| albionus said: @Kars I'm not quite sure what the disagreement is over since I agree that games optimized for the Cell will be impossible to translate directly to other systems (just like live or wiimote optimization). I don't think it would be impossible to move such games from the PS3 but it would require the dev to redo the game engine from the ground up (as in not even try to use any aspect of the PS3 code) and would produce a game with lower graphics, less AI, fewer characters, etc. If the money is there to do it though 3rd party devs would be stupid not to. |
No, the problem is: Even if you want to write highly optimized code you MUST NOT target the SPUs at once, so even such programs can be ported quite easily. I know iot sounds a bit crazy but thats a problem. You can't really predict which solution will be faster, you can only decide where to put most of the developers!
While the SPU can calculate vectors very fast, each SPU has only a single thread, while in the Xbox 360 each Core has two threads with Altivec-Engines. It depends on the exact type of code and the data distribution to tell, which architecture will be faster. While it is not to difficult to find code that can be pushed to the SPUs it won't help your program if it was not a very time consuming and therefor critical part of the code.
The main event loops of programs have the severe restriction, that they can not be parallelized easily. You can try to optimize for the Cell, but you will never know if you will be successful till the program was written.
