^ You'll have to do your back strengthening exercises if you want to be like Raiden.

I'm still bummed for that silly scene...

But actually I was talking about Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, now that was a plot that exploded as it approached the end.

That's true, I had forgotten that Halo 3 doesn't always have 5 frames of lag. It would be nice to see a comparison with the response time of last-gen games (or Wii games since it's also a single-core CPU I think).

After seeing the material about GOW3 today I'm starting to suspect that more developers could be tapping multicore in the same way. Certainly something to keep an eye on.

@Mrkitty: I really need to play that game, damnit you're reminding me of games I have, yet haven't played!

Oh yea, that scene from MGS4 really did me over as well. I would have thought a simple firemans carry would have sufficed with a back as strong as his.

@NJ5 Its also common practice on computer games for the CPU to process 1-2 frames ahead of the rendering.

@Squilliam: I can definitely understand processing 1 frame in advance, to let the GPU and CPU work at the same time. However adding more frames of lag to exploit more cores was news for me. It is also not a scalable method of using multiple cores, unless we're prepared for n frames of lag.

@CGI: I hope they don't intend to play any sports... Im not too happy with the weather forecast.

Where are you getting this? Look at the GoW PDF you mentioned, slides 13 and 14:

slide 13 is how you work with a single CPU and a GPU: the CPU prepares the scene of frame n+1 and then runs the input elaboration/physics/AI for frame n+2 while the GPU renders frame n.

slide 14 is how you work by offloading to SPUs: the scene is always frame n+1 and the simulation is always frame n+2, but it is parallelized among SPUs together with part of the rendering so that the time needed to end is lesser and you can actually render a higher framerate consistently (cpu stuff not in frame means skipping a frame)

In both cases they showed a 2 frames offset between rendered frame and simulated frame where player input is read. Of course there will be more lag frames in practice, at the very least the usual one for double buffering I suppose.

1-2 frames is too few. Default for NVIDIA cards are three I think.

^ The game also runs at an unlocked 60FPS so I wonder if this helps to compensate for this rendering methodology and may be why they chose this particular method.