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Booh! on 26 September 2010
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Kynes said:
Booh! said:
Kynes said:
Booh! said:
Kynes said:

Some have said already, but it seems that people ignore it. Familiarity doesn't translate to easiness.

Ok, programming the cell processor was never difficult, it was just unfamiliar.


And you work for what developer? What's your experience? Don't believe what Sony first party/second party/PR says, they will praise the Cell anyways. Listen to what third partys have said since the start of the generation, they are much more uninterested in praising an architecture over another one.

Heterogeneous architectures are orders of magnitude harder to work with than Homogeneous ones. That's why, having OpenCL or DirectCompute, we're still waiting for that killer app in home pcs where the graphics card makes a go-to-buy-it difference.

Desktop users don't need the extra computing power that a GPU could offer. Scientists and engineers do. Nowadays however, many video games use real-time physics engines, like Nvidia PhysX which runs on CPU/GPU hybrid environments. Nobody complains about the PhysX engine, though it uses a heterogeneous architecture, and it's the most used physics engine out there. Nobody should complain about the Cell, it's just a powerpc cpu with added functionalities. Almost none write his game engine from the ground up: if someone wants to take advantege of the "exotic" capabilities of the Cell, he can just use the right middleware.

The same physics engine that no one even tries to program new effects and nVidia provides them all? The one developers are using because nVidia provides "marketing help" to promote their games in exchange of the TWIMTBP logo and providing nVidia a way to promote their graphics cards? Please tell me one developer who have made custom effects in physics. No one complains because no one develops custom effects. Ah, the most used physics engine is still havoc, not PhysX. The developers of Just Cause 2 said that they didn't touch the PhysX code, nVidia gave them.

Cell isn't a PPC cpu with added functionalities, it's a new, very different type of processor, which changes completely the way you should work. The problem is that middlewares aren't going to extract most of the cell power, because to do so, you need to develop an engine tailored to the cell strengths, and so far, only first/second parties have done so due to lack of return of investment. Do you Sony fans want another generation of bad ports?

I think that the most popular engine is PhysX ( http://physxinfo.com/articles/?page_id=154 ). However that's the point: Havok is optimized for the Cell, PhysX is optimized for the Cell, the Bullet physics engine is optimized for the Cell, Sony provides a lot of libraries for developers (optimized for the cell) and today even the crappiest of the ported games is quite good. Three or four years ago there weren't much optimized libraries for the Cell, that's the difference.