New 'Lair' screenshot (PS3 - Dragons :))

LookingFor

This cropped up in a GDC presentation - looking very nice!



Glad they've added a human element.

The game's budget is apparently $25m! But they plan to spread core technology across two or three projects to help get their money back. Each dragon is scanned from a physical model designed by the same guy that made the dragons for Dragonheart, using a scanner previously only used in movie making - the dragons are made up of hundreds of thousands of polys, with each having full muscle simulation.

projectmayhem

LookingFor wrote:

the dragons are made up of hundreds of thousands of polys, with each having full muscle simulation.

and that is why cell is important. the 360 or PC's under €3000 can't do that without slowing down to a near-halt

Mossy Monk

wow. that looks amazing

i cant wait to see some video. roll on E3

Retr0gamer

projectmayhem wrote:

and that is why cell is important. the 360 or PC's under €3000 can't do that without slowing down to a near-halt

Bull. It's been seen in the next unreal engine that will power a lot of Xbox 360 as well as PS3 games. I doubt we will see Cell replacing multi core processors. Powerful yes, important, I don't think so. It's just 'emotion engine' marketing bull**** from Sony again. Sure the cell isn't anything more advanced than a multi core processor which we will be seening in PC's soon enough any way and that the xbox 360's 3 processors and 6 cores do a fine job of emulating. In fact we will see a lot of power going unused until well into both consoles life spans since multicore processors suffer from similar problems that the dual processor Sega Saturn suffered from.

LookingFor

Retr0gamer wrote:

Bull. It's been seen in the next unreal engine that will power a lot of Xbox 360 as well as PS3 games.

I've yet to see a Unreal3 engine game with character models this complex, not that I'd link that to Cell necessarily..

Retr0gamer wrote:

I doubt we will see Cell replacing multi core processors. Powerful yes, important, I don't think so. It's just 'emotion engine' marketing bull**** from Sony again.

It's funny, because Cell is doing everything that was hyped about EE at the time. Universities and defense companies are lining up to use it. It won't replace the multi-core in your desktop PC, because that wasn't what it was designed to do - but it is winning work versus those CPUs in other spaces.

Retr0gamer wrote:

Sure the cell isn't anything more advanced than a multi core processor which we will be seening in PC's soon enough any way

What, quad-cores? They're more powerful as general purpose cores, but not for what Cell was designed for. Maybe when you have 6 or 8 cores on a chip. Even then, they'll never be as exploited as Cell will be in PS3.

Retr0gamer wrote:

and that the xbox 360's 3 processors and 6 cores do a fine job of emulating.

You can't "emulate" more power. Ultimately you run up against the limits of the hardware.

Retr0gamer wrote:

In fact we will see a lot of power going unused until well into both consoles life spans since multicore processors suffer from similar problems that the dual processor Sega Saturn suffered from.

I agree it will take time for these chips to be tapped, but if devs are getting more out of Cell, earlier, when it's supposed to be even harder to get a handle on, then I think that speaks volumes. And the gap will likely only get bigger over time. I don't think it's yet fair to say that 360 'can't do' dozens of dragons with muscle simulation etc. but the point is, the trend in its games to date has not been toward such detail (not even just graphically, but in terms of physics and simulation), whereas a number of early PS3 games are trending to a very high level of simulation and detail. Reading about some of the stuff that devs are doing in launch games, even, I wonder if the same performance could be got out of 360's CPU with just the same level of effort and development maturity. Like reading of everything the CPU is doing in Warhawk (simulation for hundreds of fighters in combat and all that that entails + the rest the game requires AND volumetric software ray-tracing for the atmospherics), I've my doubts if 360's CPU could keep pace if the team made the same effort on it (at least, when you start throwing in things like raytracing on top of everything else, which Cell excels at, I begin to have doubts).

The Saturn was a totally different beast. On the one hand it was less challenging because the level of parallelism was lower (lower than we saw on PS2, even), but on the other it was just a bitch to program for, had lots and lots of pitfalls, and both CPUs were different to work with.

Retr0gamer

The big problem with the saturn was that the two processors could not be used to split their power to carry out the same task. It's similar to the what multi core processors suffer from, a process can't be split between two cores and can only be proformed by 1 core.

What I'm seeing from the PS3 is some nice graphics using some nice shading effects and other effects. There's no doubt in my mind that the xbox 360 could perform these processes along with all the physics and movement simulations that the PS3 carries out in these demos. Remember that there hasn't been one xbox game that has used every one of it's cores due to developers looking to do PC conversions of their games and dev kits that allow access to more than 1 processor arriving only a few months before release.

jesus_thats_gre

It looks like one of the 3D Mark benchmarks..

LookingFor

Retr0gamer wrote:

a process can't be split between two cores and can only be proformed by 1 core.

Not true. I mean, of course, some tasks are very hard to parallelise, but then some are also trivial. There's parallelism at work on multiple levels in a typical game, that can be exploited.

Retr0gamer wrote:

What I'm seeing from the PS3 is some nice graphics using some nice shading effects and other effects. There's no doubt in my mind that the xbox 360 could perform these processes along with all the physics and movement simulations that the PS3 carries out in these demos.

When? And what will PS3 be doing by that time?

I'd love to see what would happen if you asked a 360 developer to put a ray-tracer on a couple of 360's cores for cloud rendering, as is being done in Warhawk He'd probably laugh. For a while.

Retr0gamer wrote:

Remember that there hasn't been one xbox game that has used every one of it's cores

Untrue. Check out this:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/e/5bec52bd-8f96-4137-a2ab-df6c7a2580b9/Coding_for_Multiple_Cores.ppt

They have case studies in there for PGR3 and Kameo. Both were using all 3 cores. Also look at what they were using them for - stuff that could easily be done as well on a single SPU in Cell. Take, for example, PGR3:

Core 0:
Update, physics, rendering, UI
Audio update, networking"

These two threads could go on Cell's PPE, as they do on a Xenon core.

Core 1:
Crowd update, texture decompression
Texture decompression

Decompression is something a SPU excels at. You could give a SPU to each of these two threads, one for decompression, one for crowd update - the latter would probably leave the SPU idle for a bit.

Core 2:
XAudio

Might surprise you, but a number of devs are dedicated a whole core just to audio. A single SPU would be as good for this as a single Xenon core (maybe even a bit better).

So, we've run out of Xenon cores, but we've got 4 SPUs left over on Cell. I'll let you guess what that might mean for the computational complexity that would be possible on Cell vs Xenon in this instance.

If you look elsewhere in that presentation, they also mention another thing SPUs are really good at - cloth dynamics. They talk about some devs using 100% of a Xenon core just for that, but again that's something a single SPU would be just as good at, if not better (see this: http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/whitepapers/alias_cloth.pdf for example - a single SPU clocked at 2.4Ghz outperforms a Pentium4 clocked at 3.6Ghz!) . If a dev spent 100% of one core on Audio, and 100% of another on cloth, Cell could match that with two SPUs, and leave five free for other things.

projectmayhem

it's also worth pointing out there's a core on CELL dedicated to parity (AA and the like are built-in, as it were). i watched IBM deliver their big speech about this and the crowd were drooling because, in theory, cell can predict when something bad's going to happen (horrible slowdown, AA going to hell, etc.) and corrects it before it happens.

this is why all the quotes say that cell has "7 working cores", because the 8th is set aside for parity

good website

Retr0gamer

All good points but don't you think that the same thing will probably happen on the PS3 with SPU's wasted on just music or physics in the early games just like we are seeing on the xbox360?

I think I'll remain sceptical

LookingFor

projectmayhem wrote:

this is why all the quotes say that cell has "7 working cores", because the 8th is set aside for parity

good website

The 8th is disabled for redundancy. That SPU will be doing nothing. It's so when they're manufacturing the chip, they can still use ones that have a SPU partially or wholly not working. If they were depending on 8 SPUs being available, they'd have to throw away those chips. This way they can improve yields and cost.

Retr0gamer wrote:

All good points but don't you think that the same thing will probably happen on the PS3 with SPU's wasted on just music or physics in the early games just like we are seeing on the xbox360?

Since when is music or physics a waste? The first will probably at most only ever occupy one core or SPU. The latter could occupy several SPUs, but to be quite honest, that'd be one of the best uses for them. A large physics capability is eminently desireable - who doesn't want their games to look and/or behave more realistically? Doesn't have to be physics either, you could throw some SPUs at rendering to help the GPU do even more, ala Warhawk. Or it could be AI, or any combination of these things within the limits of the hardware. Certainly don't consider any of these things to be wasteful - if you want games that are 'next-gen' beyond just prettier textures, you'll want those CPUs to be make things sophisticated on every level.