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Fei-Hung on 09 July 2008
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olibou21 said:
Deneidez said:
HappySqurriel said:

Which would make the Cell an ideal processor if you're decoding multimedia streams or running a web application, but the majority of what your CPU is responsible for in games is not that parallelizable or asyncronous which will limit how close you can get to approaching theoritical performance. If developers can only ever achieve 80% of the Xenon's theoritical peak and 40% of the Cells theoritical peak in game then the processors are as powerful (for gaming) as eachother.

Well, they can use it with simple tasks like physics and stuff(as those are usually embarrassingly parallel), but not really that much graphically as you know today "power = graphics". And when it comes to advanced AI. Making it work on CELL is well... hell, if you can even make it at all. So imo best way how you could enchance games with CELL would be more lively world(moving geometry and calculate for example effect of wind for every object, liquid calculations & so on).

 

What you say is so evident ...

Fact is Mike is so occupied dealing with numbers regarding Cell we all know that he forgets real world contingency regarding development process :

1) Not all algorithms are parallelizable.

2) Those are not all the time efficient enough (the gap to mono- core may be not big enough).

3) Legacy of coding : developers already have a very hard time (Look for example J. Carmack's interviews) dealing with multicore CPUs. Imagine the piece of work needed to efficiently work with a paralleled designed one...

4) to build such a CPU, many low level hardware capabilities have been brought back to software. Mike never consider the huge over work that implies. Ints : budget and time to code a game is limited ...

5) You talked about physics on which Cell is particuraly efficient : one of the main point of these calculations is precision. With Cell, you will be able to go further in precision. Will it be noticable in game ? I mean for example is taking account of "exponent 6" argument of the formula really THAT usefull ?

i agree to some extent but:

 

1) Some developers have a hard time coding, not all. Some prefer it some don't. Its matter of opinion and at the end of the day you have to take into account that the cell is a new breed not a evolved breed. Its like saying no one will buy cars since they are far more complicated to use in transport then a horse and carriage. Yes its true but if you know what you are doing and you can harness the good it offers then it is worth it. More and more people are finding better ways to use and harness what the cell offers. 

2) For many gamers the cell isn't much more but a console war, but if you look at what the cell is being used for on a global scale, you will realise that is far more successful then you would think. If it was as useless or as hyped as put by many opinions within forums, then other large national and global organizations would not be taking advantage of the cells processing power.

3) the cell works on various different levels without limitations as to what each SPE can do unlike the xenon. 

4) There are more SPE's allowing not only more calculations to be done and more work to be processed but if you were to translate this into what it can do for video games, you will see from various different games designers that the cell is capable of allowing more things to be shown and done in game then the xenon. The more people are playing about with the cell, the more they are enjoying its benefits.