Ubisoft Dev: PS3 Can't Handle AI as well as the 360

[shams]

Entroper said:

shams said:

In a way, they are correct. The architecture of the SPUs makes it very hard to compile/run AI on them - easily anyway (anyone know if there is a general C/C++ compiler for the SPUs?).

But the game would have to process a huge amount of complex AI for this to be true. Only then would it soak up too much CPU on the main PS3 CPU (non-SPU), and result in a lack of cycles to drive the other processes (or control the SPUs).

...

So - it could very well be true, or it could be a load of BS. Only a technical developer for Ubisoft (someone actually working on the game) would really know.

 

There is a general C compiler for the SPUs, and it has lots of useful specific functions to program efficiently (like performing SIMD operations and shuffling and what not). What the SPUs are especially bad at is traversing dynamically allocated data structures or accessing random places in memory, which can be important for AI.

With clever programming, you can offload some AI tasks to the SPUs, especially if you can batch them efficiently, put them into lists, that sort of thing.

Cool, thanks for the info.

So it should be possible to offload the same AI to the SPUs - just not particularly efficient (which should matter). Even at 10% efficiency, a couple of SPUs should be able to handle all the AI requirements (constant random main memory accesses might kill the data cache though).

Its just a question of difficulty anyway - as it always is (i.e. you can port anything to any device - just a question of results... i.e. Assassins Creed on the DS, but not on the Wii!).