Procrastinato said:
The PS3 tuning tools show you the time, during a frame, during which each SPU (and the PPU threads) is idle or busy. The gives a pretty good indication of how well you've parallel-ified your app to work with the Cell. Most devs who state they are using "X %" of the SPUs, are basically just stating that they have only embraced the parallism of the processor to that degree. If the SPUs are constantly busy, that's a pretty impressive accomplishment, because it means they've ported enough work over to the SPUs, and organized their game frame in such a manner that all of them are in use at all times. Sure, their code can probably be optimized further... but I believe the claim is more about not letting cores go idle -- which is the real challenge in utilizing the PS3 to its full potential, in the end. Most devs do NOT use all the SPUs, all the time. Many early apps and ports didn't even use the SPUs at all. There's a big difference between last gen and this one, in that regard, so the quote you have there is really out of context. In any case, I think they have good reason to be proud of their engine -- they obviously have accomplished what many devs in the future will be striving for... efficient usage of a parallel architecture. A much harder task than you might think, for complicated apps. |
what an excellent post. you really know what your talking about
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