it into MIPS+VU0+VU1 code automatically, taking the best advantage of all the machine's resources. Unfortunately this pretty much exists in the realm of science fiction.

    • VU-asm programmers are hard to come by and the software they produce is impossible to maintain

      Why is the code they produce so hard to maintain? Is there something particular about the languege used that leads to sloppy code?

      • Re:The problem is the compilers (Score:4, Insightful)

        by hibiki_r ( 649814 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @09:42AM (#7985187)

        Assemblers are really, really low level, 1 asm instruction is typically equivalent to 1 machine code instruction, as opposed to the 3-25 of machine code the typical line of C code is like. Adding the extra complexity of specifying which registry each piece of data goes to and the lack of high level constructs makes assembly code inherently harder to maintain.

        Also, there's the issue of the VUs being vector-based processors, which the typical asm-monkey or game programmer probably has little experience with. Add that to having 2 vector units available at the same time (parallel programming?), and ou get a machine that most 'mortal' game programmers don't get even close to being able to code for properly.

        On the other hand, I've heard from people that had to work both on PCs and PS2s that they'd rather handle the PS2s assembler than having to suffer through writing video code that works properly on the myriad of video cards avaliable today, most of which have enough little quirks.Most changes in the 3d engine code have to be tested on at least 8 computers with 8 video cards just to make sure that the latest change hasn't just made any of the test setups crash due to some bing in the directx drivers for that card.

      • Re:The problem is the compilers (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bluGill ( 862 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @09:49AM (#7985255)

        Not sloppy code, but hard to maintain. ASM does not allow for a lot of nice things that structured langauges allow for. You end up with a lot of lines that move from one seemingly random memory location to a different one, change bits seemingly randomly, and place the result in a different location. It is very hard to see what is going on for all the irrelavant things that happen.

        What makes it harder is nobody in their right mind would write in assembly unless performance is critical and no better algorythm is known, so assembly programers activly prefer hard to understand code that is fast over easier to understand code. That bit manipulation code above may silently depend on a side effect of an operation several instructions ago.

        Read the story of Mel. [science.uva.nl] While no assembly programer intentionally writes code that hard to understand without documentation, they all look for tricks like Mel would use because they should never be called unless the C compiler can't optimise good enough. No matter how much they document things (and correctly documenting your code is hard) it is by nature hard to understand.

        Modern processors often have weird things going on too that you need to remeber. Delay slots, multipul pipelins to fill, and so on. A good programer (or more likely compiler) tune to take advantage of all this, but by nature is creates code that isn't liner.

        Now the VU units can't be programed in C (appearently?), so they don't nessicarly have to use all the tricks in assembly to make it go fast. However even still by nature assembly is hard to understand.

    • Why is that? Wouldn't Sony, in thinking down the line just little bit, have invested in creating something like Cg in their SDK and dev kits?

      It makes little sense to release a game system with extra goodies for the graphics and make it hard to use those same said goodies.

  • mice (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Hythlodaeus ( 411441 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @12:26AM (#7982501)
    Forget vector units... I'd like to see multiplatform FPS's make proper use of MICE on PC ports. "Enter the Matrix", "Deus Ex 2" - I'm talking to you.
    • Yeah. ETM PC control was just...so, so, SO bad. All around, really, but especially on the shooting-from-the-car missions.

  • Um? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by unclethursday ( 664807 )
    "A lot of the games that don't really use vector units are ports from other systems."

    Funny, most muti-platform games are designed on the PS2 FIRST, not last. There's two I can think of, though: Splinter Cell (which really did look good on all three consoles), and Wreckless: the Yakuza Missions (which is just a shitty game, period).

    There're very few that go from GC to PS2 or Xbox to PS2. Normally they're either PS2 to Xbox or GC, or they are developed at the same time for all the consoles that the gam

    • Another recent title which comes to mind is Max Payne 2 - that was definitely designed with Xbox/PC in mind, and the PS2 version is not so hot.

      I also think Sony are saying that even made-for-PS2-first games could look a lot better, too.

      • Re:Um? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by unclethursday ( 664807 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @01:16AM (#7982824)
        Oh yes. I have Max Payne 2 for my Xbox (we got it for free from Rockstar, but have to review it for GAF as my 'payment'), and it is one good looking game, in most respects (character models could still use some work).

        The PS2 version, by comparrison, is utter crap looking. Horrid, washed out textures, the overall blandness of the entire thing.

        Still, the PC version, with the correct PC graphics specs (which I don't have), blows the Xbox version away in graphics as well, especially since PC version of the game can support much higher resolutions than the Xbox version.

        I'm not saying games can't look awesome on the PS2, like it may sound like from my OP, really. Zone of the Enders the 2nd Runner is one gorgeous (and fluid moving) game, as is Final Fantasy X. But those are PS2 exclusive titles.

        But, we all know that when most games get ported from the PS2 to other systems that they suffer from 'PS2 Port Syndrome'; where the developers do a quick and dirty port, without offering buyers on the GC or Xbox the graphical abilities these consoles have over the PS2.

        UbiSoft showed that even with the limitations the PS2 has compared to the Xbox and GC, that you can still make a great looking game (Splinter Cell) and have it on all the consoles. In fact, IIRC, UbiSoft actually re-wrote all the rendering abilities for each console to be console specific, so that it would look good on all of them.

        So, while Sony Europe may be right that games could look better on the PS2, blaming 'ports from other systems' is simply laughable (again, 9 out of 10 go to the others from the Ps2, not the other way around). Besdies, with a few exceptions, Sony published games don't look all that hot on the PS2, either.

        • UbiSoft showed that even with the limitations the PS2 has compared to the Xbox and GC, that you can still make a great looking game (Splinter Cell) and have it on all the consoles. In fact, IIRC, UbiSoft actually re-wrote all the rendering abilities for each console to be console specific, so that it would look good on all of them.

          Actually, they had to do more than just re-write the renderer. The actually had to tune the content as well so the PS2 and GC could handle it. E.g., in several of the Myanma
      • Another recent title which comes to mind is Max Payne 2 - that was definitely designed with Xbox/PC in mind, and the PS2 version is not so hot.

        The first Max Payne looked like crap on the PS2 as well, and had horrible controls on that platform. IIRC the reason for it looking like crap was because they used lower quality textures to deal with the memory limits of the platform. AFAIK there was no excuse for the controls.

        I really can't say I'm surprised that Max Payne 2 would look like crap on the PS2 given
    • I don't know about Wreckless, but Splinter Cell did look great on all three consoles. Now my understanding is that large parts of the rendering code were re-written on each platform to make it look that good. What the article is talking about (I think) is those games that get put on all 3 platforms real fast, and often lower quality things. I would guess that most of the games below fit the list:
      • Ty: The Tazmanian Tiger
      • The Matrix: Reloaded
      • Most sports games
      • Rayman 2 or 3 (Whatever the latest was)
      • The Sims
      • These VUs perform rapid successive floating point multiply accumulate operations which are utilized in all 3d graphics computation. If they are pumping triangles to the screen, texturing them, or calculating light distances and angles (which they all do) then they could easily fully utilize both VUs. Even then if they had some spare cycles left, they could get into audio processing which also could easily saturate a VU.

  • Not an attempt at trolling... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by orthancstone ( 665890 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @12:30AM (#7982517)
    Perhaps this is a sign to Sony that the next console should be less complicated with its graphics. The Xbox is probably easy enough consider its DirectX basis and the Gamecube architecture uses one graphics chip rather than a convoluted parallized two chip system.

    While the PS 2 may have a powerful, robust graphics core because of this design, as has been pointed out: Does every company have the time to make use of the specifics, or are they going to do the least amount of work possible when porting to make a game playable and not horrendous looking?

    If cross-platform gaming continues to become a huge trend, it would be in Sony's best interest to try and simplify some parts of its graphics to make the best parts of it more accessible to developers that perhaps don't have all the time they need to port the game as well as they should.

    In the meantime, though, Sony has a large amount of exclusive content...so they shouldn't be too worried about whether or not they are getting optimization for cross-platform games. People are sure to still buy them but they most likely will definitely pay attention to kick ass exclusive games for being even better.

    (PS-If that sounded like complete crap, eh, oh well :/ )

    • You're exactly right (Score:2, Informative)

      by Rakthar ( 580956 )
      The more eclectic you make your system, the more you limit who will spend the time maximizing its performance. If you remember the Dreamcast, they decided to go with a PowerVR type tile based architecture. It caused problems with ports and some of them required quite some rewriting before they would work properly. End result? Limited third party support, and part of why the console did so poorly.

      The PS2 is the 800 lb gorilla so of course it's not going to miss out on any ports. That being said, when Sony c
    • Absolutely. You have to hand it to MS on this one, leveraging the already extensive DirectX development community was the only way the XBox could have reached a sizeable population of games as quickly as it has.

      Having said that, it seems in a lot of ways like Sony is just complaining and whining and boasting and snorting just as they always do, whine whine, "Our PS/2 is faster than a 3.4GHz P4, whine whine" and "Our Cell technology will make computers 1,000 times faster than current computers and we'll se
      • Of course at the moment they've only just announced that their console can maybe swing 60fps at about 800x600 or less. Hello, Sony, the early 90's called, they want their framerates back.

        Of course, that framerate and resolution is already twice what 95% of all televisions in the US is capable of doing...
        • You and your friends must be using a bizarre television then. The standard (non-HDTV) television in the US and Japan updates 'the screen' at around 60 times a second, interlaced. Every other line is updated 30 times a second, but the screen itself is essentially running around 60 FPS.

          The visual differences between 60 FPS and 30 FPS games on a standard American/Japanese television are very pronounced, assuming you have a bit of experience with gaming and are using the right type of game (racers probably bei
  • A lot of games or programs on any platform including the PC do not take full advantage of the platform. The best way to take advantage of the platform is to code in assembly.

    However, this is not really the best use of time for people. Developing in higher programming language in a cross-platform way will end up with better SDKs for the game company.

    Here's the priority list I would run my game company.

    Focus more on developing good games first. The principal task of a game publisher should be to get hi
    • Make it easy for your developers. Choose the platform where it is easiest to program your game in so you can get to market quicker. If your game is good enough, people will buy the console to play your game.

      This is probably, besides the "design a great game" part, the most important thing to remember. However, it is more on the hardware manufacturers than the developers to provide easy to program for hardware.

      Look at history, and you'll see only one fluke, the PS2. The Sega Saturn was a bitch to pro

      • There are so many things wrong with you post it practically kills me:

        the Dreamcast's PowerVR made it hard for some developers

        Only for idiots. the N64 wasn't easy to program for either

        Not even close. And much easier than the PSX which was perhaps designed and definitely documented by retards who had never read anything in the 30+ previous years of computer graphics research and practice. While Sony does use OpenGL in the PS2

        Buzzt. NO ONE uses OpenGL on the PS2.

        as well as using the VUs in ADDI

  • VU Useage == Good Game (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Thursday January 15, 2004 @12:51AM (#7982662) Homepage
    It's the magic formula to success! No wonder the XBox is terrible, it has no VUs! OK, in all seriousness the VUs don't magicaly make games better, that is a result of the reason, not the cause.

    This makes perfect sense. The developers who use the VU are the ones that take the time. Quick and dirty ports wouldn't use it, but if you take the time to optomize for the VU and such, then chances are you'll take the time to optomize other things. You'll make the sound work well, get rid of the logic glitches, adjust the diffuculty so people don't get stuck because you left out some clues to where the key is hidden, etc. The publishers and developers that take time to make great games spend some of that time one the VUs.

    So, indirectly, it makes perfect sense that VUs make a good judge of quality. Now if only other publishers would stop making so much shovelware. The PS2 (and other consoles too, but especially the PS2) has a LOT of great games. But for every great game the PS2 has, it has TONS of shovelware. Unfortunatly, often the shovelware gets great marketing (Finding Nemo, The Matrix: Reloaded, BMX-XXX) and great games (Amplitude, Ico, etc) don't get nearly as much and so they don't do nearly as well, because a large number of games are bought by parents who don't know what games are worth money, or what aren't worth their weight in dust.

  • With few exceptions, cross platform games suck on the PS2.

    They generally, in order of appearance look best on the X-Box, slightly worse than the X-Box on the GCN and then like a generation behind on the PS2.

    Maybe it's the VU programming versus more direct and easier methods on the GCN and X-Box(I've heard the X-Box is easy as pie to code for[I'd hope so, considering it comes from the same company that came up with the idea of wizards for deriving classes!], and Nintendo has excellent developer support as

  • Performance Analyzer presentation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by antime ( 739998 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @01:06AM (#7982766)
    I'm not sure it's this the article is referring to, but here's lecture slides on the performance analyzer [scea.com] from the Game Developer's Conference 2003 that includes some case studies.

    For more info, look at the other docs on SCEA's R&D site [scea.com] and SCEE Technology Group's site [scee.net].

  • Don't the studios have a vested interest in lenghtening the life span of a console? Add potential features strategicly so as to have some "wow" left over. The Madden series of games gets better looking every year on the same hardware. sort of like forward expectation control and management.

    crazy.

    • Don't the studios have a vested interest in lenghtening the life span of a console? Add potential features strategicly so as to have some "wow" left over. The Madden series of games gets better looking every year on the same hardware. sort of like forward expectation control and management.

      Not really. The manufacturers may have a vested interest in lengthening the life span of a console, but the third-party developers have a vested interest in pushing as much "wow" into their games as possible. Unless t

      • The Madden games look better every year on the same hardware because they produce the games annually, and each year they learn some more about the process from the previous year's efforts.

        Or maybe it's because they just improve the old code rather that rewriting it.

        I actually think the parent makes more sense. If the next game didn't look better than the last, who would buy it? They don't care too much about the console itself, no, but leaving room for improvement does still help their game sales. I

      • Not exactly from scratch, but the game that's the closest I can think of to a 'fair shot' for all of the competitors would be Soul Calibur II. Originally for arcade hardware, thus not originally designed around any of the home consoles in particular. Taking a look at SC2 on a console in relation to other games on the same console, it certainly looks like they put a strong effort into tweaking the game to the utmost for all the consoles.

        And in the end, the PS2 version does notably lag behind the Gamecub
  • The difficulty in programming the PS2 VUs has prevented the port of Strongbad's Vector Graphics Based Game. Strongbadzone [homestarrunner.com]
    Maybe one day technology will catch up. Strongbad E-mail "Video Games" [homestarrunner.com]
  • The biggest problem with the ps2 as far as perceived performance and final render quality for ported games is the comparatively limited ram and all those processors contending for the iop bus. Art and sound assets from an xbox game have to be severely cut down to fit in a ps2. Sure, VU assisted rendering would make some things look nicer, but you're still dealing with limited space for textures and sounds compared to xbox.

    As far as what systems are used for most cross-platform game dev, what I've seen wi
  • How many PS2 games actually suffered sales loss from complaints about it being only 30fps instead of 60fps? How did sales figures correlate to high performance scores?

    Instead of Sony bemoaning that developers aren't using the full power of the machine, shouldn't they instead concentrate on how they can make it easier for the developer to unlock that power?

  • Blame Sony and the PlayStation2. It was Sony, after all, who chose to go with some crazy newfangled hardware-graphics "solution" that everyone knew was going to be hard to program for. I had doubts at the system's announcement and they proved to be founded. What Microsoft did with the XBOX seems to make a lot more sense - make a system out of standard hardware that everyone already knows how to program for. That the PS2 has been around for so long and its full power still remains untapped is testament t

  • Relative power of machines (Score:5, Informative)

    by GreatDrok ( 684119 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @02:53AM (#7983207) Journal
    I get asked all the time which machine is most powerful. It is easy to answer that it is the Xbox because it has a 733Mhz processor and NVidia GPU but in reality that is missing the point. When Sony designed the PS2 they were a couple of years earlier than the Xbox so clock speeds were lower, the 300Mhz MIPS RISC processor was very fast for the time, much faster than any available Intel chip, they were still being used in SGI workstations for example and those are beefy pieces of kit. The problem for Sony was to increase the grunt while being limited by clock speed and the best solution is to introduce parallel processing. The VUs are no different to SSE and SSE2 that Intel introduced in the PIII and P4 line but you don't hear people throwing stones at Intel for doing that.

    The problem Sony has is convincing programmers to look beyond the capabilities of the basic MIPS processor and getting them to use the VUs but just as it is difficult to really make SSE kick arse it is difficult to get VUs working well. I used to program massively parallel computers (look up MasPar) for a living and they were hard, one of the reasons the company eventually failed in fact. However, the techniques used to program that beast are the same as used to write code on the VUs and SSE. I have seen applications that increased in speed by a factor of 20 (not 20%, 20x!) through the use of SSE on Pentium chips so when Sony gets annoyed that people are not using the VUs and so making the PS2 look like it isn't very powerful, well, you can see their point.

    As for the relative power of the PS2 versus the other hardware, have a look at Gran Tourismo 4, or Killzone and reconsider your position if you blindly believe that power is all about clock speed and DirectX.
    • Yea, have a look at Gran Turismo 4, and then scrub the jaggies out of your eyes with a rough sponge. Yes, the game looks better then previous PS2 games. I own a PS2, and will be buying GT4, but it really isn't all that incredible. It's not just the 300Mhz RISC processor that slows down the PS2, but the lack of RAM as well. Sure there are great methods for swaping textures using the PS2s quick bus speeds, but why bother? Sure, some developers will always spend the time to dig through the spec sheets and

    • When Sony designed the PS2 they were a couple of years earlier than the Xbox so clock speeds were lower, the 300Mhz MIPS RISC processor was very fast for the time, much faster than any available Intel chip, they were still being used in SGI workstations for example and those are beefy pieces of kit.

      When the PS2 was released (October 2000), you could get a 700-933MHz, 256MB, GeForce equipped PC from Dell for less than $2,000. That type of PC > PS2.

      I remember seeing one my friend bought on eBay for $45
      • "When the PS2 was released (October 2000), you could get a 700-933MHz, 256MB, GeForce equipped PC from Dell for less than $2,000. That type of PC > PS2."

        A 300Mhz MIPS chip is a very nice RISC processor. When the PS2 was being designed it was far faster than any Intel processor available. Even with a PIII running at 700Mhz+ the MIPS could hold its own with well optimised code, not to mention that they then added the VUs which are not standard equipment on MIPS. The design process for the PS2 would hav
  • This is typical of machines that use a custom chip approach to hardware. Anyone who remembers the appalling port of Street Fighter 2 to the Amiga 500 compared with the graphically superb (but poor playing) Elfmania knows what I mean. I'm sure there are other examples of really bad ports in gaming history...
  • It it true that porting an application quickly is always going to result in a less impressive application than if you re-wrote from the ground up, writing ASM for all system-critical bits.

    On the other hand, if you have a well-designed system then porting should still produce a quality application. This isn't the case for ports to the PS2 (as it wasn't in the case of the Saturn). This just means the PS2 is a bugger to program. That sounds like Sony's fault to me.

    All the PS2->X-box conversions I've seen,
  • GTA:3 and Vice City are games that I think really suffer from being first made for PS2 and then ported...at least, PS2's limited memory issues is the explanation I heard for the games' tendency to dissappear random traffic cars and pedestrian while your back is turned. I can't help thinking those 2 games would be much better if they had started on Xbox, or GC (as unlikely as that is)
  • WHat exactly is the point of creating games that do more than 30fps? Remember this is a console that PLUGS INTO A TV! There is NO POINT
    in writing a game that does 60fps if no one is going to see 50% of the frames. Far better to use the processing power to do the AI or phyics
    calculations.
  • After reading this article, the response to it, and knowing a bit about the hardware behind the PS2 the only thing I need to know is when did the average Software Engineer get so lazy? I have been a Software Engineer for many years now and I, for one, would never have complaints about a complex system. Part of the joy of being a Software Engineer is figuring out how to get the most out of what you are given. The PS2 is a complex machine designed from the ground up to do what it does, execute dynamic
  • Funnily enough , I was having a conversation with a mate of mine who is a games developer.

    X-Box games also suffer from dodgy PC ports syndrome. Most X-Box games are simply derived from the Windows version of the source code and simply tweaked a little to run on the X-Box which leads to an obvious performance hit since they are not always developed specifically for the hardware. Obviously it makes a lot of sense for Game studios to build the PC version and then port it to the X-Box, it saves money, developm
  • Is easier to spot a port on the xbox than in any other system, games designed for the xbox usually pull effects like glow, soft shadowing, and fov (they are relatively easy to pull by the gfx card). Just Try to compare the looks of otogi, PGR2 or rainbow six with those of ROTK, THUG or jedi knight2 (and those games are so cool what a shame!) crap! even freaking spongebob squarepants looks cool with those effects! Fortunately some companies go the extra mile and pull the same look on all platforms (prince o
  • An efficient way to deal with this problem for developers would be to use middleware, per example Renderware not only this helps to make the developing phase a little shorter, each version of the game is optimized for each console. Per example MKDA plays and looks exactly the same in each version. Prince of persia was also made in middleware software and the results are astonishing.

    p.s.
    Max Payne 2 for xbox takes the cake as one of the worst ports ever, not only they made missions shorter and the auto t

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