The better console for value.

[MikeB]

@ NJ5

Once you posted a nice diagram of Killzone 2's engine which showed SPEs waiting for other SPEs for quite a high percentage available CPU time.

You misunderstand the diagram:



The black areas are spare CPU time which can be used for other things (the used areas can be made smaller even, though efficiency optimisation). It may well be obsolete by now, SPU 4 and SPU5 if they would have been included in this diagram would be completely empty.

The more optimized an engine is, the less flexible and more expensive it gets. The best PS3 engines aren't getting used outside of the companies they were made at as far as I know. That should tell us something.

Naughty Dog and Insomniac are sharing engine code, Ratchet & Clank, Resistance 2 and Uncharted are very different games. 1st and 2nd party developers are sharing more and more code with 3rd parties, but of course there should be competition to some extend. They can't give everything away for free without getting something back as well.

The PS3's Cell is weak at double-precision (unlike the newer versions of the Cell).

It's relatively weak at double precision code compared to single precision, but it's still very fast at double precision, it's just that the Cell is uber fast at processing single and half precision code formats.