| greenmedic88 said: Realize that everything Newell says is marked by the fact that Valve's Steam is effectively a "4th console" within the PC gaming market itself. Like any other PR man speaking for his own platform, do you think he might be inclined to extol the virtues of PC development while simultaneously condemning current console hardware? Valve stands to reap much greater profits as a distributor through it's own "console within a box" service than as a developer creating ports to run on mass consumer proprietary consoles. It means receiving distro fees as opposed to paying them to Sony or MS. If it weren't for the fact that console gaming has become such a large industry, I'm sure Newell wouldn't feel inclined to port any of Valve's games to a console, much less state a scathing opinion on the state of the current generation's hardware. Think about the motives of an individual before automatically assuming it's a given fact regardless of whether you choose to take the opinions of your respective gaming gods at face value or not. If you haven't already noticed, most of the biggest names in gaming development have an annoying propensity to publicly state some of the most biased claims that makes the motives of their stated opinions questionable at best. |
Well, you are right about Newell... Still anything he whines about is usually true. How about arstechnica article about the same thing? :)
"Furthermore, the Xenon may be capable of running six threads at once, but the three types of branch-intensive code listed above are not as amenable to high levels of thread-level parallelization as graphics code. On the other hand, these types of code do benefit greatly from out-of-order execution, which Xenon lacks completely, a decent amount of execution core width, which Xenon also lacks; branch prediction hardware, which Xenon is probably short on; and large caches, which Xenon is definitely short on. The end result is a recipe for a console that provides developers with a wealth of graphics resources but that asks them to do more with less on the non-graphical side of gaming."
"Even if the PPE's branch prediction is significantly better than I think it is, the relatively meager 1MB L2 cache that the game control, AI, and physics code will have to share with procedural synthesis and other graphics code will ensure that programmers have a hard time getting good performance out of non-graphics parts of the game.
...
The Cell has only one PPE to the Xenon's three, which means that developers will have to cram all their game control, AI, and physics code into at most two threads that are sharing a very narrow execution core with no instruction window. (Don't bother suggesting that the PS3 can use its SPEs for branch-intensive code, because the SPEs lack branch prediction entirely.)"
For example really advanced AI -> branches, more branches, even more branches... Thats one reason why there won't be 'wow' moments with current gen AI. Anyway it also affects development. iOE is just pain with more complicated programs.
Source: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-2.ars/7
On PC there isn't problems like this, because it uses more advanced OoOE. :)
