The OS on the PS3 was VERY tightly controlled by Sony, making it impossible to port something like FAH or OpenMM to it using the game developer toolkit, which meant that only Sony could develop the PS3 client. It does appear that both may use off-the-shelf components which would facilitate hardware support. From the information that you and I know, it's very hard to guess how many new clients would actually fold on either platform, compared to some other equal investment in something else. At the present time, Stanford currently has quite a number of development efforts underway and they'd have to take development resources away from other important things. Stanford probably could develop reasonable clients for either/both of them with the right kind of support from Sony/Microsoft but without their strong support I don't think it will happen (though I'd be happy to be wrong).
In comparison, the XBox was significantly under-powered and according to the benchmark sites would not have made a powerful enough geometry engine although they did make up some of that by the number of clients that might have been available. They were willing to invest in the development effort to help spur sales of the PS3. The PS3 client could not have been developed without a lot of help from Sony. I suppose the FAH client for these platforms could just be a regular program like any other game, but that's a decision to be made further down the road I suppose.
As Bruce implied here, there may be business objectives associated with the client, but I really think the PS4 and 720 are likely worth pursuing if FAH wants even more cutting-edge computational power. From the information above, it appears that neither the PS4 and the 720 have this problem. In other threads people have asked about other platforms, like the Raspberry Pi, but those platforms are limited by a small market, battery power, and lack of serious computational capabilities. My point is that if the PG has an interest and the resources, both of these platforms seem like a really good idea. Both the PS4 and the 720 appear to have a similar computational performance, and both use architectures that are analogous to the well-known PC's. The gaming situation seems to have changed from 2007. I'm sorry for the really long post, but I want to put some facts and figures out there for consideration. The 8-core CPU is clearly capable of some good parallel computations, and if the 720's CPU uses out-of-order and branch-prediction optimizations as the PS4 supposedly does, then it may have some serious computational power behind it. They also show an architecture diagram that seems very analogous to a PC. There are 8GB of RAM on board, with 32MB of fast embedded SRAM at double the throughput speed, and a 50GB-capable 6x Blu-ray drive. Still, some bits and pieces floating around seem promising:Ĩ CPU cores at 1.6GHz, with a custom 800MHz graphics processor in the GPU. Not much is known about the Xbox 720 at this time, mostly because Microsoft has not announced things. Considering the PS4's specs, it seems like a much easier to develop for, and if the PG were interested in doing that, the process should be much easier this time around.
The PS3 simply had power that was unmatched by the PC or any other console. This answer was on the FAQs for a long time and still is in some places. Many users were asking why FAH wasn't on the Xbox 360, and the answer that was always given was "it simply doesn't have the same power".
Considering the PS3's radical architecture which made it exceptionally powerful at the time, it was quite impressive that they managed to port their MD simulation code to it.
Consequently, many games developed for both systems were unable to take full advantage of the PS3's capabilities, and many games ported from the Xbox 360 to the PS3 underperformed versus their Xbox counterparts.Īgain, both platforms are now much easier to develop for.īack in 2007, FAH released its client for the PS3. The Cell Processor in the PS3, according to many developers, was powerful but difficult to develop for, which led to the Xbox 360 becoming something of a developer standard.