The PS3 is a great piece of hardware. The business plan associated with it has been a failure.

@ starcraft

Well, I have heard IBM technical specialists and discussed topics with PS3 developers. What more credible source do you need, Bill Gates or John Carmack (of Doom can't be done Amiga, yet currently runs on much older Amigas than past PCs can run today, ever since the release of Doom's source code - fame)?

I don't claim to know it all, but it's not as if I am a total noob regarding technology myself. Here a pic of me performing a tech demo for TV channel 3Sat:

@ Caey

There were also PR comments from Microsoft stating they intend to make the XBox 360 the new PS2. Of course the PS3 is not selling as fast as Sony PR predicted, but it performs on par with my personal expectations and they are much higher for the years ahead of us.



Sony is still generating healthy profits despite employing over twice as many people than Microsoft does.

MikeB said: @ Darc Requiem IMO it makes sense to dedicate one SPE to the OS at this point while they are adding features. You act as if the developers are already maxing out the 6 other SPEs while in fact they are only scratching the surface and various multiplatform games and Genji 2 (which is visually impressive using only the PPE and RSX) are yet to use the SPEs.

As I am interested in SPE usage within games so far, I recently compiled a list regarding the games which are known to already use the SPEs,

If you can find more related quotes, I would appreciate the effort to share them with me:

PS3 games that are known to use the Cell's SPEs

1) Resistance:Fall of Man

"Animation and calculating collisions between objects are perfect fits, says Hastings. So those are the primary jobs Resistance doles out to the SPEs.."

Source: Spectrum online

2) Ratchet and Clank Future

"We were using the SPUs and that's a key to having a game that runs fast on the PS3, but there were a lot of things that we knew we could improve, and we have been improving them on Ratchet. And even with Ratchet, we're still seeing more and more things we can do; it's kind of like peeling off the layers of an onion."

Source: Gamedaily

"We are continuing to build our Insomniac Engine and have made many improvements to it since Resistance: Fall of Man. The one huge focus for us has been moving more of our processes over to the SPUs on the CELL processor. This has allowed us to get our physics and effects systems running roughly four times faster than it did in Resistance at nearly double the framerate, which is something you can see in weapons like the Tornado Launcher."

Source: The New Zealand Herald

3) Motorstorm

"SPU usage is a good example. The progressive development of corresponding debugging and profiling tools made thorough exploitation of this powerful resource quite challenging for the less technically biased members of the team. In the aftermath of MotorStorm, with mature tools at our disposal, we’ve been developing mechanisms to make the PPU and SPU’s power and parallelism far more accessible to our entire team, re-thinking data organization and algorithms in the process. MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we’re aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!"

"Our SPU exploiting systems consist of:

i) Havok physics.
ii) Determination of object visibility.
iii) Concatenation of hierarchies.
iv) Billboard object culling and vertex buffer creation.
v) Updating of particles and vertex buffer creation.
vi) Updating of vehicle dynamics.
vii) Updating of vehicle suspension constraints.
viii) Audio (MultiStream).
ix) Video decoding."

Source: Beyond3D

4) Formula One Championship Edition

"We don't really use the concept of reserving certain SPUs for specific tasks. Instead we employ the concept of prioritized job lists that are executed by the SPUs whenever one is available. We use the SPUs for the following jobs: audio effects, particle system, physics (landscape collision, narrow phase and collision resolution), rain effects (rain droplets and rain splashes) and various render side jobs. The game logic is driven largely by the PPU. We use the SPUs together to collaborate on working through each frame that's displayed by the game. The SPUs are extremely versatile so they can be used to accelerate any in-game system."

The SPUs are heavily involved in the graphics pipeline and do an enormous amount of work to eliminate inefficiency before anything arrives at the PPU and RSX. For example, the SPUs are powerful enough to decompress and check every triangle [polygon] before passing it on to the RSX. Triangles that are facing away from the player, or that are not on the screen can be 'trimmed' away by the SPUs, which hugely reduces the amount of redundant work sent to the RSX. This in turn lets the RSX get on with what it does best--drawing stuff on screen.

The SPUs can also be used to augment the RSX vertex shaders, making far more vertex-heavy tasks possible which is very useful for character animation. Additionally, the SPUs can be used to implement behavior very similar to geometry shaders--F1 CE uses them in this way to render seamless interpolated levels of detail for some scene elements. So in answer to the question "Do the Cell and RSX work together?" the answer is a resounding "Yes," and I think this is one of the real strengths of Playstation 3 that we'll see increasingly exploited by development teams going forward.

Source: Newsweek

5) Super Stardust HD

"We are able to get over 10,000 active objects with physics and collisions and over 75,000 particles simulated and drawn @60fps. That said, we were unable to use all the available processing power from Cell for this game, so for the next game there are still plenty of reserves left"

Source: IGN

6) Heavenly Sword

" In Heavenly Sword, the Cell enables incredible numbers of enemies to be on screen at one time. The trick is that Cell treats entire regiments as a single unit of artificial intelligence when they are at a distance; as they draw closer, Cell gradually divides the army into smaller and smaller groups, so they eventually become individual troops with unique fighting styles and tactics."

"Heavenly Sword is one of the first PS3 games to tap into Cell's true potential. Here are the highlights.

Artificial Intelligence To keep up with the hundreds of on-screen enemies, Cell treats distant armies as a singlular "hive mind." As they approach Nariko, Cell splits their intelligence across squads, and finally, individual troops.

Graphics Wind gusts swirl Nariko's hair and clothes, and bazooka blasts send out showers of dust and rubble. 1080p support is still a question mark, though.

Physics When firing a cannon, Nariko can influence the trajectory of the projectile using the Sixaxis. Ninja Theory claims it needs the Cell to handle these complex calculations."

Source: Gamepro

"Personally I really love the SPUs as they have exceeded our performance expectations and we've got a lot of them to play with."

Source: Eurogamer

7) Lair

"We have all of our animations running on the S.P.U.s of the Cell's chip because you couldn't draw armies or basically animate armies of that amount and size without it. And our physics are completely on there. We are also doing fluid dynamics for the first time in a game, as far as I know. Water is not basically a sheet of a base surface, but completely animated and sub-divided, and you actually can direct with it thanks to the Cell. We actually do part of our rendering on the Cell. Simply because it's so powerful, we spent months and months moving more and more systems onto the S.P.U.'s."

"Not a specific S.P.U. 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. And sometimes, yes, A.I. certainly can take up a full S.P.U."

Source: Gamepro

8) Killzone 2

"In this talk, we will discuss our approach to face this challenge and how we designed a deferred rendering engine that uses multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA). We will give in-depth description of each individual stage of our real-time rendering pipeline and the main ingredients of our lighting, post-processing and data management. We’ll show how we utilize PS3’s SPUs for fast rendering of a large set of primitives, parallel processing of geometry and computation of indirect lighting. We will also describe our optimizations of the lighting and our parallel split (cascaded) shadow map algorithm for faster and stable MSAA output."

Source: Killzoneunit

9) Final Fantasy XIII (uses SPE enabled White Engine)

"The White Engine reportedly uses four of the six developer-available synergistic processing elements (SPEs) of the Cell microprocessor to achieve near-pre-rendered CGI quality in realtime."

Source: Play UK through Wikipedia

10) Gran Turismo 5
11) Warhawk

"Although I would say it’s the sum-total of all of our natural phenomenon in the game. Our clouds, procedural water, atmospheric scattering, terrain, etc. All of this stuff runs in parallel on all 7 SPUs simultaneously every frame – I’m still not sure if the game community is giving enough credit to just how fast the SPUs really are."

Source: PS Blog

12) Untold Legends
13) Uncharted: Drake’s fortune

"Like the PS2 the PS3 is a sophisticated and powerful piece of hardware. Our engineers are working very hard at making specific optimizations to take full advantage of the Cell and its SPU's. However, there is so much depth to this machine, that much like the PS2, you will continue to see developers squeeze more and more out of it over the course of what I am sure is going to be a lengthy life-cycle."

Source: IGN

14) Infamous

"For us, the most exciting part of the PS3 has been the cell processor, the SPUs specifically. In our highest density scenes right now, we are currently using about 30 percent of the SPUs' capabilities--with the SPUs doing lots of heavy lifting for us on rendering, visibility, particle systems, skinning, animation blending, and so on...this with scores of pedestrians, cars, fires, etc., all going on. And the best part? We've not made any significant attempts to even optimize the SPU code. I think it's reasonable to guess we could put 10 times as much stuff on the SPUs and still make our frame budgets. It's really pretty amazing."

Source: Gamespot

15) The Getaway 3 - Tech demo
16) Unreal Tournament 3 - Sony developers helping Epic.

17) Ninja Gaiden Sigma

"There are games that have thousands of enemies at once, and some of them don’t move or do much. For us it’s about making sure they have goals they are fulfilling and that they can work together with existing enemies. That’s really our philosophy. As far as A.I. goes people have played our game before will see that we’ve made some subtle improvements. A lot of it has to do with using all the Cell’s SPU processors."

Source: Next-Gen Gamer

"One important thing about the PS3 is the seven SPUs in addition to the main processor, and using those is what allows you to get the best graphic quality. So we have an entire section of programmers which is assigned to figure out how to get those SPUs working on graphics to the fullest. Now we're actually at the point where day-to-day you can see the graphic quality improve before your eyes, so to speak. So if you look at the screenshots we have for you today -- if you look at those compared to what we put out at TGS, there's a big difference in terms of the textures and the atmosphere. You can see the steps we've made since then."

Source: 1up

Half life 2=360 version without even using the spu's which to me is amazing.

To be exact the theoretical max of the XBox 360 Xenon CPU is 76.8 GFlops. Any criticism with regard to achieving this theoretical max directed at the Cell specifications counts for the Xenon as well, actually more so, if you compare this with the cell design and the way it's implemented into the system.

I am sorry you havent a clue about how the power in a computer is used!.
I'm not going through it all but I'll say a few points.

1. It doesnt matter how fast a processer is. If your ram is not up to the job.
With the 360 the develoer can use it how they want. I.e select how much to use for what. The PS3's is dedicated, its already set. They have to use it how it is. Information for the cpu comes from the ram!

2. The graphics chip in the 360 is far more future proof as it can do some modules that are only available in DX10. The PS3's cant do these. And never will be able to.

3. SPE's are foe floating point work. They are not used in games. Mainly for Multimedia stuff.

4. And BLU RAY. Games dont need it, it is a con. Hell look at Mass Effect!

Sony are great at talking up their products but I've built many a PC and was not sucked in by the PR bullsh*t that was 4D.

Just add that even if developers have used SPE's in their PS3 games, maybe thats the cause of major framerate problems in nearly all PS3 games.

MikeB said: MikeB said: @ Darc Requiem IMO it makes sense to dedicate one SPE to the OS at this point while they are adding features. You act as if the developers are already maxing out the 6 other SPEs while in fact they are only scratching the surface and various multiplatform games and Genji 2 (which is visually impressive using only the PPE and RSX) are yet to use the SPEs. As I am interested in SPE usage within games so far, I recently compiled a list regarding the games which are known to already use the SPEs, If you can find more related quotes, I would appreciate the effort to share them with me: PS3 games that are known to use the Cell's SPEs 1) Resistance:Fall of Man "Animation and calculating collisions between objects are perfect fits, says Hastings. So those are the primary jobs Resistance doles out to the SPEs.." Source: Spectrum online 2) Ratchet and Clank Future "We were using the SPUs and that's a key to having a game that runs fast on the PS3, but there were a lot of things that we knew we could improve, and we have been improving them on Ratchet. And even with Ratchet, we're still seeing more and more things we can do; it's kind of like peeling off the layers of an onion." Source: Gamedaily "We are continuing to build our Insomniac Engine and have made many improvements to it since Resistance: Fall of Man. The one huge focus for us has been moving more of our processes over to the SPUs on the CELL processor. This has allowed us to get our physics and effects systems running roughly four times faster than it did in Resistance at nearly double the framerate, which is something you can see in weapons like the Tornado Launcher." Source: The New Zealand Herald 3) Motorstorm "SPU usage is a good example. The progressive development of corresponding debugging and profiling tools made thorough exploitation of this powerful resource quite challenging for the less technically biased members of the team. In the aftermath of MotorStorm, with mature tools at our disposal, we’ve been developing mechanisms to make the PPU and SPU’s power and parallelism far more accessible to our entire team, re-thinking data organization and algorithms in the process. MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we’re aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!" "Our SPU exploiting systems consist of: i) Havok physics. ii) Determination of object visibility. iii) Concatenation of hierarchies. iv) Billboard object culling and vertex buffer creation. v) Updating of particles and vertex buffer creation. vi) Updating of vehicle dynamics. vii) Updating of vehicle suspension constraints. viii) Audio (MultiStream). ix) Video decoding." Source: Beyond3D 4) Formula One Championship Edition "We don't really use the concept of reserving certain SPUs for specific tasks. Instead we employ the concept of prioritized job lists that are executed by the SPUs whenever one is available. We use the SPUs for the following jobs: audio effects, particle system, physics (landscape collision, narrow phase and collision resolution), rain effects (rain droplets and rain splashes) and various render side jobs. The game logic is driven largely by the PPU. We use the SPUs together to collaborate on working through each frame that's displayed by the game. The SPUs are extremely versatile so they can be used to accelerate any in-game system." The SPUs are heavily involved in the graphics pipeline and do an enormous amount of work to eliminate inefficiency before anything arrives at the PPU and RSX. For example, the SPUs are powerful enough to decompress and check every triangle [polygon] before passing it on to the RSX. Triangles that are facing away from the player, or that are not on the screen can be 'trimmed' away by the SPUs, which hugely reduces the amount of redundant work sent to the RSX. This in turn lets the RSX get on with what it does best--drawing stuff on screen. The SPUs can also be used to augment the RSX vertex shaders, making far more vertex-heavy tasks possible which is very useful for character animation. Additionally, the SPUs can be used to implement behavior very similar to geometry shaders--F1 CE uses them in this way to render seamless interpolated levels of detail for some scene elements. So in answer to the question "Do the Cell and RSX work together?" the answer is a resounding "Yes," and I think this is one of the real strengths of Playstation 3 that we'll see increasingly exploited by development teams going forward. Source: Newsweek 5) Super Stardust HD "We are able to get over 10,000 active objects with physics and collisions and over 75,000 particles simulated and drawn @60fps. That said, we were unable to use all the available processing power from Cell for this game, so for the next game there are still plenty of reserves left" Source: IGN 6) Heavenly Sword " In Heavenly Sword, the Cell enables incredible numbers of enemies to be on screen at one time. The trick is that Cell treats entire regiments as a single unit of artificial intelligence when they are at a distance; as they draw closer, Cell gradually divides the army into smaller and smaller groups, so they eventually become individual troops with unique fighting styles and tactics." "Heavenly Sword is one of the first PS3 games to tap into Cell's true potential. Here are the highlights. Artificial Intelligence To keep up with the hundreds of on-screen enemies, Cell treats distant armies as a singlular "hive mind." As they approach Nariko, Cell splits their intelligence across squads, and finally, individual troops. Graphics Wind gusts swirl Nariko's hair and clothes, and bazooka blasts send out showers of dust and rubble. 1080p support is still a question mark, though. Physics When firing a cannon, Nariko can influence the trajectory of the projectile using the Sixaxis. Ninja Theory claims it needs the Cell to handle these complex calculations." Source: Gamepro "Personally I really love the SPUs as they have exceeded our performance expectations and we've got a lot of them to play with." Source: Eurogamer 7) Lair "We have all of our animations running on the S.P.U.s of the Cell's chip because you couldn't draw armies or basically animate armies of that amount and size without it. And our physics are completely on there. We are also doing fluid dynamics for the first time in a game, as far as I know. Water is not basically a sheet of a base surface, but completely animated and sub-divided, and you actually can direct with it thanks to the Cell. We actually do part of our rendering on the Cell. Simply because it's so powerful, we spent months and months moving more and more systems onto the S.P.U.'s." "Not a specific S.P.U. 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. And sometimes, yes, A.I. certainly can take up a full S.P.U." Source: Gamepro 8) Killzone 2 "In this talk, we will discuss our approach to face this challenge and how we designed a deferred rendering engine that uses multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA). We will give in-depth description of each individual stage of our real-time rendering pipeline and the main ingredients of our lighting, post-processing and data management. We’ll show how we utilize PS3’s SPUs for fast rendering of a large set of primitives, parallel processing of geometry and computation of indirect lighting. We will also describe our optimizations of the lighting and our parallel split (cascaded) shadow map algorithm for faster and stable MSAA output." Source: Killzoneunit 9) Final Fantasy XIII (uses SPE enabled White Engine) "The White Engine reportedly uses four of the six developer-available synergistic processing elements (SPEs) of the Cell microprocessor to achieve near-pre-rendered CGI quality in realtime." Source: Play UK through Wikipedia 10) Gran Turismo 5 11) Warhawk "Although I would say it’s the sum-total of all of our natural phenomenon in the game. Our clouds, procedural water, atmospheric scattering, terrain, etc. All of this stuff runs in parallel on all 7 SPUs simultaneously every frame – I’m still not sure if the game community is giving enough credit to just how fast the SPUs really are." Source: PS Blog 12) Untold Legends 13) Uncharted: Drake’s fortune "Like the PS2 the PS3 is a sophisticated and powerful piece of hardware. Our engineers are working very hard at making specific optimizations to take full advantage of the Cell and its SPU's. However, there is so much depth to this machine, that much like the PS2, you will continue to see developers squeeze more and more out of it over the course of what I am sure is going to be a lengthy life-cycle." Source: IGN 14) Infamous "For us, the most exciting part of the PS3 has been the cell processor, the SPUs specifically. In our highest density scenes right now, we are currently using about 30 percent of the SPUs' capabilities--with the SPUs doing lots of heavy lifting for us on rendering, visibility, particle systems, skinning, animation blending, and so on...this with scores of pedestrians, cars, fires, etc., all going on. And the best part? We've not made any significant attempts to even optimize the SPU code. I think it's reasonable to guess we could put 10 times as much stuff on the SPUs and still make our frame budgets. It's really pretty amazing." Source: Gamespot 15) The Getaway 3 - Tech demo 16) Unreal Tournament 3 - Sony developers helping Epic. 17) Ninja Gaiden Sigma "There are games that have thousands of enemies at once, and some of them don’t move or do much. For us it’s about making sure they have goals they are fulfilling and that they can work together with existing enemies. That’s really our philosophy. As far as A.I. goes people have played our game before will see that we’ve made some subtle improvements. A lot of it has to do with using all the Cell’s SPU processors." Source: Next-Gen Gamer "One important thing about the PS3 is the seven SPUs in addition to the main processor, and using those is what allows you to get the best graphic quality. So we have an entire section of programmers which is assigned to figure out how to get those SPUs working on graphics to the fullest. Now we're actually at the point where day-to-day you can see the graphic quality improve before your eyes, so to speak. So if you look at the screenshots we have for you today -- if you look at those compared to what we put out at TGS, there's a big difference in terms of the textures and the atmosphere. You can see the steps we've made since then." Source: 1up

 

Sorry guys I hust read through this post and the last paragraph is laughable. The graphics chip once everything has been processed is what puts the image on the screen. The 360's graphics chip is capable of more effects and is also faster. Even if the cell is faster in the end they will be very close when you see the games side by side in 3 years time. albeit with some better effects on the 360.