We decided to ship the SNC PPU Toolchain built version of Fallout 3 on PlayStation®3.
We were very pleased with the performance and memory gains, and fast support response we've received.
Dave DiAngelo
Lead PS3 Programmer
Bethesda Softworks
SN Systems has exciting opportunities for Toolchain Engineers to join our teams in Bristol, UK and San Jose, USA.
Within the team, emphasis is placed on designing robust and maintainable applications.
Tuner lets you capture and visualize program behavior so that you can eliminate conflicts and bottlenecks in your code. High performance games can now be achieved with less guesswork. Tuner gives you these real advantages:
Tuner has been developed for PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) using SN Systems' experience and knowledge of developing Tuners for other game consoles. The following features are supported:
Tuner has a very low overhead so you can play your game in real-time. There is no need to modify your source code and even works with optimized release builds. Three data capture modes are supported: real-time, fill buffer and circular buffer. Use real-time mode for low data volumes to play your game and spot frame rate anomalies. Use fill/circular buffer modes for higher data volumes once you have identified the problem areas.
Tuner is now capable of performing sample based profiling by recording the value of the program counter (PC) at a rate of 25kHz. This gives a general overview of which functions are being used the most during a capture. This information can then be used to guide the instrumented function trace to get absolute timings.
Tuner records all the thread context switches that happen during a capture, each thread is shown as a period of running or stopped. This information can be used to see how much time is being used by each thread and how costly giving up your time-slice has been.
You can mark parts of your code with user markers so you can time your subsystems' contribution to a frame.
Tuner also now includes support for recursive User Markers. NEW in v1.5.4!
Once you have identified functions of interest, you can instrument parent or child functions on-the-fly with no need to re-compile code or re-download your executable. This greatly reduces time to discover and investigate problems.
Tuner now also includes support for recursive instrumented functions. NEW in v1.5.4!
Captured data can be viewed in the game and frame view. In the game view all captured frames are visible and drops in frame rate are clearly displayed. Individual frames can then be selected to view the relationship between function times, user markers and the Sync function. Double clicking on functions in the frame view takes you to the source code. Captured data can be saved to file for later comparison with improved code.
Click on the thumbnail images below to view a larger screenshot.
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Tuner is included in ProDG for PSP, which is available to order at no additional cost via your SCE account manager.
"PSP" is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.