Who tells you Halo 3 isn't using the same kind of tricks to use a lot of cores?

From what I've seen, Halo 3 and KZ2 have some of the worst response times among all games. I wouldn't be surprised if the reasons are similar.

PS3 has been out, what? 2 and a half years?

Judging by PS2 games 2000 vs 2003 and then 2003 vs 2007, I think it's safe to say that PS3 games in 2013 are going to blow away what we see in 2009.

I hardly think that the only things devs can play around with now for the next four years are cheap tricks.

Response times for all FPS on console are about the same. Theres nothing wrong with the response times. I play them fine. KZ2 just feels different because the controls are very different.

As I said there are still improvements to do. Not only optimizations but also using multicore in a more effective way.

However that's where it gets hard to use multicore, hence why I said it will be uphill from now on. It's hard enough to use multicore effectively in some simple applications. For a complex application like a game it's much harder, with a lot of serial dependencies and whatnot.

Not by a long shot, all recent presentations show this. In fact Naughty Dog and Guerilla Games suggest to optimise very little at this point as there's so much performance headroom.

Once PS3 games start to tap into the bulk of available SPU cycles, devs will resort to full optimisation and like Naughty Dog and Guerilla Games state there are many oppertunities to do so.

@NJ5
Well, I'm pretty sure Halo 3 uses all the three cores.
Didn't you write that piece about latency and OnLive and linked yourself the Gamasutra article? Read that again: Halo 3 times are pretty typical for 30 fps games. The good ol' video about the KZ2 lag monster was done on a different TV, so we miss the calibration amount, but it did put KZ2 between 6-8 and 8-10 60th of a second. At worst it's as bad as, say, Halo 3 but better than  GTA IV or Skate. At best it ties for the lowest response time among the measured games.

I was going to say "A price cut?" but since you're talking about games...

Is this a joke?

I just rechecked and for Halo 3 the input lag is 4-5 frames (I thought it was always 5 frames). So maybe Halo 3 is not doing the same thing as GOW3's developers explained.

I haven't seen specific measurements for KZ2, but it doesn't seem to be any better.

My main point is that developers are apparently already doing hard decisions regarding performance. Most games are 30 fps (many with drops), and now the pipelining tricks. Tapping the multicore architectures is proving to be very hard, as expected.

Nah, we've seen the biggest jumps in graphics already. Graphics are so impressive in the first couple of years of the generation because people are used to games being played on the 7 year old hardware of the previous generation.

The further you get into a generation, the harder it becomes to get the "WOW" effect of graphics.

Case in point: (interchange Uncharted and Gears of War here) when GeOW first came out, people went ballistic over its graphics. Since then, multiple games have been released that look better than Gears.... but because the jump wasn't that big, no body cares. Killzone 2 was a little different because of the hype that's been going since before the PS3, the massive development time, and the huge budget. Personally, I think they should have moved some of those $$$ away from graphics and into hiring some decent voice actors. It comes to something when you actually have to use the subtitles to understand a character (Rico).

To summarise: will games look better? Yes. Will we care? No.

^It looks great, but if cyborg thingies out of nowhere ruin the last tenth of the plot of _this_ one I'll get angry :)