Comment by jrista: As a daily user of Perforce for over two years now, with an extended development and quality engineering team of well over 100 people, I have become intimately familiar with it. While it is a decent source control system, it does have its drawbacks that those evaluating SCC systems should be aware of. For one, as mentioned by others, branching/integrating is particularly cumbersome and difficult to do. You have an ungodly amount of control, but it comes at the cost of excessive complexity. On the flip side, the visual merge tool is one of a kind, and presents a beautiful three-file "based" merge view of your work. Perforce does provide some graphical visualizations of branch paths (called the Revision Graph), however the way it is visualized often makes the tool rather useless. If you only need to see a very small segment of time for one or very few files, it can be useful...anything more, and it is near impossible to navigate the Revision Graph. Perforce is also not a very efficient tool, as almost any file operation requires duplicating files and data: branching, labeling, change lists, etc. No sparse or lightweight tagging or branching here. If you are not afraid to use a tremendous amount of disk space tracking your changes, perforce will probably serve you well. If not, I would look to another tool. Perforce makes use of workspaces, however these can be frustrating at times, as perforce caches all state in your workspace, rather than using the actual files on disk to determine some state. This often results in files not getting synced because your workspace says they are up to date, when, for whatever reason, the physical files on disk are indeed NOT up to date. A final annoyance, Perforce is rather brutal on your network. It is an extremely chatty program, and consumes a considerable amount of bandwidth. Any network connectivity loss, and you run the high risk of being unable to do any work with your source-controlled files until connectivity is restored. As of yet, I have not discovered an activity that can be performed off-line in Perforce.

Comment by jrista: As a daily user of Perforce for over two years now, with an extended development and quality engineering team of well over 100 people, I have become intimately familiar with it. While it is a decent source control system, it does have its drawbacks that those evaluating SCC systems should be aware of:

• As mentioned by others, branching/integrating is particularly cumbersome and difficult to do. You have an ungodly amount of control, but it comes at the cost of excessive complexity. On the flip side, the visual merge tool is one of a kind, and presents a beautiful three-file "based" merge view of your work. Perforce does provide some graphical visualizations of branch paths (called the Revision Graph), however the way it is visualized often makes the tool rather useless. If you only need to see a very small segment of time for one or very few files, it can be useful...anything more, and it is near impossible to navigate the Revision Graph.
• Perforce is also not a very efficient tool, as almost any file operation requires duplicating files and data: branching, labeling, change lists, etc. No sparse or lightweight tagging or branching here. If you are not afraid to use a tremendous amount of disk space tracking your changes, perforce will probably serve you well. If not, I would look to another tool.
• Perforce makes use of workspaces, however these can be frustrating at times, as perforce caches all state in your workspace, rather than using the actual files on disk to determine some state. This often results in files not getting synced because your workspace says they are up to date, when, for whatever reason, the physical files on disk are indeed NOT up to date.
• A final annoyance, Perforce is rather brutal on your network. It is an extremely chatty program, and consumes a considerable amount of bandwidth. Any network connectivity loss, and you run the high risk of being unable to do any work with your source-controlled files until connectivity is restored. As of yet, I have not discovered an activity that can be performed off-line in Perforce.

Comment by jrista: As a daily user of Perforce for over two years now, with an extended development and quality engineering team of well over 100 people, I have become intimately familiar with it. While it is a decent source control system, it does have its drawbacks that those evaluating SCC systems should be aware of. For one, as mentioned by others, branching/integrating is particularly cumbersome and difficult to do. You have an ungodly amount of control, but it comes at the cost of excessive complexity. On the flip side, the visual merge tool is one of a kind, and presents a beautiful three-file "based" merge view of your work. Perforce does provide some graphical visualizations of branch paths (called the Revision Graph), however the way it is visualized often makes the tool rather useless. If you only need to see a very small segment of time for one or very few files, it can be useful...anything more, and it is near impossible to navigate the Revision Graph. Perforce is also not a very efficient tool, as almost any file operation requires duplicating files and data: branching, labeling, change lists, etc. No sparse or lightweight tagging or branching here. If you are not afraid to use a tremendous amount of disk space tracking your changes, perforce will probably serve you well. If not, I would look to another tool. Perforce makes use of workspaces, however these can be frustrating at times, as perforce caches all state in your workspace, rather than using the actual files on disk to determine some state. This often results in files not getting synced because your workspace says they are up to date, when, for whatever reason, the physical files on disk are indeed NOT up to date. A final annoyance, Perforce is rather brutal on your network. It is an extremely chatty program, and consumes a considerable amount of bandwidth. Any network connectivity loss, and you run the high risk of being unable to do any work with your source-controlled files until connectivity is restored. As of yet, I have not discovered an activity that can be performed off-line in Perforce.

Perforce

Perforce (commercial/closed-source, centralized) is the industry standard for a number of reasons.

1. It's a commercial product, which means it comes with commercial support. Open-source projects may be eligible for a free license (minus the technical support).
2. It supports workspaces very well, which allows very flexible source and asset directory layouts.
3. It supports changelists very well.
4. You can see who is working on what. Games have an abnormally high number of rapidly changing binary files (assets) compared to other development projects. Most of the time these are non-mergeable, so keeping track of who has what/where/when is critical. Subversion and DSCC clients intentionally avoid this technique, but it's quite beneficial in certain applications.
5. It supports gigantic code/asset bases. It does not store duplicate data on client machines, which is important when your sub-view of the tree is a couple dozen gigs.

That said, it's painfully obvious on an almost daily basis that Perforce doesn't feel their position in the industry is threatened. Their visual tools, including P4V and P4SCC (integrate with Visual Studio) are slow and buggy, with the latter known to freeze Visual Studio for the sheer enjoyment of it. AnkhSVN is miles ahead of Perforce.

Comment by xan: It is worth noting however that their merge tool, P4Merge (used for diffing and merging) is excellent and far superior to the likes of Tortoise Merge. Surprisingly, this component is available for free as part of the P4 Visual Tools package.

Comment by slicedlime: Another drawback with Perforce is that branching in it tends to be a huge pain, especially if you have large trees. Almost every other vcs is better at branching and merging. This is usually a small price to pay for the above advantages though.

Perforce

Perforce (commercial/closed-source, centralized) is the industry standard for a number of reasons.

1. It's a commercial product, which means it comes with commercial support. Open-source projects may be eligible for a free license (minus the technical support).
2. It supports workspaces very well, which allows very flexible source and asset directory layouts.
3. It supports changelists very well.
4. You can see who is working on what. Games have an abnormally high number of rapidly changing binary files (assets) compared to other development projects. Most of the time these are non-mergeable, so keeping track of who has what/where/when is critical. Subversion and DSCC clients intentionally avoid this technique, but it's quite beneficial in certain applications.
5. It supports gigantic code/asset bases. It does not store duplicate data on client machines, which is important when your sub-view of the tree is a couple dozen gigs.

That said, it's painfully obvious on an almost daily basis that Perforce doesn't feel their position in the industry is threatened. Their visual tools, including P4V and P4SCC (integrate with Visual Studio) are slow and buggy, with the latter known to freeze Visual Studio for the sheer enjoyment of it. AnkhSVN is miles ahead of Perforce.

Comment by xan: It is worth noting however that their merge tool, P4Merge (used for diffing and merging) is excellent and far superior to the likes of Tortoise Merge. Surprisingly, this component is available for free as part of the P4 Visual Tools package.

Comment by slicedlime: Another drawback with Perforce is that branching in it tends to be a huge pain, especially if you have large trees. Almost every other vcs is better at branching and merging. This is usually a small price to pay for the above advantages though.

Comment by roe: Perforce is extremely chatty. There's not much going on without the server involved. Most notably, you need the server in order to do open-for-edit, which means you need to jump through a few hoops if you intend to break the connection to the server.