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>Almost nobody used "cell processors", and for very good reason. Seeing that you edited with a citation from a Volition AP. I guess if you trust sources like t

>Almost nobody used "cell processors", and for very good reason. Seeing that you edited with a citation from a Volition AP. I guess if you trust sources like this - there is no argument possible. >In some extremely rare cases, some game engines found a way to use them for graphics (like Battlefield 3's Frostbite 2 engine towards the deferred lighting passes). But by the time engineers found a way to leverage this extremely complex architecture, it was already too late. You mean like 2007 Uncharted?

jerf 14y ago
It's too late in this cycle to be a fanboy. It is very well established that the cell processors are bandwidth starved and it's hard to feed them. Not impossible, but legitimately hard. This is an architectural fact, not something to be debated anymore. The PS3's internal architecture was poorly balanced. This really hasn't been a secret for a long time, for anyone who can take off the hype goggles. It sounds like the PS4 will not have this problem. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft makes the same mistake; it really won't be a console-gaming win to stick 8GB of slower RAM in the box, then suck away 2 or 3 GB for other purposes. (Probably still won't be as poorly balanced as the PS3 though.)
- pandaman 14y ago
  It's hard to code for SPU. Game programming in general is hard. Yet all 1st party studios and most high profile 3d party used SPU code either of their own or from the libraries that Sony gives. And I agree, PS3 was not a nice architecture compared to 360. PS2 was not nice compared to xbox 1 too. However this just not justify idiotic claims like "nobody used SPU" etc.
- teamonkey 14y ago
  Each console has its strengths and weaknesses. Working on multiplatform games, the 360 version is, more often than not, CPU-bound while the PS3 is very often GPU-bound. But in reality there's very little in it. They're both horribly memory-bound and the 360's Achilles' heel is actually the lack of disc space. But look at something like Halo4. It's had all of Microsoft's drive behind it. Pretty, yes. Significantly better than anything the PS3 could do? Not really, no.

jerf 14y ago

It's too late in this cycle to be a fanboy. It is very well established that the cell processors are bandwidth starved and it's hard to feed them. Not impossible, but legitimately hard. This is an architectural fact, not something to be debated anymore. The PS3's internal architecture was poorly balanced. This really hasn't been a secret for a long time, for anyone who can take off the hype goggles. It sounds like the PS4 will not have this problem. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft makes the same mistake; it really won't be a console-gaming win to stick 8GB of slower RAM in the box, then suck away 2 or 3 GB for other purposes. (Probably still won't be as poorly balanced as the PS3 though.)

pandaman 14y ago
It's hard to code for SPU. Game programming in general is hard. Yet all 1st party studios and most high profile 3d party used SPU code either of their own or from the libraries that Sony gives. And I agree, PS3 was not a nice architecture compared to 360. PS2 was not nice compared to xbox 1 too. However this just not justify idiotic claims like "nobody used SPU" etc.
teamonkey 14y ago
Each console has its strengths and weaknesses. Working on multiplatform games, the 360 version is, more often than not, CPU-bound while the PS3 is very often GPU-bound. But in reality there's very little in it. They're both horribly memory-bound and the 360's Achilles' heel is actually the lack of disc space. But look at something like Halo4. It's had all of Microsoft's drive behind it. Pretty, yes. Significantly better than anything the PS3 could do? Not really, no.