Heh,
on the original posting as opposed to graphics / gameplay theme it has turned into ;)
Coming from low level programming (would be called kernel hacking these days) & hardware design background it always cheers me up to see shuch discussions.
Oops dissertation alert sorry folks
Clock speeds, bus bandwidth, number of cores or whatever count for nothing if theyre not used properly.
Take a look at, Linux, Windows or Mac OS X they are totally unable to make proper use of dual core procesors. For the most part they simply offload a single task completely to another core (or processor) such as antivirus, wordprocessor or a game, and leave the rest of the operating system running on the other core. Yeah you get a speed increase but it's not double. Getting interprocess communication (bad enough on a single processor) is more than doubly difficult with 2 processors.
The OS coders can't even cope with multiple processors, and having spent several years being called in to optimise game code that isn't running fast enough I can assure you that the vast majority of games coders wont be able to do it either. TBH many of them cant cope with one processor.
Gabe Newell (of Halflife developers Gearbox), sums up much of the PS3 situation where it looks nice until you try to use it. Search for his comments, yes he is opinionated but unfortunitely he knows what he is talking about
On so called (massively) parallel systems your main code is running across several cores (or processors), if your scheduling is just a little off, you will end up with most of the these tasks stalling becasue you are awaiting data from somewhere else). Multiply that across the several DSPs and processing chips on the PS3 and you get a product that if likely to be a victim of it's own complexity. You are already seeing such issues in the current crop of PS3 games
Google for Inmos Transputer to see the lengths you have to go to for parallel processing (and also see how the UK goverment screwed things up).
Yes the PS3 has a huge potential (as does the 360 BTW), however from friends that still work in the games industry the problem is that Sony give you the hardware but you are on your own in tying it all together.
Anyway I'd love a PS 3 (or a 360 or Wii) for my son (and myself) but I'm too skint ATM.
Regarding the PC,:
Consoles are more cost effective on the whole. But then on a PC (or Mac) you don't actually need antialising & filtering, as when I'm playing games I'm concentrating on not getting killed I don't care worry if theres a texture in the middle distance isn't perfect ;)
GFX cards are expensive as theyre doing a lot of parallel processing, at very high speeds. A while back I wrote some code for breaking some encryption using the GFX card rather than the normal PC processor. Using my cheap (120 quid) Geforce 4 card was about 10 times faster than my then employers fastest server (4 x 3Gig xenons).
Anyway I'm back to breaking Spectrum turbo loaders on a Spectrum emulator now (without using any of the emulators advanced features), becasue this (work) laptop is too slow for anything else (and I'm all maimed out)
Rob...
