@MikeB
"Atomic Cache Unit
Never heard of it right?
Well its one of my favorite things on the PS3 and gets little love cos its one of those tiny features that make life so much nicer."
http://blog.deanoc.com/?p=96
Hmm, interesting blog article and yes I haven't heard of it ever. I wonder why there isn't much information about it. Its really small(~4 variables), but still makes it all a bit different.
It's extra work, but all game engine devs agree they are able to achieve superior better results. Code designed for the SPEs will be a lot more cache friendly on other CPUs as well.
Sometimes whatever you do/how optimal you try to be the best result is when used automatical/already implemented stuff. This is especially the case when all programmers in project aren't gurus and as Groucho said theres only few of these guys. (You like the word superior, don't you?)
The Tomb Raider Underworld dev for example stated the Cell approach is superior better to anything Microsoft proposes for both platforms. He does however acknowledge game assets wise and general game engine design for this game is totally geared towards the 360 (due to the 360 being on the market earlier) and thus will not get the most out of the PS3 (referring to a comparison with Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, a PS3 exclusive for which the devs explained to have an enormous amount of headroom for future games as well).
Can I get sources for all of these claims/articles you refer? (No, I don't imply that they haven't said such things etc. I just want to see what else did they say and what kind of stuff they are talking about. Superior... Hmm... I wonder did they really use such a word. :D)
I said mainly not only, that´s what it´s currently mostly used for. However 720p together with AA already results into tiling, thus impacts framerates. 600p with AA can be done without really impacting framerates, thus a game like COD4 can run at 60 FPS on the 360.
And how about shaders for example? I am quite sure its stupid to use ram for shaders when you have ten times better eDRAM you can use to play around with those shaders. Or are shaders some sort of inferior part so you can't really count them? And yes you are right. One must use tiling at higher resolutions with AA and it will slow things down a bit.
Like I said before, it´s really cheap around here, 149 Euro (much less than a Sony PSP for example or a Wii) and I loved Kameo when I bought one a long time ago.
Not sure can I count calling something cheap as saying something good about it, but I guess thats best I can get from you.
