MikeB on 03 September 2008
@ Squilliam
It obviously wasn't...
Why are you talking in past tense? The Unreal engine can be heavily adapted to tap into more processors. But the best used approaches in doing so are more beneficial to the PS3 architecture, yet beneficial to both platforms (more so to PCs sporting more cores).
For the Unreal engine on the PS3 to significantly outperform its 360 version only more stuff needs to be ported over to the Cell's SPEs (tapping into more processors than the 360 has cores available).
You are speculating. Furthermore multicore development is still in its infancy so its a big statement to call the Xenon 100% tapped out.
Not really the case, look at the game engine design of 360 launch titles and CPU cycle usage. There are some important bottlenecks relating to shared system RAM bandwidth and shared L2 cache between all three cores (relevant to talk about if looking at theoretical peak performance).
Considering Halo 3 went for a funky light engine that required the game to be rendered at 60FPS the game outside of the lighting was pretty good too.
First of all the lighting engine isn't really that impressive, secondly the game is rendering 30 FPS and slows down towards lower FPS in parts of the game.
Furthermore when you say easily, I hope you're talking about games with budgets under 20 million right?
Technically. The game budgets aren't entirely invested into technology advances, developing supreme game assets, hiring good actors, hiring game designers, hiring audio professionals, etc cost the bulk of the money.
Actually having only a small team of very talented coders usually yield far greater technical advancements than a huge team of mediocre talented programmers.
Once you gain advancements developers can share knowledge and even code with other developers, it will only improve for the PS3 over time (it will also become cheaper).
