starcraft said: ChartsViewer said: Since I have both and I already have MGS4 I don't really care. But it's easy to see that the game is easy to port to 360, If they port it they could even do better graphics. Don't see nothing special, just SONY's money, nothing more. Just like HALO or GOW.... This pretty much sums up the reality of the situation. 360 fanboys hopes and dreams.

 

MikeB said: The SPUs are full processors and the SPEs are like little system themselves within which the SPU acts as a CPU. Just because the SPUs are really fast at DSP, GPU or vector unit related tasks does not inhibit the other potentials. It requires redesign, some stuff you currently do manually on the SPUs to achieve maximum efficiency which translates into better cache hits on other CPUs as well. You write you code as parallel as possible (8 hardware threads and maybe additional software threads where this suits your game engine) and for ideal performance you stick to half- or single precsion formats (but the Cell can outperform other top CPUs at double precision as well, due to more CPUs). The PPU is different compared to a x86 desktop CPU as it lacks some non-crucial features and legacy bagage found in such CPUs, the SPUs take such simplifications even further. This results in legacy code backwards compatibility issues, but also leads to more power and potential performance efficiency form one chip. One profound advantage of the SPUs is that they have quite a lot of cache-speed-like genuine memory to work with, multiple times the amount a 360 core has L1 cache. You can write any kind of code which can run on the PPU for the SPUs. However within the Cell design the PPE is meant to be the general overviewing manager and the SPUs the allround experts.

I didn't say you can't do everything on the SPUs. They're Turing Complete, so of course you can do anything on them. You can also do anything with an abacus and a monkey as long as you train the monkey well enough :P

What I'm saying is that you can't do everything better on them than on the PPU. Just to give you two quick examples:

1- SPUs don't support double-precision floating-point arithmetic (if you need it, use the PPU or prepare for a serious performance hit). The latest Cell processors support this, but the PS3 one doesn't.

2- SPUs don't have dynamic branch prediction, which means they'll invariably suffer on certain kinds of code compared to the PPU.

 

starcraft said: ChartsViewer said: Since I have both and I already have MGS4 I don't really care. But it's easy to see that the game is easy to port to 360, If they port it they could even do better graphics. Don't see nothing special, just SONY's money, nothing more. Just like HALO or GOW.... This pretty much sums up the reality of the situation.

 :)

Even Gears of War 1 has better graphics than MGS4. So nothing special about it in termos of tecnology, it uses space, so what? Put it in 2 or more DVD's. If people don't mind waiting for installations and other stuff they don't mind changing a DVD.

Just like HALO or other exclusive games on 360, I didn't see nothing that can't be done over the PS3.

@ NJ5

First of all you can do things in half- or double precision computer numbering formats.

The SPUs are suitable for doing double precision as well, despite the hit in performance. They still manage to outperform top rival CPUs.

This paper researches the performance of several top processors, the Cell in these double precision tests is using 8 SPEs (the PS3 has 6 SPEs available under Linux for apps to take advantage of)

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/%7Esamw/research/papers/ipdps08.pdf

The SPUs do support branch hints tough, to help with regard to performance.

@MikeB: That graph is showing MFlop/Watt which is not a measure of performance, just power efficiency.

If we look at performance, that paper mentions 1.8 GFlops/s per SPU on double-precision arithmetic tasks. That's not impressive for a 3.2 GHz processor. Of course, you can use several SPUs at the same time (assuming your computation is parallelizable, which isn't always the case), but that eats processing power which can't be used for other tasks.

Anyway, no matter how much we discuss it, the fact stands that a full-blown processor like the PPU is more suited to certain tasks that the SPU. The SPUs are much better than the PPU at certain tasks, which results from their specialization. If you believe otherwise, I have a nice bridge up for sale...

 

Its confirmed the game comes in a 50Gb Blu Ray.

The cutscenes arent CG but most done with the game engine so dont consume enourmous amounts of money.

Some graphical effects as the Octocam are said to be possible only because of the increased processing power of the PS3.Also the modelization of the charachters and the wide scenarios.Many 360 games are corridor-like as Gears and Bioshock.To reach this graphical level in open spaces is more difficult.

The sound quality is impossible to attain without a HD plattform.



But yeah ,if you dumbed down some graphics effects ,give a line of text instead of all the cutscenes ,compressed the sound and lowered its quality ,and put out a package of 5-6 disks this could come to the 360 .....maybe.

kingofwale said: Great idea, 3 DVDs while you watch all cut-scenes in 480P. Heck, why not also port it to Wii while we are at it?

LOL. This is the worst comment this generation has seen. What makes you say 480p. Most Blu Ray games have information doubled up so as to save loading times. Also Sony dont compress the games on BLU RAY. In the end I suspect MGS4 is no bigger than around 17 - 18GB. And M$ have amazing tech at condensing the data for 360 discs. If MGS4 was on 360 it would be 2 maybe 3 discs with all bells and whistles and 1080p. Anyone remember Resident Evil 2 on N64?. The cartridge was 512mb and it stored the entire game with FMV that came on 2 Playstation discs of 720mb each.

From what I have seen of the game, it looks like they used up that much space just to say "hey, we just justified our usage of blu-ray." It definitely doesn't look like it is in the textures. It appears to me that they did not compress any of their data, which is just plain stupid. I guess the only point of not using a lossless compression on any of their data would be to not have to spend time decompressing it.

Well for one, the install. Bringing that part to the X360 would alienate the people without hard drives.

Two, to keep the same quality of sound, compression would not be option, unless you want Sony fan boys to poke fun of having the "inferior" like Xbox fan boys do all the time.

Third, there a lot of cut scenes, product placement, and such to we work in the game to have it released in the game. Hell, if you played the game in the last chapter, you know one particular section that would need to be omitted or change without breaking one plot of the game. It was kind of weird that Kojima (Konami) thumbed their noses up at X360 so bad.

Those are some of the reason why it possible can't go to the X360. But something tells me it will or if not go to the next gen Microsoft system.

@ NJ5

Read the paper and look at figure 6a, in total performance the graph is similar.

The point is that the SPUs are well suited for double precision despite this being sub-optimal. I think Mike Acton sticks to half- or single precision formats, so his comment on the SPU being better than the PPU is correct. It's the end result in games which matter, not how something is achieved.

For example it does not matter how much FSAA a game implements, its about keeping jaggie perception as minimal as possible and achieving the best artistic end result.



So? The aim should be to make your game engine run as parallel and asynchronous as possible. Being able to perfom as much as possible processing simultaneous. It's a challenge mostly from a game engine design perspective, but technically from a hardware perspective it can be done and the Cell is more suitable for this than other CPUs (note the near linear performance increase while tapping more SPEs).



With regard to double precision, like various studies demonstrate the SPUs are suitable. You have far more SPUs available, so this makes sense.

Sure the PPU has different strong points, but the strong points mainly relate to how the PPU and SPUs fit the general design and of course a in x86 assembly writetn program can only run on a x86 CPU, but that doesn't mean you couldn't rewrite the app for other processors to perform just as well or better.

The SPUs are very strong for gaming and multi-media purposes, which are most relevant int he case of the PS3 (also for research, server, raytracing, human artificial intelligence simulation, supercomputer, etc, etc, related tasks). In the end it all comes down to being able to calculate things very fast.