Yeap it was Crytek, probably because they want to sell the CryEngine2 to some PS3 devs...

Why wait? They were used as far back as "Toy Story". The bedposts used procedural textures to apply the right wood grain to a sphere.

I am just saying it’s possible. I still don’t think it will ever be done, but that’s not because I think it can’t be done.

I just think Sony will have to sell 70 million more consoles before it becomes cost effective for them to do it.

Not true at all.

F@H assigns different work units depending on what a platform is good at. The client that most PCs use runs on only the CPU, so that client works on a wide variety of units, but some of them are considerably slow even for fast CPUs. Since the Cell is more specialized than a PC CPU, it only works on a few different types of work units, all of which it can do fairly fast. Now there is also a GPU client for ATI PC cards, and that has an even higher score than the PS3. Why, because the GPU is even more specialized than the Cell, and it only works on one or two different types of work units, and its very fast with those unit.

Keep in mind that if you take work units a P4 can finish in a decent amount of time and give them to the GPU or Cell then things would take considerably longer, even though the P4 is old and slow. Also keep in mind that the CPU client has some very fast processors working, but also some very slow CPUs that bring the average down considerably.

See how much fun things can be when you know what you're talking about? Both of your original assertions, that no PCs can fold as fast as the PS3 or that the program has been optimized for the Cell, are wrong. 

Procedural textures "on games", have you ever hear about the 92Kb game, Krieger???

Man, ignorance must be bliss.

Do you really think any console has been completely tapped out at this point?

And you do realize that the RSX is essentially a last gen nvidia card, right? And that not even high end modern day nvidia cards can play crysis at max settings....

What I don't think many people here understand is that code optimization is a much more difficult task on a PC than it is on a console. On a console the architecture is standardized. On a PC the person can be running any one of a vary large number of possible component permutations. You don't know the cache sizes at each level whose relative sizes and speeds will effect which algorithm you will want to use. Not to mention the inherent brokenness of x86 which should have died long ago. This is something even intel acknowledges implicitly with all the money it has funneled into itanic.

Additionally, PCs have the overhead of OSs that are significantly more sofisticated than the glorified batch processing systems with pretty front ends that people think are OSs on consoles (DOS maybe to blame for this). Why have a complicated scheduler? Are you really going to be playing two games simultaneously? What does the memory usage look like? One giant process using everything or pretty much everything. Well, the paging system just got a lot simpler.

Will Crysis have a higher throughput on the ps3 than some crazy expensive PC? Unlikely.

However it is not inconceivable. If the most computationally intensive parts of Crysis were trivially parallelizable and had an amenable FP:M ratio then cell would perform significantly better than x86 or a standard PPC machine. Various image filters fall into this category which is why we use a cluster of ps3s for our medical imaging research here so this is not just theoretical.

You mean from the same people who made this?

http://theprodukkt.com/debris/

Yea, to do something like that however, you would need to drop a super computer into a console. No one would be stupid enough to do that...

... wait a minute... ;)

Of course I talk about that, but if you haven't played it, I don't think you will ever understand the point...

What?

 Download Krieger and play it... you will be very surprised...