The power of the Cell revealed (GREAT read)
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Most developers will not unless some "Rosetta Stone" set of tools like XNA come out. Probably won't happen.[QUOTE="rimnet00"]Of course, however it doesn't mean developers will be able to reach that level of optimization. Theoretical computation and real world results are not the same. Oh, and the CELL is part of IBM's technology, of course they are going to say something like that.Dreams-Visions
As such, the "potential" of the PS3 may go down in hsitory as "potential". as "just wait..."
You shouldn't fear the octopiler. See how happy he looks?
GTA4 HDD exclusive? now this must be a joke thread right?
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-celltips1/
This shows that the cells power hasn't even been FULLY utilized... I can't wait for the GREAT exclusive games to come out like MGS4, FF13, GTA4 (hdd exclusive), kill zone 2, and resistence 2. Not to mention the other great EAAA games out like resistance 1, motostorm, and oblivion. With this new information on how to utilize the PS3 it's pretty scary what they can do. Oh and by EAAA i'm going off some other websites. What do you all think of this break through in the cell?
iamthetruth55
AMD and NVIDIA blasted IBM's effort from the math accelerator market.
It's bad CELL's SPEs are being use for fixing NVIDIA's RSX aging design. For today's raster workloads, the RSX/Geforce 7 is an aging GPU.
From forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=57736&page=5
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"I could go on for pages listing the types of things the spu's are used for to make up for the machines aging gpu, which may be 7 series NVidia but that's basically a tweaked 6 series NVidia for the most part. But I'll just type a few off the top of my head:"
1) Two ppu/vmx units There are three ppu/vmx units on the 360, and just one on the PS3. So any load on the 360's remaining two ppu/vmx units must be moved to spu.
2) Vertex culling You can look back a few years at my first post talking about this, but it's common knowledge now that you need to move as much vertex load as possible to spu otherwise it won't keep pace with the 360.
3) Vertex texture sampling You can texture sample in vertex shaders on 360 just fine, but it's unusably slow on PS3. Most multi platform games simply won't use this feature on 360 to make keeping parity easier, but if a dev does make use of it then you will have no choice but to move all such functionality to spu.
4) Shader patching Changing variables in shader programs is cake on the 360. Not so on the PS3 because they are embedded into the shader programs. So you have to use spu's to patch your shader programs.
5) Branching You never want a lot of branching in general, but when you do really need it the 360 handles it fine, PS3 does not. If you are stuck needing branching in shaders then you will want to move all such functionality to spu.
6) Shader inputs You can pass plenty of inputs to shaders on 360, but do it on PS3 and your game will grind to a halt. You will want to move all such functionality to spu to minimize the amount of inputs needed on the shader programs.
7) MSAA alternatives Msaa runs full speed on 360 gpu needing just cpu tiling calculations. Msaa on PS3 gpu is very slow. You will want to move msaa to spu as soon as you can.
Post processing 360 is unified architecture meaning post process steps can often be slotted into gpu idle time. This is not as easily doable on PS3, so you will want to move as much post process to spu as possible.
9) Load balancing 360 gpu load balances itself just fine since it's unified. If the load on a given frame shifts to heavy vertex or heavy pixel load then you don't care. Not so on PS3 where such load shifts will cause frame drops. You will want to shift as much load as possible to spu to minimize your peak load on the gpu.
10) Half floats You can use full floats just fine on the 360 gpu. On the PS3 gpu they cause performance slowdowns. If you really need/have to use shaders with many full floats then you will want to move such functionality over to the spu's.
11) Shader array indexing You can index into arrays in shaders on the 360 gpu no problem. You can't do that on PS3. If you absolutely need this functionality then you will have to either rework your shaders or move it all to spu.
Etc, etc, etc...
[QUOTE="iamthetruth55"]Cell's power will be fully utilized by developers willing to go the extra mile to see performances unlike anything we have EVER seen. Will it take time? Yes, but the wait till be worth it.loftus42I hope your right. But I think your hoping in one hand and shi**ng in the other. And you know which one is gonna fill up first. Just kidding. But you do know this is a risc processor, and it has a lot of problems. These processors (risc) have been around for a while, and the limitations are well known. But again they haven't done it in this way yet. One good thing on the cells side is Intel had released it's road map last week, and they are planning in going the same way that the cell is designed. the only difference is they are using x86 processors. lets hope for the best. I think the cell is just way too early to really take advantage of this technology. there just is not enough experience with multi-threaded applications to do it any justice.
Intel Ivybridge's HD 4000's 16 IEUs can already handle OpenCL.
AMD Radeon HD GCN already includes X86 IP and supports C++ constructs.
Teh Cell, unlimited POWAH
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