NJ5 said:
Rainbird said:
NJ5 said:
Xen said:
Pointless.
The limiter in current gen consoles and modern PC's is the GPU. It's very rarely the CPU. They better partner up with AMD and get a smokin' new GPU first.
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It's not entirely pointless, it has the benefit of easy backwards compatibility...
Other than that it's pretty dumb to continue using the Cell IMO. Unless Sony truly wants to make life hard for developers as they once claimed...
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Developers are getting more and more used to it, so I doubt it's a development disaster of any kind. Especially not if it means that development tools can be carried over to the PS4.
We don't know what Sony's plans are though, so I think it's too early to call it a dumb move.
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More used to it, yes. Some existing tools may help, but in the end many developers will still have to do extra effort to program for the "odd platform".
I'm ASSuming here that Microsoft's and Nintendo's new console will have more sensible CPUs with few, symmetric and fast cores. Add to that PCs, and you have three platforms which should be rather easy to port between, and then the PS4 which will require extra effort if the Cell is used.
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There is an outside chance that Microsoft or Nintendo could make an "odd" platform by adding a physics processing unit, but the challenge of programming for that would (likely) only impact middleware developers; and, being that the processor would be suited to the task of creating a physics engine, it might not be that unusual for what they were using it for.
