Add onto that the PS3’s much higher retail price and the extra year the Xbox 360 enjoyed ahead of its release, and the PS3’s potential wasn’t realized until late in its life-cycle. Simply, re-engineering games for a completely new system unlike any other was a time- and cost-prohibitive process, which meant that the Cell processor wasn’t used to anywhere near its full extent.ĭespite sinking millions into Cell architecture, the complexity of its SPU hardware contributed, in part, to a slow start for the PlayStation 3. Inaba called it at the time “the biggest failure for Platinum so far, the one that really sticks in my mind.” A similar story surrounds the problematic PS3 port of The Orange Box, which Valve handed off to EA rather than tackling it themselves. A failure to utilize the SPUs resulted in terrible performance compared to other platforms. When it came time to port Bayonetta to PlayStation 3, Platinum Games producer Atsushi Inaba described to Edge Magazine how Platinum handed the project off to an in-house team at Sega. When developing for multiple platforms, developers regularly ignored the complicated SPUs and just used the PPE.
We’re all familiar with the time pressures developers face and the prevalent problem of crunch that may arise as a symptom of these time pressures. Developers had to code this handoff themselves, creating a multi-step process that resulted in a steep learning curve for programming on the PlayStation 3. Harnessing the PS3’s potential – back then and in the present day – wasn’t easy in large part because the process described above wasn’t automatic. Sony flirted with the concept in the PlayStation 2, but boosted the power in the PS3 with a floating speed that was forty times faster than its predecessor. Those SPUs could handle parallel mathematical calculations, which made them perfect for intricate physical simulations, like collisions, clothing, and particles. The processor’s setup allowed the central power processing element (PPE) to offload complex code to the extra cores. The PlayStation 3 utilized a unique structure that differed from the relatively simpler Xbox 360 and PC architectures at the time that Sony called "Cell." The PS3 console’s CPU was comparable to the Xbox 360, running at 3.2GHz, but Sony aimed to bolster the CPU’s capabilities by including seven floating co-processors, aka the PS3’s synergistic processing units (SPUs), which were infamously complex for developers. The primary roadblock to proper, official PS3 emulation could be that, well, the console was built differently.
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