Remember when Sony said the PS3 would render at 120 fps? Forget it, 240fps

[Squilliam]

Groucho said:

Squilliam said:
If the SPEs are so so awesome at doing general purpose equations then why are they not being used in that fashion? Its pretty simple, after a while you stop blaming the developers are start blaming the tools and architecture.

 

Actually, I think its a fair bet to say that any engine designed with multithreading in mind to begin with does use the SPUs for general-purpose work, in addition to intense vector math work.  I think the PS3's architecture is a great one... I just think that tools have traditionally been designed around the single-core PC idea, and that the PS3 suffers (much) more from this fact, and the fact that developers are not used to thinking in parallel terms, than the X360 does.

On-topic: The authors of GT5 have clearly embraced the PS3's architecture, as have many 1st-party exclusives, and it shows in their quality.  The fact that this is difficult to do, doesn't really diminish the fact that it can, and has, been done.

Its more the fact that custom programming has gone out the window. Developers use libraries of tools and they call them up by a function and they never rewrite them unless they absolutely need to.

Btw, the memory management systems in the Cell are a real headache, the more cores they use the more painful it becomes to balance the workload. Unfortunately from the last time I heard about it, the SDK didn't automate a lot of even the low end balancing and it forced the developers to do it by hand.