Sony staffers have debunked an industry report which claimed the PS3 is "slow and broken." The report in question, published by The Inquirer, claimed that flaws in PS3 architecture caused the console to stumble in a benchmark test. The tech-heavy article pointed to the Nvidia RSX graphics chip as the culprit and stated the triangle setup rate for the PS3 chip was slower than that of the ATI-designed Xbox 360 chip-270 million triangles per second vs. 500 million triangles per second, respectively.
The Sony hardware team responded and has trashed the article as “entirely meaningless,” in accounts given to Games Industry. An anonymous and infuriated programmer for the PS3 stated that, "It’s just a pointless measurement. Where’s the context? How were these numbers measured? There are loads of different ways you can measure tri performance, and just putting up headline figures like that tells you nothing.”
In explaining how skewed figures can be when trying to prove a point, the programmer continued on by saying, "In fact, the PlayStation 2 had better tri performance than the Xbox, on paper. Everyone knows that the Xbox was more powerful at running real games, but if you just wanted to fill a screen with 2D, flat color, unlit triangles, then the PS2 was much better at that, so it looked great in benchmarks. That just shows how meaningless this measurement is – it’s really pointless."
The press has played up the difficulty in programming for the PS3, but a programmer put this all in perspective by remarking, "I’d say PS3 was a challenge to work on, but every new platform takes a while to get used to. Put it like this, I worked on early PS2 games, and those were a real nightmare – we’re getting code up and running on PS3 much faster than we did last time around.""Once people start doing really impressive stuff on PS3 and Xbox 360, they’re both going to be much the same [in terms of difficulty]," he concluded. "Sony’s giving us better tools this time around – they’re still not great at communicating and there are some weird holes in their developer support, but they’ve learned a lot of lessons from PS2."
