PS3 vs 360 ROUND 4-----Jon4lakers

[darklich13]

Procrastinato said:

darklich13 said:

Procrastinato said:

darklich13 said:
So is he saying that most Multiplatform games only use a single core for processing? What about the other 2 cores on the 360?

He's saying that many (bad) ports are done by trying to stuff all the work of the 3 X360/Xenon cores onto the 1 core of the PS3/PPU core, because its cheap/easy to do so.  That's basically why older PS3 ports tended to be subpar, relative to their 360 counterparts -- they didn't even try to use most of the Cell CPU, they just used the part that was basically identical to one of the Xenon cores.

But the single core of a PS3 is no faster than a single core of a 360?

The PPU core, by itself, is near identical to a single core of the 360.  The 360 has 3 such cores.  The PS3 has 1.  The PS3 also has 7 additional SPE cores, which, when utilized, beat the socks off the Xenon's 3 "normal" cores easily.

Utilizing them requires a good engineer or three, and time.  Publishers like to make stuff as cheaply as possible, often even when it might cost them in terms of quality and eventual sales, because they are conservative investors.  Hence... bad ports.  At least back when people weren't very experienced with the Cell.

 How is taking code disigned to run on 3 cores down to 1 a cheap process?  Seams more like they would port to 1 core and 2 SPE's. Which in this case the 360 would have an advantage.  This is because 3 actual cores are better than 3 SPE. But when developers take advantage of the Cell additional SPE, this is where you will see the advantage for the PS3.