| ElRhodeo said: Hmm... no offense, but this question is kind of pointless. Nobody here knows ANYTHING about the actual game programming, so you'll get this: |
Speak for yourself. I wrote a game engine in one of my advanced elective classes while earning my computer science degree. I've also taking computer engineering courses including creating a pipelined general purpose processor from scratch (debugging this was a bitch).
As camiloc said, this isn't really about determining what percentage of PS3 hardware will be used, since most games use most available resources to them. The question is how efficiently they use the resources available to them. The idea is that the Cell is a little more esoteric and difficult to optimize for (or create tasks for, perhaps) than the other consoles CPUs. This is arguable, of course, since 360 programming is more about multithreading efficiently which introduces race conditions and a whole slew of other very complicated issues.
Most programmers will be 'optimizing' for the cell at a fairly high level of abstraction. They won't be reordering instructions themselves or counting cycles -- rather, the compiler will do things like that for them. The idea is that the compiler programmers understand the architecture at a low level better than engine programmers, so engine programmers can focus entirely on algorithmic efficiency.
The idea is to have specialists at each level and in this way your algorithms guys don't have to have as deep an understanding of the low level hardware as the compilers guys and can focus more on algorithms. Of course, it will still benefit them to have some understanding of the low level hardware, but it can be a little more abstract which is a huge benefit to someone trying to learn it.
Games evolve graphically as the hardware matures for many reasons. The first is that the bar is set: people have an idea of what needs to be met and beat. Secondly, developers have more resources in terms of time, existing assets including art, textures and codebase. Finally, experience with the hardware -- both locally (a single developer) and globally (known-efficient algorithms, best known practices, etc) increases with time. So developers don't have to spend as many resources attacking a problem that has a known solution or they may much better know how to approach development of the hardware. For example, there are tasks to which the Cell is well suited and after discovering this they can work it into a game or make an engine around it.a
Experience will also help developers mitigate the Cell's weaknesses -- not having 3 general purpose cores like the 360. Any way you slice it, this is a huge deal for most games. In fact, I'd wager this as the most likely reason Madden on the PS3 struggles to maintain 30fps whereas Madden on the 360 runs a solid 60fps.
Even with all of this, ultimately, the PS3 is just another computer. It has memory limitations, fillrate limitations, processing limitations, etc. It's not some magic box that whose full power will manifest 4-6 years from now with an order of magnitude better graphics. That's what Sony *wants* people to think, but it's foolish, wishful thinking.
