A snip: "Contrarily to what I have read on few forums, we are not firing the SPUs at the end of the frame and then wait for the results the next frame. We couldn’t afford to add any significant latency. For this kind of game, gameplay is first, then quality, then framerate. We had the same issue with vsync, we had to come up with ways to use the existing latency. So instead of waiting for the results next frame, we are using the SPUs as parallel coprocessors of the RSX and we use the time we would have spent on the RSX to start the next frame. With 3 ms or 4 ms of SPU latency at most, we are faster than the original 6ms of RSX time we saved."
http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/more-on-god-of-war-iii-antialiasing/
Eurogamer/Digital Foundry comments:
"The more flexible nature of the CPU means that while such tasks can be more computationally expensive, you get a higher-quality result. "
"In the case of God of War III, any given frame typically takes between 16ms and 30ms to render, give or take a millisecond or two. The original 2x multisampling AA solution took a big chunk of rendering time, at 5ms. Now, the hugely more impressive MLAA algorithm takes a total of 20ms of CPU time. However, it's running on five SPUs, meaning that overall latency is a mere 4ms. So the final result is actually faster, and that previous 5ms of GPU time can be repurposed for other tasks. "
"The God of War III engine excels in handling dynamic lighting, with up to 50 lights per game object. Helios' head (bottom right) is the most obvious example of the player directly interfacing with dynamic lighting."
"We can place lights in Maya and have them update in real-time in the game on the PS3, it's like being able to paint with lights. Lighting is a fast and a very enjoyable artistic process." "
"God of War III stands out in this regard simply because you don't tend to notice the shadows. They're realistic. The human eye is drawn to elements that stick out like a sore thumb, and that includes shadows.
The result is subtle and it works beautifully. As well as working with his team mates in helping to build the PS3 renderer from the ground up, Sony Santa Monica programmer Ben Diamand spent around three years gradually developing the deferred shadowing system employed in God of War III, that works beautifully in eliminating the artifacts and blending dynamically-generated shadows along with others that are pre-baked into the scenery."
"It's games like this, along with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Killzone 2, that give the platform holder ownership of the bleeding edge of console gaming technology in the current generation."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-making-of-god-of-war-iii?page=4
I had some hefty discussions here on VGChartz regarding the Cell's SPU's performing anti-aliasing, a little snip:
MikeB: Flexibility, there are different methods and approaches for doing AA (and the need for this also depends on rendering resolution, art direction and other lighting/color effects as well).
I think with this clear realworld example such questions are now suitably answered. As for others who behaved badly and didn't understand what they were really talking about, please be more open minded and polite in the future.