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More PlayStation 3 Grid Computing Details
gwernol writes: "Redherring has a good article on Sony's forthcoming PlayStation 3: not too many technical details but good background to the Xbox/PlayStation wars. Sony are touting the use of massively parallel 'cell computing' to get a 1,000 times performance increase over the PS2. This plan, also known as grid computing is also discussed here."
There's so much wrong with this statement.
First - it's not consoles that can't compete with PC's, it's the other way around. PC game sales are miniscule when compared to consoles. Gaming on the PC is restricted to RTS and FPS gaes for the most part - games which take advantage of a mouse/keyboard setup.
People play consoles because they DON'T have to worry about upgrading, or getting drivers to work, or crashes, or any of the other headaches involved in PC gaming. Consoles games just work - the way they're supposed to, every time. And they work the same way on everyone's system.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
you haven't seen anything yet.
In terms of scalability, the uber-parallel-processing-pipelined PS2 makes a lot of sense, and will continue to get more powerful in the future as its software improves. In terms of usability though, the PS2 has irked a lot of console developers because it's an entirely different beast and doesn't behave like a PC when you get down to performance bottlenecks.
The PS3 and beyond can only continue this trend. Sony hopefully won't make the same mistake ease-of-use wise, but the PS3 will be getting tantalizingly close to the "do everything you ever cared to do in a game" performance.
The future of this technology is hugely dependant on software capability to make sense of and utilize it. This will be the biggest hurdle, and clearly nothing like it really exists today.
One of the next big steps may be carbon-nanotube based computing, because it will enable architectures with massive hierarchical processing power and near limitless involatile stupidly fast memory, all embedded everywhere. Carbon (and other) nanotubes will be used for both logic and memory (as well as actual display surfaces), and ultimately be laid out more like a brain than a serial system.
I look foward having a complete system in a display where you push morphing procedures in one end which ultimately get streamed into content on the output side.
The networked aspect will be important too, but not how it's colored in this article. Your games will ineveitably run graphics processing on your local machine, with non-realtime and background tasks offloaded to others on the network. However, distributed simulation of gaming environments will only really make sense when players become the content producers and the worlds expand procedurally to simulate whatever ideas of interest their imaginations have conjured.
Then I just have to ask, when game consoles power the realization of our imaginations, whose world are we going to be living in? [hint: this is rhetorical, don't answer, just think about it]
Every piece of furniture added drastically changed the ambient color of both the room and all the furntiure that had appeared prior. Trying to composite it all over the original base footage of an empty living room in neutral lighting turned out to be an absolute nightmare. And they had months to work on this. Imagine trying to render it in real-time! Trust me, every bit of rendering power the PS3 can churn out will be used.
Really interesting stuff on that DVD. The wealth of geeky behind-the-scenes materials is almost better than the movie itself.