Good lord, the Physics in crysis is absurd (video included)

[Sqrl]

Kyros said:
sqrl: again the pc is superior in many ways but the theoretical floating point capability of the cell absolutely destroys any intel CPU. This cannot be used for all algorithms but physics are possibly one of the best areas. Many universities buy cell blades from IBM for these types of computations. You have to program for it, sometimes you will need to use different algorithms. But the power of this CPU is amazing. If you have the right tasks even the newest most expensive pentium doesn't even come close. If you cannot optimize the computational task though or if it us more complicated faster clocked general purpose CPUs will have advantages.

 What you said is entirely my point actually.  You are working with theoretical numbers and unrealistically opimized demos.  When you have to add this stuff into a game and have it run with the other CPU intensive tasks, tasks which aren't as friendly to the processor's strengths you get much different results. 

Nobody is saying that the Cell isn't optimized for floating point.  When all it has to worry about is rendering physics it is going to do very well, I don't disagree with this...but I would still argue it isn't top dog. In any case the practical applications are not as straightforward and are significantly more cluttered and the result is that the Cell is behind the high end PCs right now in terms of what kind of physics it can bring to practical applications while still supporting the rest of the workload involved in a video game.

Long story short, yes the Cell can hang with the PCs in physics when they are doing physics only.  But outside of that, when other tasks are required also...things don't stack up nearly so favorably.

Also, while cell blades are extremely powerful, a cell blade is not a PS3...or even close.  Some of these blade servers are in the $20k price range to fill up completely,  so clearly we are talking about a lot more than even most extreme PC rigs and a helluva lot more than a simple console.  So if you are saying that it is a powerful architecture then yes I agree it is a good architecture, but if you are saying that the PS3 is even close to the level of computing of a blade server then I completely disagree.

--IBM lists thier "Economy" Blade Server at $6,149--