MikeB on 01 July 2008
@ Deneidez
Multi-plats show usually which one is better. If PS3 is so great , how come its not even at par with X360 graphics in multi-plats?
The more impressive multi-platform games are about on par.
The reason why sometimes the PS3 version is worse is due to being different in various ways and companies resorting to cheap quick & dirty ports.
Let me give you an example, the PS3 has 6 very fast SPEs for games to take advantage of (in addition to the PPE and OS workload is offloaded onto a 7th SPE). They are different compared to the PPE or Xenon core, even more legacy bagage and non-crucial features are left out but have extremely fast local memory.
One of the things left out is a branch predictor, a branch predictor can enhance performance for branchy software. But the far more efficient method by eliminating branches as much as possible and manually implement branch hints to avoid mispredictions, this approach is required for the SPEs to get the best results out of them, such code will also perform better on the triple core Xenon, but the benefits will be smaller in comparison.
The 8 processor PS3 Cell is much more powerful than the triple core Xenon, it's CPU is basically made out of 3 PPE-like cores, but there's many legacy code which aren't hand optimized like this, so for such code you have things up and running well on all 3 Xenon cores in a shorter amount of time and with less effort. On the PS3 you only have things up and running this easily on its PPE.
What developers are now doing is rewriting their software as parallel and asynchronous as possible while moving more and more components over to the SPEs in a proper manner.
It's an effort and time consuming process, but every bit of work done for one game is a step you won't have to take for your next game. That's why I stated years ago before the PS3 launched it will take quite some time before developers get the most out of the PS3's architecture, while of course still acknowledging the Cell's immense potential.
