God the media piss me off when they rework stories and what people said to what they want it to be without many people noticing.

mitsuhide said: God the media piss me off when they rework stories and what people said to what they want it to be without many people noticing.

I think it was an innocent misquotation.  The real problem is that all these stories feed on each other like cannibals and no-one bothers to check the source.  Lazy-assed bloggers!

@ omgwtfbbq

The SPEs can be used for AI, to quote a Heavenly Sword developer:

"So basically you have the army game which has up to 2180 AI’s (I checked the other day cos somebody on Beyond3D asked and I didn’t actually know, its can probably go a little higher but thats the current number embedded in the code) running on SPUs with the normal main game logic mainly running on PPU. For fighting the SPU code selects the 20-30 closest army guys and hands them over to the normal game so you get the full fight engine and AI for them. For ranged weapons (like the Bazooka) its all handled internally to the armies, and they try and run or dive and also get blown up quite spectacularly(its very satisfying ). The army AI is hierarchical, each guy has his own brain and avoids and tracks important things but there is also a battalion level intelligence that guides each unit around the field following a specialised virtual machine with commands and orders. Its quite hard to control an army and not make it look silly, so we use a few tricks to make it look visually interesting as well"

@ omgwtfbbq

Evidence suggests otherwise. If the SPEs are not used and a XBox 360 game engine uses multiple Xenon cores you may be right.

Note it's not as simple as breaking up an existing legacy game engine into pieces to utilize the Cell's SPEs.
That's why some developers have issues using their legacy game engines. 

ok I'm gonna be flamed on that one..... but to the ones who said KZ2 demo had way better graphic than GOW he/she/they really need s to check his/her/their eyes.... I mean come on, I know it's early in dev and it looked good.... but the demo was glitched as hell you had graphic bugs and some shit weren't even close to the quality of other games already released..... what was great though in that demo was the phisics and animation... but certainly not the graphics.... and you can think what you want and your "IMO", it's a fact.... to be a PS3 killer app KZ 2 has a long way to go

@ endimion

I was talking about technologically, not your personal graphics preferences or game preference whatever that may be.

First of all Physics and Animations are part of "graphics", likewise are lighting, special effect, polygon counts, etc.

Anyway I was not judging the textures, design or anything from an artistic point of view. Let me give you an example the first Amiga computers from 1985 were able to display photographs with up to 4096 colors simultaneously, this at a time when all Macs and most PCs only offered 2 colors, some top PC cards allowed for up to 16 colors to be displayed simultaneously. Now a good picture with 16 colors may actually look better to you and me than a bad picture drawn with 4096 colors, still from a technological perspective the worse picture is more impressive as the possible specs provides the artist more freedom for what they want to create. Did you follow what I am trying to say to you?

From an artistic perspective I think Killzone 2 has an interesting art direction.

leo-j said: @omgwfbbq Yes a 3 core system can easily handle better graphcis than a 7 core system. I had this discussin before with a 360 fanboy and wooped him to shape I have no time for your BS.

huh? WTF are you talking about? I never compared Xenon to Cell for graphics processing. That would be a ridiculous comparison to make, not to mention completely useless. The correct comparison would be comparing the two graphics cards, and from what I heard Xenos outperforms RSX in most cases. 

Of course, the Cell would easily outperform the Xenon when it comes to graphics processing, but neither of those two could possibly get the performance of a dedicated graphics chip. 

So please explain how the number of cores in the CPU could possibly relate to how well the GPU performs. Unless, of course, you "have no time for my BS", which of course translates directly to "I can't argue you because I don't know what I'm talking about, so I'll pretend I've already won"

Final-Fan said: omgwtfbbq said: Final-Fan said: Well omgwtfbbq I have to say that you've easily convinced me (with the earlier post) that the PS3 is a lot better at physics and graphics than it is at AI. However, I am not convinced that the weakness is as great as you claim -- that (1) the PPE will be bogged down quite a bit by having to juggle the SPEs and (2) the disadvantage of the Cell's single PPE will outweigh the advantage of its ability to dump graphics/physics processing onto the many SPEs, as compared to the Xenon in the 360. Point 2 especially is one that I think remains to be definitively demonstrated one way or the other. Obviously a game focusing on extremely sophisticated AI but with minimal graphics would be much better off on the 360, but I don't think that's a likely portrait of future 360/PS3 games. Now I should say that I am not a person with technical knowledge of processors at this level of detail, and if I have overlooked a fact which is blindingly obvious to you then I apologize, but please don't discount me entirely due to that. I would welcome being proven wrong, in detail, with brutal honesty -- because then I would know more than I do now. Erm, you do realise that the graphics is handled by the GPU right? The GPU in the Xbox is much more capable than the Cell for handling graphics. As for a game that requires top physics, top graphics, AND great AI, you have to remember that the Xbox360 is still a 3 core system. While the GPU can handle the graphics, there are still three cores to split between physics and AI, as opposed to the PS3 where the PPE has to handle the AI as well as other things. I'm sure if you tried hard enough you could find a situation where the PS3's SPUs will give it enough of an advantage to overcome not having an entire core dedicated to AI, but in almost every case you'll find the Xbox360 will be better.   Turns out I forgot that little detail -- which would have happened no matter how much of an expert I was or wasn't. Oh well. But still, there has to be some advantage "1 core and 7 SPEs [edit: AND a GPU]" has over "3 cores and 1 GPU". It just can't be a one way street. [edit2: And it may not be intentional, but you now seem to be saying that the PPE has to do AI and physics, instead of being able to move physics work to the SPEs. [Also, one of the SPEs helps to run the OS as well as "security", so that does in fact take load off of the PPE that remains on the Xenon in the 360. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_Hardware )]

Of course there are advantages of 1 core, 7 SPE, I GPU over 3 core, 1 GPU. That advantage is not AI, due to the design of the SPEs and the nature of AI. However, many other things will of course have benifits on the Cell architecture. You're exactly right, it can't be a one way street ;)

as for your edit2, no it's not intentional, Physics will be on the SPE's. However, you have to remember that there are many other things other than Physics and AI that will have to be run on the PPE. 

 

@ omgwtfbbq

Also Lair uses the SPEs for AI:

Phase5: "Our S.P.U. code works dynamically, so we are not locking up one S.P.U. and saying "OK, you are the A.I. S.P.U., but we instead say, "OK, here are these 15 things including A.I." We run them on the S.P.U., and the code automatically distributes them."

With the huge amount of soldiers and animals on the ground, boats/creatures in the water and dragons in the air, there's a lot of AI involved.

It's not that the SPEs have to handle the AI, you could just do it on the PPE and take the workload off the PPE to allow for more AI by putting other tasks on the SPEs. It's all up to the developers to make such decisions on what is preferable for their specific game.

MikeB said: @ omgwtfbbq While the GPU can handle the graphics, there are still three cores to split between physics and AI, as opposed to the PS3 where the PPE has to handle the AI as well as other things. The SPEs can be used for AI, to quote a Heavenly Sword developer: "So basically you have the army game which has up to 2180 AI’s (I checked the other day cos somebody on Beyond3D asked and I didn’t actually know, its can probably go a little higher but thats the current number embedded in the code) running on SPUs with the normal main game logic mainly running on PPU. For fighting the SPU code selects the 20-30 closest army guys and hands them over to the normal game so you get the full fight engine and AI for them. For ranged weapons (like the Bazooka) its all handled internally to the armies, and they try and run or dive and also get blown up quite spectacularly(its very satisfying ). The army AI is hierarchical, each guy has his own brain and avoids and tracks important things but there is also a battalion level intelligence that guides each unit around the field following a specialised virtual machine with commands and orders. Its quite hard to control an army and not make it look silly, so we use a few tricks to make it look visually interesting as well"

well, just because something isn't designed for a particular thing, doesn't mean it's not possible. I understand that it's possible to run the AI routines on the SPE's, but it would take a performance hit when compared to a general purpose core.