Now that it's been brought up, I DO rememebr developers bitching about PS2. I'd completely forgotten. Of course the situation is different now, but...

...I guess there will be half-assed Maddens for a couple of years.

It is really not that simple ...

Generally speaking, to get maximum performance on a distributed system you end up having to drastically modify most algorithms and in doing so you generally introduce concurrency issues and race conditions which are not easily solved. If handled incorrectly you may end up having bugs appear through out your software which are difficult to debug.

On top of this, in spite of not being that large of a piece of software, game engines are full of highly complicated algorithms that are so complicated because they're based on advanced mathematical concepts and are already highly optimized.

Epic has some of the highest talent and most experienced developers in the world and they're having trouble with the Cell; it may take years and several iterations before middleware companies have solutions for most developers to get good performance out of the PS3 (if they even care at that point in time).

As far as one dev cracking open Cell.

Insomniacs, Naughty dog, SquareEnix, Kojma productions, Media molecule, Polyphony Digital. Are all pretty much doing it right now.

As far as Epic, just look at UT3!

The bitching about the PS2 was only the first year, and that was due to two factors:

1. The VRAM focused size over speed (look up embedded dynamic memory). Developers were used to size, like on the PC, but once they caught on, it wasn't a problem, especially since the GC used the same type of RAM, and the GC was designed to be easy to work with.*

2. The PS2 didn't have things like anti-aliasing, and 8-way render passing, built in. Yet it turned out the PS2 didn't have them built in because it was designed to do them manually with the CPU's two vector units, instead of automatically with the GC's, and Xbox's, GPU API. Once they caught on how to do that, they just applied them to any game that needed it, just as they did with the other systems.

So it wasn't that they had no choice. They actually got used to the system, just before the GC and Xbox launched, so the ease of use for those systems was made moot (as lack of texture compression was not that hard to work around).

With the PS3, it is also a matter of getting used to, but with little to offer consumers, and something big to drive them away, the system would likely have an exodus like the N64, if not for the fact that developers are deliberately supporting all systems.**



*Of course the GC had to be worked with in the first place, which is why developers largely have to get used to the Wii.

**It's to ensure that 3rd-parties have as much power as the hardware developers, no matter who is in the lead.

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head in regards to multicore/threaded programming. Many current solutions to this really suck, and it wasn't until the last few years that setups which gain significant benifits from paralell processing were commonplace (as in, available to the average computer/console user). Ultimately I think it is in the compiler where a lot of the low level work should be handled, just how like moving a lot of complex optimisations have ended up there and have largely removed the need for programmers to return to their code and tighten loops, possibly even reducing them to assembler.

You also need a programming language that handles paralellism well. A lot of functional languages can be broken up well, but given games generally are written in C/C++ (and while I don't know personally, I could pretty mcuh guarentte thats what you'll get in the console SDKs), you are going to have issues. I suppose if you were really keen, you could almost write code as if it were functional, but even still I'm unsure how well it would work.

Pretty good and accurate summary article!

If you want to dig deeper I recommend a fellow Amigan's in depth articles on the Cell processor:

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html

And IBM's Cell pages:

http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/

Also this is a pretty interesting SPE thread with some PS3 game developers contributing to the discussion:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=42523

 Wanna make a bet on this fiscal year?  (net loss, not bankruptcy.  I totally disagree with Truthsayer, but the wager intrigues me) 

@ WiteoutKing