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Sony - Crysis on the PS3. - View Post

What I don't think many people here understand is that code optimization is a much more difficult task on a PC than it is on a console. On a console the architecture is standardized. On a PC the person can be running any one of a vary large number of possible component permutations. You don't know the cache sizes at each level whose relative sizes and speeds will effect which algorithm you will want to use. Not to mention the inherent brokenness of x86 which should have died long ago. This is something even intel acknowledges implicitly with all the money it has funneled into itanic.

Additionally, PCs have the overhead of OSs that are significantly more sofisticated than the glorified batch processing systems with pretty front ends that people think are OSs on consoles (DOS maybe to blame for this). Why have a complicated scheduler? Are you really going to be playing two games simultaneously? What does the memory usage look like? One giant process using everything or pretty much everything. Well, the paging system just got a lot simpler.

Will Crysis have a higher throughput on the ps3 than some crazy expensive PC? Unlikely.

However it is not inconceivable. If the most computationally intensive parts of Crysis were trivially parallelizable and had an amenable FP:M ratio then cell would perform significantly better than x86 or a standard PPC machine. Various image filters fall into this category which is why we use a cluster of ps3s for our medical imaging research here so this is not just theoretical.