HappySqurriel said:
In my opinion, a lot of the reason why the PS3 has a reputation for being so difficult to program for is that a lot of developers are not willing to accept a fundimental rule of parallel processing ... When you're working on a distributed system, the more parallel units of work you divide your algorithm into the more processing power is wasted due to idle time. Games like Lair had all of their game assets designed (and their levels built) under an assumption that they would be able to get a decent level of performance from all of the SPEs at the same time; as development continued and they started to see massive ammounts of processing power wasted to idle time the developers probably (foolishly) assumed that they could optimize the systems performance using a profiler. They probably wasted weeks (or months) of development time trying to balance the processing load more evenly across all of the SPEs only to find themself trapped at the same basic performance level. Many of the best developers in the world have tried to push the PS3 as hard as they can and yet we haven't seen anything that demonstrates that it can achieve performance levels that you (and many PS3 fans) expect. |
Yeah, but some developers we (didn't) expect are really making some waves :P, Take Polyphony for example :P they have a build of their current game running a full 60FPS, 1080p, and maybe 7.1 surround :P Factor 5 tried, polyphony did :)
Of course only being a year in is a bitch for technology ^^ ESP a build like the cell, but onces it becomse more understood, the ratchet, uncharteds, gt's, metal gears, and such wont be nearly as rare as they are nowadays :)
From 0 to KICKASS in .stupid seconds.