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EA explains why Madden NFL 08 runs faster on the Xbox 360

When it comes to a videogame franchise that gets the most repeat business, it’s hard to tackle the dominance of EA Sports’ Madden NFL games.

For football fans, Madden is the game to get every early fall. This year, the Madden NFL 08 release is extra special for those on warring sides of the console superiority debate. EA Sports made it no secret that the Xbox 360 version of the game would be the best console version of the game that is capable of running at 60 frames-per-second.

Sadly for Sony faithful, EA Sports said that the PlayStation 3 version of Madden NFL 08 will run at around 30 frames-per-second – half that of the Xbox 360 version.

Although reviews of the game following its release on Tuesday indicate that the PlayStation 3 version of Madden NFL 08 isn’t unplayable due to its choppier frame rate, the Xbox 360 version is vastly preferred for its smoother animations.

Fanboys will surely use the technical differences between the two console versions to support their own side, but the truth may be as simple as a different learning curve. A gamer emailed EA Sports inquiring about the differences between the two versions, and received a response from Rob M., EA Sports senior technical support, with an explanation, as posted on Maxconsole.

“While we fully understand your frustration with the limitations the technology has placed against the video frames per second of the game play on the PlayStation 3 game console, it was our intent to put out the best possible with Madden across 10 platforms,” wrote Rob M. of EA Sports. “While it is very simple to draw a conclusion based on the end-user experience with the game technology, what most people do not realize is hours of research which goes into fully understanding the hardware demands for each console.

“In the case of the next-generation consoles, many publishers have been developing titles for the Xbox 360 for over 3 1/2 years while everyone who publishes now for the PlayStation 3 with the exception of Sony has been developing for the PlayStation 3 for only a little over one full year. The differences in the overall knowledge of the hardware is vastly different for both consoles and, as is the case with newer technology, it is very difficult to get it right the first time.”

The response from EA Sports notes that 30 frames per second is the standard for all PS3 football games this year, not just Madden, but also NCAA Football, and 2K Sports' offerings as well.

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Hours of Research?
By TomZ on 8/15/2007 10:04:16 AM , Rating: 5
I guess the statement that they performed "hours of research" sounded kind of funny to me. Not days or weeks of research - just a few hours maybe? But I'm sure the reality is that they spent a lot of time and arrived at the 30fps limitation with a lot of careful consideration.




RE: Hours of Research?
By mdogs444 on 8/15/2007 10:08:40 AM , Rating: 2
Could be right.

Or could be that sony does not have enough developer tools and developer support to make the time investment for EA worth their while.


RE: Hours of Research?
By TomZ on 8/15/2007 10:10:38 AM , Rating: 3
That would be a big mistake by Sony - big games like Madden help sell consoles, and having a deficiency like the one stated in this article can only help XBOX360 relative to PS3, even if only a little.


RE: Hours of Research?
By mdogs444 on 8/15/2007 10:13:57 AM , Rating: 3
Very true. I agree.

But i guess that is neither "here nor there" when it comes to EA right? They just want to sell the game - regardless which console/system its for. If you dont buy a PS3, you'll buy a 360, or PS2, or PSP, or...etc.


RE: Hours of Research?
By ryedizzel on 8/15/2007 10:17:00 AM , Rating: 5
I think the situation here is obvious. I don't mean to bash the PS3 but Sony has always been known for making consoles that are complex to design for. The Emotion Engine for PS2 was a perfect example. They need to wake up and realize that they are no longer the console gaming juggernaut, and that game developers are less willing to jump through a bunch of extra hoops just to code a game for their poor selling system.


RE: Hours of Research?
By omnicronx on 8/15/2007 10:36:02 AM , Rating: 2
how the system is selling has nothing to do with it, you are right they need to realize developers are not going to jump through hoops, but as the article noted people have been designing 360 games for 3 years, and it was easier to develop in the first place. Sony's system is quite hard to code, a learning curve is needed, and one year is just not enough to play catchup with a system thats been out for three times longer, and is easier to code in the first place.

Its really sad really, because developers are not going to spend the time to take advantage of the extra power the ps3 provides, and my guess is that most dual platform are developed for the 360 then ported to ps3, resulting in worse performance sometimes than that of the 360.


RE: Hours of Research?
By ryedizzel on 8/15/2007 10:46:59 AM , Rating: 5
well i disagree and think system sales have a large part to do with it. if PS3s were outselling 360s and Wii's, then i guarentee you EA would have spent more time making it better. but like i said before Sony likes to design overcomplicated consoles which put the developers through hell while they learn to code for it. and even after game makers were finally able to utilize the full power of the PS2's emotion engine, was it really any faster than the Pentium 3 inside the original Xbox? i expect to same the same results for the PS3 vs. 360. but in the meantime game developers will continue to drag their feet on coding for it until it shows reasonable market value.


RE: Hours of Research?
By nikon133 on 8/15/2007 9:16:35 PM , Rating: 1
Amen to that. Comes to EA, I've notice something else... some PC games (like NFS Carbon) are crap on nVidia graphic cards, while running much better on equally capable ATI hardware. Now... can they say that they didn't have enough time to "research" nVidia PC hardware..? Yeah, right.

yeah, right. they are just a bunch of lazy... bent on making maximum profit with minimum effort. I'd bet they develop games like Carbon or Madden for Xbox360 and then just do a quick and messy port to other platforms. As 360 has ATI graphics, games work better with ATI hardware in general.

If PS3 manages to outsell 360 and EA starts developing new games for PS3 and port to other platforms, I bet PC performance on nVidia hardware will get better than ATI PC as well.

while I do agree that PS2 was very exotic hardware and had longer learning curve to develop for, PS3 should be more mainstream. nVidia chip in PS3 is pretty much standard. And Cell processor(s), even if not fully utilised at present, should have more than enough grunt not to be bottleneck, even if code it runes is far from optimised... surely not only half of 360 speed!


RE: Hours of Research?
By Hexxx on 8/16/2007 9:20:27 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
As 360 has ATI graphics, games work better with ATI hardware in general.


Not any more... I believe that Xenos is superior to the RSX but your statement isn't correct.

quote:
And Cell processor(s), even if not fully utilised at present, should have more than enough grunt not to be bottleneck, even if code it runes is far from optimised... surely not only half of 360 speed!


The code needs to be highly optimized to take advantage of the Cell processor. The 360 is a symmetrical tri-core general purpose CPU, the Cell only has a single core general purpose CPU (PPE) and 6 usable specialized cores (SPE) that need to be specifically coded for. So if not optimized, the Cell would probably have less than half the power.


RE: Hours of Research?
By DingieM on 8/17/2007 9:58:55 AM , Rating: 3
Xenos is indeed clearly superior to the RSX, but the PS3 can offload SOME graphics handling to the Cell SPE's. That will surely take away the processing speed as advantage.

Xenos has full HDR, 4xAA AND blending almost without speed penalties but ONLY if a programmer uses D3D texture compression (meaning building an engine from the ground up for the Xbox360). PGR3 and PGR4 uses that. Just look at the simulated rain with PGR4 it looks really impressive and real-life like.

RSX (any nVidia G7x class GPU) can NOT do HDR+AA natively so PS3 has to do some hacked version of HDR through the Cell but that eats performance taking away the advantage. They may achieve higher resolution HDR but that is not guaranteed to look better (also with regard to visual style). HDR should always be a (tiny) bit blurry because the human eye sees it that way as well...maybe due to watery eyes...

Going back to the Xenos: that has a tesselation engine that can subdivide rough polygons into much smoother ones giving the impression that much more polygons were used without using the space and bandwidth.
If Xbox360 developers use this tesselator, they can do the same things as Killzone 2 does and even more, because with the Xenos Unified Shader Architecture they will be capable of showing much more special effects and very fast. I'm absolutely positive they can achieve that by understanding the technology.
Highly likely PS3 fangirls are going to flame me for it.

BUT, all in all both systems have roughly equal power, thats what the majority of developers conclude themselves.
EA can achieve more with the PS3 than they do now with Madden'08. Combination of overall better accessible hardware, tools and support IS the way to go and is GOLD.

PS3 may have a much harder to understand architecture to develop for, Xbox360 isn't always that "easy" though I must say.


RE: Hours of Research?
By Verran on 8/15/2007 10:52:12 AM , Rating: 5
quote:
how the system is selling has nothing to do with it

I disagree. I don't think the comment was intended to harp on the fact that PS3 is coming in third in a three man race. Everyone knows that. I think the comment was meant to say that at one point, Playstation was quite honestly dominating the console scene. At that point, Playstation could have been downright impossible to code for, but it didn't matter. There was no alternative, so developers had to "bite the bullet".

However, times have changed and PS3 does not have that same luxury now. This is a BIG blow for PS3. Madden (and all the other lame EA sports game iterations) is a huge seller for consoles. EA has basically said here that it's not worth their money to go the extra mile and decipher the PS3 development tools. If the PS3 version runs crappy, they don't really care.

Sure, the 360 has been out longer and to a certain degree things will get better as the PS3 ages as well. But many developers have also said that the PS3 is just plain harder to code for. The Cell is neat, but it's only faster if you take the time to code for it. The question is, who will offer the olive branch? Will Sony develop better tools, or will developers take a hit to their bottom line and spend more time catching their PS3 versions up? EA seems to have made their decision.


RE: Hours of Research?
By afkrotch on 8/15/2007 10:52:31 AM , Rating: 2
What you also have to know, is that the PS3's cell processor might be complicated to write for, but the development for it is not going to stop. They'll be new, smaller, faster Cell processors in the future. I find it highly likely that it'll power the next iteration of Playstation.

So developers don't need to head back to the drawing board, if the next Playstation uses a faster Cell or multiple Cells.


RE: Hours of Research?
By FITCamaro on 8/15/2007 11:07:41 AM , Rating: 2
While its possible. It also comes with an extremely high production cost. And if developers say "Get rid of it" because of the difficulty to program it, Sony will. With development budgets already skyrocketing, the last thing developers need is to have spend extra time trying to figure out the intricate complexities of the CPU.

I'm hoping the next generation of consoles won't be quite so lacking in the CPU department. Even an Athlon X2 or Core Duo would have been a better CPU for either console.

With the chips getting so cheap, its possible future consoles might even use one of them. I mean we already have $266 quad cores. In 3 years, we'll probably have octal-core chips. So who knows, one of the next gen consoles might have a quad-core AMD or Intel processor.


RE: Hours of Research?
By adam92682 on 8/15/07, Rating: 0
RE: Hours of Research?
By TomZ on 8/15/2007 11:54:46 AM , Rating: 1
Acquired, maybe; out of business, no way.


RE: Hours of Research?
By rupaniii on 8/18/2007 10:58:14 AM , Rating: 1
Naah. It's likely Microsoft will be AMD's biggest client. AMD will design a Fusion processor with the Tricore processor embedded on it. Yeah, why? AMD Owns ATi, which is in 360. With and x86-64 core, a new XBOX would run old XBOX games better than 360 did. With a translation layer for graphics, no problem. But, no, AMD's got a nice contract coming, no doubt.
Maybe IBM will have to take some manufacturing, but, it's almost a lock for an AMD ATi solution.
WHY?
Well... If it downloads media, uses live, and has x86, and hooks to the tv and internet... and browses the web, maybe has a keyboard, and everyone has HDTV by then... maybe it runs Windows by then too.... and, well, maybe Microsoft plays their endgame by getting their media center in the living room finally.


RE: Hours of Research?
By Proteusza on 8/15/2007 11:36:39 AM , Rating: 3
Nintendo has never used bespoke hardware for its consoles (or, they have used customized hardware, but not a fully customized solution).

The reasons are simple: simpler development because the hardware is more established, lower production cost because the R&D is already done.


RE: Hours of Research?
By afkrotch on 8/15/07, Rating: -1