krik said:
@Soriku Have you even played the game? I bet you didn't and even if you did, how can you be so sure? I'm not so sure and I'm a Senior Lead Engineer with 16+ years of experience. The only think I know is that Naughty Dog uses 1 SPE for the water simulation, 1 SPE for mesh processing (to be able to support meshes with more triangles they preprocess them in the SPE to send less vertex data to the GPU) and another SPE for animation calculation (to perform animation morphing between 200+ animations and also for inverse kinematics). Now I also know that the SPEs are faster than the main cores doing vectorized code and they are indeed faster doing those specific operations that are all very math intensive. Now, for me, this means the they probably could do it on the 360 but they would have to reduce some computational power in both water dynamics and animations. Now you tell me what is the basis for for you being so sure? Do you even know what you talking about? |
And I'm a Consulting Systems Architect with 26+ years of experience. I don't think that means I necessarily know more that someone with fewer years of experience knows. Remember, there's always a bigger dog... brow-beating doesn't mean squat.
But I do agree with your point that Naughty Dog really pulled out all the stops with this game, particularly with their deep use of multiple SPEs. And they produced a fantastic game as a result.
On the other hand, although I agree that the Cell is more powerful than the PowerPC chip in the 360, at least on paper, there are other issues that make this closer to comparing apples and oranges. For example, the PowerPC has 3 full cores, not just SPEs which are very fast pipelines... there are ways of taking advantage of a full core that you can't do with an SPE... sometimes flexibility can win over raw horsepower.
The graphics engine itself on the 360 is very advanced. You also have to consider specific buses and their bandwidth. Throw in a unified memory architecture on the 360, and suddenly assuming the PS3 can win hands down is no longer a sure thing.
Yeah, the PS3 is probably capable of a little more on paper, but good systems architecture takes more than just picking the hottest CPU out there.
