Thats pure bs.

 Not one dev is even close to using all its power and that pretty much what they are saying.

I think I've quoted this statement before, but it's a statement from Naught Dog (you can find it on the official site):

"17) Q: What percentage of the PlayStation's power are you using for each Crash game?
A: All of it. 110 volts. Exactly what is in your wall socket. But there is a lot more that we can do with the 110 volts in the future. Look for the next PlayStation games we work on to look better and better."

---

They also made a statement about a console being like a glass, and you could fill it up with rocks, and it'd be full, but you could add smaller pebbles around the rocks, and then sand around the smaller pebbles, and finally water around the sand granules. Then you start to break the rocks down to pebbles, the pebbles down to sand, the sand down to water. The impossible task that good developers always work towards is creating a glass of just water.

Or something like that.

could some just write a program that cleared out memory addresses or some other mindless task some insane number of times persecond and make a piece of hardware do every bit of work it can, I know that on the atari 2600 you can just do something like vblanks and assign garbage into ram and use every stinkings cycle and resource on the system, seriously this % of power is an idiotic concern, games will look as good as they look and that will be taken as far as developers are able to go and in general the more time developers spend on hardware the better they get.
assigning some arbitrary percent is meaningless
I mean look at stuff like the atari 2600 or the neo geo, it's hard to believe early games (say surround or space ship on the 2600,) and late games (fatal run, radar lock/solaris) are on the same hardware

Speak for yourself. I wrote a game engine in one of my advanced elective classes while earning my computer science degree. I've also taking computer engineering courses including creating a pipelined general purpose processor from scratch (debugging this was a bitch).

As camiloc said, this isn't really about determining what percentage of PS3 hardware will be used, since most games use most available resources to them. The question is how efficiently they use the resources available to them. The idea is that the Cell is a little more esoteric and difficult to optimize for (or create tasks for, perhaps) than the other consoles CPUs. This is arguable, of course, since 360 programming is more about multithreading efficiently which introduces race conditions and a whole slew of other very complicated issues.

Most programmers will be 'optimizing' for the cell at a fairly high level of abstraction. They won't be reordering instructions themselves or counting cycles -- rather, the compiler will do things like that for them. The idea is that the compiler programmers understand the architecture at a low level better than engine programmers, so engine programmers can focus entirely on algorithmic efficiency.

The idea is to have specialists at each level and in this way your algorithms guys don't have to have as deep an understanding of the low level hardware as the compilers guys and can focus more on algorithms. Of course, it will still benefit them to have some understanding of the low level hardware, but it can be a little more abstract which is a huge benefit to someone trying to learn it.

Games evolve graphically as the hardware matures for many reasons. The first is that the bar is set: people have an idea of what needs to be met and beat. Secondly, developers have more resources in terms of time, existing assets including art, textures and codebase. Finally, experience with the hardware -- both locally (a single developer) and globally (known-efficient algorithms, best known practices, etc) increases with time. So developers don't have to spend as many resources attacking a problem that has a known solution or they may much better know how to approach development of the hardware. For example, there are tasks to which the Cell is well suited and after discovering this they can work it into a game or make an engine around it.a

Experience will also help developers mitigate the Cell's weaknesses -- not having 3 general purpose cores like the 360.  Any way you slice it, this is a huge deal for most games.  In fact, I'd wager this as the most likely reason Madden on the PS3 struggles to maintain 30fps whereas Madden on the 360 runs a solid 60fps.

Even with all of this, ultimately, the PS3 is just another computer. It has memory limitations, fillrate limitations, processing limitations, etc. It's not some magic box that whose full power will manifest 4-6 years from now with an order of magnitude better graphics. That's what Sony *wants* people to think, but it's foolish, wishful thinking.

Seriously by either definition the console is using all the power it has.

If there is a formula today that does a task in 30 seconds and two weeks from now there will be a new formula that does the same task, then how much of the power are we utilizing?

The answer is of course that we have no F'ing idea. Because we don't know if that new formula is going to be faster or slower even. It may do the same task in a different way and be identical in overall speed for us. It might be faster with more inputs than the current formula but slower with less inputs than the current formula. Quite simply the reason you cannot affix a percentage to it is because there is no way to know the future and be able to say how much more efficiently they will be able to program it later on.

The real reason this type of analysis is worthless is because all consoles are in the same situation where improvements to procedure could later increase performance but nobody knows by how much they will improve it or for that matter nobody knows for sure if there will even be a new way to do it.

@ElRhodeo,

There are a lot of us with experience in these fields. I doubt its the majority on the site, but there are people who have or are going to school for these exact topics.

ok, we've said it many time..... an use of a processor over 80% imply you reach a coding quality close to the holy grale (understand it doesn't exist)..... so not only you don't have any game on any plateform using more than 80% efficiently the capacity of any processor..... but in addition using a lot of resource doesn't mean anything either.... my effing firefox is using 48% of my 3 Ghz cpu sometime does it make it a high graphic qulity soft.... no just a greedy bastard :P
so my point is you could have a better game using less resources because coded better than one using crazy resources and not looking better.....

so now you want a number.... with all the technology available on a PS3... a game like MGS4 accepting it's well coded... is probably using an overall average between 45%-55% which is really good considering what I said....

I'll let you in on something that is pretty easy to figure out. All this talk about percentage usage or whatever is usually BS.

The only thing to look for is if the percentage is really high, in the middle or low other than that the very specific numbers they sometimes give are just pulled straight out of their asses.

Most games are barely using the SPUs, so untill they do not they arenlt really using that much of the PS3s power.

Squares white engine was designed to use th SPUs from the start , so FF13 will be a game to really push the PS3.

check out kojima's blog if you want the newest info.