more war notes

I still haven't finished Saint's Row, I'm having tons of fun and just trying to complete all the activites before I start tackling the final missions.


I came across this VERY cool video for Havok 4.0. (Havok is a physics engine used by many great games, Oblivion, Dead Rising and Saint's Row included).


There have been many arguments on TXB regarding Havok 4.0 and how it would work better on the PS3 due to the SPEs.. here is an excerpt that I found quite good:


Argument: "The CELL is complex. The CELL has more potential than the multicore. "


Reply (via Falagard on TXB):

Actually, the CELL is a powerful when it comes to specific operations such as working on vectorized floating point data. In basic terms, the SPEs are very similar to the GPU's shader units - you load up a small program into the SPE and then run that program over a set of data, such as vertices in a mesh. The output of one SPE can be chained into the input of another SPE, so you can do some very interesting things with it if a programmer puts his mind to it.

However, because the CELL only has one general purpose CPU (the PPE), I think programmers will find it LACKING in power because that single CPU cannot run the same amount of game logic tasks that a multi-core system can, and will be the bottleneck to coordinating tasks that run on the SPEs. The SPEs are not general purpose CPUs, they can't be used to do run traditional code. Anything that runs on them has to be designed to work within the constraints of what the SPEs do well - which is work on streams of data. Running AI, game logic, and things of that nature will be very hard to do because it has branching conditional logic which cannot be handled by the SPEs. It can be made to jump through these hoops with a lot of work though, by encoding logic into the data streams the same way that GPUs can be used to do physics even though they weren't initially meant to handle that.

Any programmer would be far happier with 3 general purpose CPUs over the 7 SPEs that are in the PS3. If the PS3 even had 2 general purpose CPUs I'm sure the programmers would be jumping for joy.

Lastly, the cross platform developed games will not be using the SPEs to their fullest extent, but they may be using the 3 cores in the 360 because newer PCs these days are multi-core (general purpose CPUs) and building an architecture that can be shared between the 360 and multi-core PCs is possible, but the PS3 requires a completely different solution. Chances are that cross platform games (such as Assassin's Creed) will choose to ignore the SPEs and only work with the single PPE which means the PS3 ports are actually crippled versions.

This is not because the devs are lazy, it's because it's not worth the effort to completely rewrite the game architecture when all they have to do is render less characters on the PS3 and most of the rest of the game can remain intact.