Groucho said:
Typical console game, single frame:
(A) CPU runs game logic
(B) CPU runs physics
(C) CPU does animation
(D) CPU sends completed animation data to GPU
(E) GPU does skinning of animated character skeletons
(F,) GPU processes vertexes into renderable triangles
(G) GPU renders textured triangles to screen
(repeat)
Typically, performance on these sections goes like:
(A) game logic (PS3 okay, X360 pretty good, PC awesome)
(B) physics (PS3 okay to awesome, depending on programming investment, X360 pretty good, PC pretty good)
(C) animation (PS3 awesome, X360 pretty good, PC pretty good)
(D) not really a big performance hit or difference, I just threw this step in there for clarity
(E) skinning (PS3 awesome with programming investment, X360 pretty good, PC awesome with modern GPU)
(F) vertex processing (PS3 pretty good, X360 pretty good, PC awesome with modern GPU)
(G) texel/pixel processing (PS3 okay to pretty good, X360 pretty good, PC awesome with a modern GPU).
That still won't solve the bottlenecks at step (G) -- the Cell could (and future versions very well might) kick every other gaming platform on the planet's behind at steps (A)-(F), and if there's still a bottleneck at (G), the end result will be the same. You always have to have a good GPU to go with the CPU. Because PCs are modular, and consoles are not, the PC will always "win" in this department... always. Remember, a high-end PC GPU costs more than a PS3 does -- JUST the GPU.
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Quite nice post, but its timestep(and usually everything in game have different kind of timestep, for example physics/collision detection/translations usually use very small timestep because of clipping etc) not frame. You can skip frames and today games skip frames quite often. Even if you skip frames you must calculate those physics & stuff. And for the rest of stuff... For example (A) can't be ever good with iOE PPE + SPUs vs current OoOE multicore CPU:s. CELL should have to evolve into beast like current PC CPUs are to be better in (A). And for (E), what do you mean by skinning? You mean textures? They are heavily affected by GPU and its abilities. So making better CPU doesn't do a thing for it. So in the end all its very good at are (B) , (C) and that doesn't make it superior to others, does it? :P
And of course you can do some preprocessing with CPU while GPU is working with something else. For example you can make translations for some objects already or calculate shadows etc. Theres a lot of stuff you didn't include, but I guess you haven't ever really checked what 3D engines have eaten. Anyway thats also stuff that CELL is good at. :)
