PS3's power locked away, says Free Radical

[windbane]

kars said:

windbane said:

The processing power will be unlocked by those that just focus on the PS3, and we'll see the results in MGS4 and FF13 next year as well as other games between then and now like Uncharted and Rachet and Clank. Until then, Madden, GTA, and others will likely look about the same on both platforms.

Not quite. Sure, they will try to use small parts of the available power, but there is no easy way to really use it efficiently and in a general way. The SPEs must work more synchronized with each other, because there is no global cache that can be used efficiently. While there are ways to read value from the local memory of other SPEs and the PPE this works via messaging and is significantly slowerthan a local memory access. And due to the inability to handle special kinds of code, they have to be better synchroniced with the PPE.

This means that many optimization have to be overworked after bigger changes in other parts of the program.

This can't really be described as an unlocking of the power, which would basically mean: You have a new method, and with this method you can use the power without additional problems. As an example: multi core cpus take care of the load balancing, on the cell this is under the responsibility of the developer. This is easy when there are free SPEs, otherwise it becomes tricky.

I love how you know exactly how much developers will use the PS3 in their upcoming games.  And more in response to your comment at the top of this page:  developers like the challenge and once they have overcome a challenge they won't have to keep overcoming it.