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makingmusic476 on 04 March 2010
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Twistedpixel said:
makingmusic476 said:

The Cell's unique architecture ensures it won't be utilized very much by multiplatform developers. Just look at God of War III. Sony Santa Monica have somehow managed to get even anti-aliasing running on the Cell. This is pretty much impossible with a multiplatform engine.

False. The difference is that only Sony developers tell people outright their SPE useage as some kind of bragging platform. X% use of SPEs have at you! Its obvious that multiplatform developers have been making use of the systems on both systems but they are just a little behind exclusive developers.

I somewhat doubt multiplatform developers are willing to jump through hoops to get some rather unique (to say the least) results out of the Cell when the same could not be easily replicated on other platforms.  Hell, that's the reason so many PC devs aren't supporting the ps3 at all (Valve, Piranha Bytes, Gas Powered Games).  They just can't be bothered to do things in a new or different way.

If the engines for the three platforms began diverging that much (having functions being run on the Cell being completely rewritten to run on the Xenos/Radeon/GeForce), it wouldn't be a multiplatform engine so much as one game being built on two engines (ps3 vs pc/360) that happen to share a similar basic structure.  Though I suppose you could still consider it one single engine - a very versatile engine, to say the least.

The only time I've really seen a multiplat developer brag about their Cell usage were Pandemic after completing the Saboteur, and the only difference between the two versions of the game that I know of was the implementation of AA.  Meanwhile, first parties are getting AA, lighting, and various post-processing effects all running on the Cell in their games.

Getting the CPU to fill in for the GPU is simply something that is not easily replicated on other platforms, and its not economical to do things an entirely different way on one platform vs another.  Instead of doing a port you're building a game from the ground up for both systems, and this will lead to major differences between each version of the game (and thus an inevitable backlash from one or both camps), while also adding to the cost of developing the game.

It just doesn't make sense for devs to go down that road, though more power to them if the try.