Killzone 2 VS Gears of War 2 through the eyes of a programmer

[jetrii]

mjk45 said:
@jetrii,who owns the rights to the cell technology is it a three way split ,or do toshiba /sony own it and IBM is the contracter and if so does ibm own the power x cell8i seeing it has the power branding or do the other companies have an interest in it and could it or a future version be the basis for say a PS4

 

IBM, Toshiba, and Sony all have ownership if the Cell processor. However, I am not sure how the IP is split. In 2006 they renewed their partnership to extend the alliance until 2011 or so. However, Sony is the only one of the the 3 that doesn't have any factories to make the Cell processor, they have to rely on other companies to make it for them. Don't quote me on this, but as I understand it, if one of the three companies makes improvements to the Cell processor, the other 2 companies have the right to benefit from it. Again, I may be wrong on this.

The PowerXCell 8i's most dramatic change is the way it handles double-precision floating point calculations. IBM bumped the peak performance from 14Gigaflops to over 100Gigaflops. Personally, although I don't want Sony to go with the Cell processor, I think it would be best for them if they did. They can retain backwards compatability and it is a powerful chip. I'd prefer a simple/inexpensive CPU and a monster GPU to handle the graphics/GPGPU but I know it's not likely, at least, not from Sony.

@WereKitten

Swapping a highly detailed model for a lesser detailed one is not unusual, in fact, quite a lot of games do that. While I understand that in a FPS the character does get closer to walls and other objects, you also have to consider that the player is always looking at the model. In Uncharted, that is a 30,000 polygon character that always has to be rendered. I have yet to play a TPS in which the character didn't look fugly after 10 minutes. In GoW and MGS4 they are just too close and the AA is not nearly high enough to mask the jaggies. However, like I said, I can understand your argument and you did raise a few points which I did not consider, but I still think that overall, FPS typically look better.