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IBM's Radical Cell Processor
Rouslan Solomakhin writes "Forbes has recently posted an article on IBM's new revolutionary Cell processor. Cell is going to enable PS3 developers to create movie-quality games with blazing-speed graphics. Applications in other areas are also considered." From the article: "Some techies say PlayStation 3, which may debut by midyear and could end up in 100 million homes in five years, will usher in the next microchip revolution. The Sony system owes its prowess to a microprocessor called Cell, which was cooked up by chip wizards at IBM (with help from Sony and Toshiba) at a cost of $400 million over five years."
With Apple no longer buying chips from them, they really need to prove themselves.
I lost my signature... help!
Is this a bad link or is that page already slashdotted?
**Outside the Sony Booth being handed fisherman's waders**
[Gabe]: What are these waders for?
[Tycho]: My guess? All the bullshit
It's not that I don't think this chip might be as fantastic as everyone says but since Sony has basically lied out its ass for its past 3 consoles, I'm not giving it the benefit of the doubt with the PS3 and god save any journalist who gets sucked into their schilling.
So, does this mean the PS3 will have more games based on movies?
Forbes has recently posted an article on IBM's new revolutionary Cell
Damn, the enemy within. I can't believe they've infiltrated IBM. Is nowhere safe?
>Cell is going to enable PS3 developers to create movie-quality game
hum...
more like:
Rumours and hype about playstation 3 intended to reduce sales of Xbox 360.
nothing to see here...
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Really? Just like the PS1/2 could do on the fly Toy Story quality graphics? Or did you just get around that by saying movie quality games, rather than games that look like movies, but still implied it?
I have no doubt the cell is going to be impressive, but we are quite along way away from an affordable processor than can replace a render farm (I believe thats what there refered as).
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
...as the summary states.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
More information about the Cell processor directly from the source : The Cell project at IBM Research
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
I'd say almost everyone is in agreement that the Cell processor is a very powerful design, but I don't believe the PS3 will be the best example of what it can really do.
Sifting through what I've read about the PS3, the Cell processor is bottlenecked by a few things including but not limited to memory bandwidth, and a fairly generic pc graphics solution from nvidia (by generic I mean, one of their standard pc products tweaked slightly for use on the PS3).
The "movie quality" games that I'm assuming the article is referring to are the demos shown at places such as e3, which are nothing more than either pre-rendered movies or carefully programmed, high end pc demos (Epic demo with high end pc and 7800 sli config).
I'm not trying to disparage the ps3, nvidia, or IBM. Frankly, I'm a fan of Nvidia and the Cell processor and I truly believe (drm jokes aside) the ps3 will be a solid console, but I think saying that the PS3 with Cell, "...is going to enable PS3 developers to create movie-quality games with blazing-speed graphics" is misleading, ignorant and sensationlist journalism.
$sys$droids
If the new consoles are going to sell in the same numbers as the existing ones then they will outsell Apples by a degree that just ain't funny.
One of the reasons Apple is switching to Intel is that IBM just didn't give a fuck about Apple. Not nearly enough chips in it. It has been Apples problem all along, it never could convince its chip makers to focus on the features its wanted since the real money was in embedded versions of the chips. Were power is less important and running without a fan is super important.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think I've heard of this line couple year back, sometime before or around PS2's lunch date possiblly.
Movies take several years to generate two hours of content. Games are often ten times that long, with a much smaller budget. How can they possibly be of comparable visual quality? and why do people try?
I would much rather have games that concentrate on art instead of graphics. (Rez and Darwinia come to mind as examples of visually impressive games with non-realistic styles. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work well in terms of sales...)
Who wants to develop games that are the quality of holywood movies...?
I guess we will be seeing Cell in servers at some point as well, though not as cheap as in a PS3.
Sony probably won't want anyone to run Linux on the PS3, lest geeks start cranking out PS3 server farms, but hopefully Sony will leave enough backdoors so can we can see the PS3 run Linux (or FreeBSD, or some beta OpenSolaris distro). Knoppix running on the PS3 just about removes the need for a home computer.
Hopefully Sony will create such a backdoor. I mean if they can screw up with a rootkit...
*ducks*
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Kind of a dumb reason to avoid the PS3, considering that it was Sony BMG, wholly unrelated to the Sony games division, responsible for the rootkit. It's a huge company responsible for all kinds of technology, and to boycott Sony entirely would be like avoiding all GM for one mistake, made by one group of people, in a single Pontiac model car. Especially for a device like the PS3 which you can buy in cash, leave the online component alone and use it in total secrecy while wearing your tinfoil hat.
# Erik
Motion pictures made in the 1930s are also, technically, "movie quality", seeing as they're, well, movies....
What exactly does the reporter (and Sony) mean by that statement?
(Oh, yeah, I forgot: "well if they'll be the same quality as some of the movies Hollywood pumps out recently, I'm not buying it...")
I bought Darwinia using Steam (an unjustly slandered distribution platform IMHO) and well -- it's fantastic! I recommend it strongly. The gameplay does get a little repetitive after a while though -- I don't think there's very much in the way of replay value unfortunately.
The nice thing about the game is that it doesn't have a huge amount of art assets, which means that within 10 minutes of purchasing it was fully downloaded and ready to play. (Unlike Day of Defeat: Source, which took several hours).
Pirate Party UK
Going from coding for single-cored CPUs to CPUs with up to 9 cores that perform different functions can't be easy. I don't think Gabe Newell seemed enthusiastic about doing it, either.
If you want to read more about the CELL heres a link for you...
http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/home.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/librar y/pa-fpfxbox/?ca=dgr-lnxw09XBoxDesign
All your base are belong to Google.
Since the first cell product is already shipping. http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3591350722.html we should be able to benchmark the processor pretty soon and find out if it is all a hype or this really is the second coming :-)
The whole design screams "Emotion Engine 2". Having a central core with 8 (7) attached vector units that do most of the work is the next logical (well, or stupid, coding for the VUs on a PS2 was a PITA) step after the two units on the EE.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The Cell won't be terribly well suited for AI either, so you probably don't have much to look forward to. Game AI is typically notoriously branch-heavy and often tends to be mostly integer code (seeing how it is mostly search problems and at worst a neural net or two, no heavy stuff like machine vision since all information is already available). Which the Cell is more or less worthless for.
It annoys me greatly that the Cell is getting the hype it does, not only it is very specialized and as such hard to use, it is not even very innovative. One of the very first proper vector computers, the ILLIAC IV, was based on pretty much exactly the same approach. The Cell would at any rate be absolutely horrible as a general computing chip.
King Kong took how many scores of computers to render? There's no chance the cell processor will be able to do what King Kong looks like in real-time for gameplay, sorry Sony.
stuff |
1. Will it contain a RootKit designed to "expose" my TV to illegal channels?
2. Will it run Linux?
3. Will it have WiFi?
4. in Soviet Russia...aw fuck, it's 3.36 AM, can't seem to think of anything.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
The IEEE Spectrum magazine (surely a better source for Slashdot readers) predicts that Cell will be a winner in the multimedia space, noting that already its going into TVs made by Toshiba.
They also mention Linux on page 2.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Multicore CPUs, and multiprocessor systems, are only going to be as fast as the software can make them. Concurrency is a major focus of software programming research at the moment.
For some more info, check out:
The Free Lunch is Over, the article that sparked the discussion.
A talk Herb Sutter did on the Concur project, a research project into abstracting concurrency, sorry IE only but it's worth it
This story just gave me the notion of how great it would feel for someone to come along and build a machine for Linux.
mistake?
a mistake is forgetting to tighten a bolt, or carry the two, resulting in problems down the line.
sony's rootkit was an intenional and corporate level decision. DRM itself has no justification for existence at all. When confronted with the fact that it does not stop piracy, executives often come clean by putting forth a "positively spun" statement which pans out to, and i paraphrase: "we want to deny the technologically unsavvy of flexibility theyre used to in order to screw them out of money we dont really deserve"
Sony's products arent that great either. most sony stuff i've owned has broken (not broken down.. literally broken like plates break), so i have no trouble with the idea of not buying their flimsy and anticonsumer products.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Don't be fooled by the prints you see of early pictures. The original negatives used for movies in the 1930s were high-resolution monochrome film. The prints you see of them today are marred by age, repeated copying and sometimes a mismatched frame-rate.
The restored print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis is exquisite. The resolution is far beyond anything a playstation will generate, and that's after reconstruction. The original 1927 negative would have been even better.
Metropolis frame
This is a low-resolution capture, but you can see how detailed and high-contrast the frames were. The vignetting around the edges is the major picture issue.
Of course, the effects in those early movies weren't often brilliant, but on a console effects are easy. It's the subtle shading and curves that challenge a playstation.
I'll believe it when I can play one in my hands. If they even come close to the hype, how much more expensive is it to procude a game that looks like a movie. How many game companies will have the talent and money to do this. How many of these games will actually have good gameplay???
You heard it here first, cell-tanic. It's what killed the playstation.
P.S. I don't own a new xbox either. I'll stick my my old console until there are some compelling games to play then decide what to buy... Unfortunately, I'm thinking it's not going to be playstation 3
Is it just me, or are games developers more likely to stick to the tried-and-tested x86/x86_64 arch for their development? New arch, new problems.
Could not open
Sony's role here was funding and coming to IBM with a set of specs that they wanted to see fulfilled. The chip innovations themselves are the work of a design team in Austin combined with a fabrication team in East Fishkill, NY. While Sony may have its own way of marketing the chip's capabilities, IBM (and Toshiba, which also contributed engineers and funding because they'd like to use the chip, too) also has its own plans for the chip, as they regard it as extremely capable when properly programmed. I've personally seen real-time demos on a development system and it's quite impressive.
Actually, the current cell is not particularly useful for scientific applications. They only achieved the speeds they're throwing around by using sloppy single percision floating point. Put the processor into IEEE compliant mode and it's a full order of magnitude slower.
As I understood it, the Cell comes with a VM on top, which will coordinate the actual work done on all pipes. The VM is supposed to use intelligent allocation algo's to schedule compiled code on each Cell. the code can of course be compiled using specific platform compilers for the ps3, just like they did for the ps2. So in fact what is said about the ps3 is true. It's going to be hell to program for it *directly* (where most of the power can be found) but I wouldn`t say it`s going to be impossible for sony to build a line-up of titles at the start.
;)
If there's anybody who has more details about Cell programming, I`m interested!
With great power comes great electricity bills.
It would certainly proliferate the technology and get it into the hands of people that can figure out how to use it. They could stick an entry level GPU on the thing to get directx and opengl independently of the cell and which would free up the cell as a co-processor for graphics or specialized computing but still keep it labeled a cell graphics card.
Cell is going to enable PS3 developers to create movie-quality game
oooh, but i thought the PS2 did that already?
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
"Game AI is typically notoriously branch-heavy and often tends to be mostly integer code"
I don't agree with this. I believe it will still be faster because each core has it's own pipeline. So yes it is more costly to flush the pipeline, but you will have 7 cores working on those multiple AI opponents as opposed to one. Each with it's own pipeline, and each flushing it as needed. Now do we know how wide and long that pipeline is? That will also have significant performance gains or losses.
Now do I believe we will see movie quality games? Well I saw the demo of GT5 and MGS4 and they were both impressive, and if those are the real games then I would say that the PS3 is very close. Time will tell.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Not so fast regarding the AI. True, most todays games' "AI" is scripting (no needed FPU at all). But Cell will probably allow real-time usage of massive neural nets and other FPU-hungry goodies.
"Some techies say PlayStation 3, which may debut by midyear and could end up in 100 million homes in five years, will usher in the next microchip revolution."
You mean the kind of microchip that phones home?
Between the rootkit and the newer, more draconian DRM that's sure to come with the Blu-Ray drive they're putting in every unit, I'm just a little more than wary about buying Sony's next console offering.
Of course one can run anything on the 8 cores, but the fact is that for that type of tasks the Cell will be far from impressive while requiring ridiculously much programmer work.
Other than things like actually training neural nets and support vector machines though I don't really see anything terribly useful in AI actually requiring any particularly impressive amount of FP performance.
I'm reading how good the Cell is... over and over. They show some charts, some schemes, then make statements about advantages. Isn't it just marketing buzz?
If it is so cool why the Apple moved to Intel and not to Cell? Maybe it is a leap forward but maybe it is not. I'll wait and judge when I can put hands on it.
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
Could we all just remember what IBM had in mind when they designed Cell? If you have a read of the Introduction [Pdf warning], you can see they identified the primary bottlenecks to performance, back in 2000, one of the most important problems being memory latency. Now, if you've done some work with assembler, you should know that every time you touch main memory, you loose about 20-30 clock cycles through your memory's low speed. If you want an example, I have a 3GHz computer, but the memory goes at 400Mhz. Just think how much time it must spend waiting for that memory?
Cell counters this problem by using SIMD in combination with what they call "Local Storage". Instead of having to wait for every single memory transfer, threads can read blocks of memory into storage actually on the SPE, process it, and then read it back. All with a couple of instructions, and execution continues even while the memory is been read/written.
The closest that present-day multi-processor computers can get to that is by caching the data. However, that still means that a cache miss will halt execution for many cycles, and each processor / core has to constantly check what other processors / cores have in their caches, ocassionally invalidating them.
What this all adds up to, is a level of efficiency that hasn't been seen before. However, I don't think it's gonna be anyway near "movie quality" graphics, you'd need a farm of Cells for that.
My impression is that the technology surrounding the x86, e.g., the system bus, etc., has had a lot more development geared towards whatever PC's are typically used for (like desktop and server stuff), whereas the PowerPC line, and certainly the Cell, have not. This would have been due to x86 having such a large market share and many companies and people targetting there development towards it. This resulted in the x86 system architectures outpacing smaller-share competitors and being able to deliver much more performance, as far as a desktop, server, or scientific user is concerned. So Apple, which produces computers mainly targetted towards the desktop, decided to go with x86 CPUs to finally stop being hamstrung by "the rest of the computer". Apple can design a basically good motherboard, but they're the only ones doing it for the PowerPC on the desktop. x86 has 20 companies doing it, and with that amount of effort and competition, the results are better.
Apple's other problem with selling computers is that low third-party software availability makes the hardware less attractive. I assume that while it won't necessarily be any easier to port a Windows/x86 program to OSX/x86, it won't be any harder. It will be easier though for them to put some kind of emulation layer in there to make it easier for Windows progams or "half-ported" programs to run, or at least have a virtual PC that will run Windows to run Windows programs (or dual-boot). Reports from friends who run current Macs though are that OS/X is not the most stable operating system. I believe it probably has a better general software architecture and code, just that it hasn't gotten as much testing or rigorous use due to the smaller size of Apple and its user base. Windows (surprisingly) seems much more stable than OS/X. So the wisdom of running Windows inside of a virtual PC inside OS/X is debatable. With the increase in market share for Apple that I think will be coming, their reliability may improve. I'd certainly prefer to work with a Unix-based system and clean OS API over the pile of closed spaghetti code that is Windows. I think they're counting on people deciding that an Apple computer that can run either OS/X or Windows is better than a non-Apple computer that can only run Windows.
(Sorry, that went offtopic).
Cell 250 GFlops. Nvidia's latest GTX 7800 - 200 GFlops. Ok, ok. first is CPU, the second one is GPU. too bad we can't use GPU's for distributed computing though. :)
Cell has 9 cores. Intel want's his power-consuming, thermal dissipation-unfriendly processor with 32 cores out in 2 years.
32 cores.
32 cores.
anybody getting me?
WTF? Can't they just DECREASE wasting of electrons between transistor gates?
MIT or Boston or X university have developed a way to decrease this waste by 2 or more times...
Xatrix Security - Computer Security news portal
The Cell will render King Kong in real-time just like the PS2 rendered Toy Story in real-time. W00t DVDs.
I hear it also will cure cancer! Go Sony!
The whole multi core idea for gaming is all hype right now. Most games do not even take advantage of it yet, and when they do it will mostly be used for additional in game physics etc. The graphics are still controlled by your GPU for the most part. It will take some time until developers can get their hands around developing multi threaded games. I also don't know how this makes game development any easier. In fact, I've read some things that indicate that cross platform games (you see alot from EA, Sega, etc), are hindered by programming to use multiple threads on the individual systems. Porting the games across platforms could be painful. I wonder how long it took to make Geometry Wars on Xbox 360 and how many threads it uses. I think its the best game out of the lot.
Assuming that Apple gets VMWare to produce virtual PC support, wouldn't it be running on Darwin rather than OS/X itself? Assuming that Apple sticks with its superior open boot technology, the task of producing a reliable VMWare version could be relatively simple. If VMWare can produce reliable workstation versions that run on numerous Linux flavors, surely they can do the same for Darwin.
Strangely, until recently I couldn't actually see a use for X86 OS/X. But if Apple can produce some good, reliable, fast hardware with a decent VMWare implementation, I can see a way to getting solid off-the-shelf developer machines without having to build them from components all the time.
Pining for the fjords
Great article - here are some of the hardware details:
...
...
:). It offers 12 uni-directional byte-lanes which are 96 wires. Each lane may transport up to 6.4GB/s, which make 76.8 GB accumulated bandwidth. 7 lanes are outgoing (44.8 GB/s) and 5 lanes incoming (32 GB/s). There are cache coherent (CPU interconnect) and non coherent links (device interconnect) and two cell processors can be connected glueless. ...
[Quotes from "The Cell Processor - A short Introduction" by Torsten Hoefler - bracketed comments are mine.]
A single Cell, essentially a Network on Chip, offers up to 256 GFlop single precision floating point performance.
A prototype was produced with 90nm silicon on insulator (SOI) technology with 8 copper layers (wiring). It consists of 241 Million Transistors on 235 mm^2 and consumes 60-80W.
The Power Processing Element (PPE) [1 per chip] offers the normal PowerPC (PPC) ISA. It is a dual threaded 64 bit power processor which includes VMX (aka Altivec which is comparable to SSE). Its architecture is very simple to guarantee high clock rates. Thus, it uses only in order execution with a deep super scalar 2-way pipeline with more than 20 stages. It offers a 2x32kB L1 split cache, a 512kB L2 cache and virtualization.
Synergistic Processing Element [7 for game console (IIRC), or 8 per chip]- The SPE is essentially a full blown vector CPU with own RAM. Its ISA is not compatible to VMX and has a fixed length of 32 Bit. Current SPEs have about 21 Million Transistors where 2/3 of them are dedicated to the SRAM (memory). The processor has no branch prediction or scheduling logic, and relies on the program- mer/compiler to find parallelism in the code. As the PPE, it uses two independent pipelines and issues two instructions per cycle, one SIMD computation operation and one memory access operation. All instructions are processed strictly in-order and each instruction works with 128 Bit compound data items. 4 single precision floating point units and 4 integer units offer up to 32GOps each. The single precision floating point units are not IEEE754 compliant in terms of rounding and special val- ues. [denormalized numbers - +0, -0, +/-inf, etc.] The single precision units can also be used to compute double precision floating
point numbers which are compliant to the IEEE754 standard. But their computa-
tion is rather slow (3-4GFlops)....each SPE has it's own 256kB RAM which is called Local Storage (LS). This SRAM storage can be accessed extremely fast in 128 bit lines. Additionally, each SPE has a large register file of 128 128 bit registers which store all available data types. There is no cache, virtual memory support or coherency for the Local Storage...
The Element Interconnect Bus [1 per chip] - The EIB is the central communication channel inside a Cell processor, it consists of four 128 bit wide concentric rings. The ring uses buffered point to point commu- nication to transfer the data and is therewith scalable. It can move 96 bytes per cycle and is optimized for 1024 bit data blocks. Additional nodes (e.g. SPEs) can be added easily and increase only the maximal latency of the ring.
The I/O Interconnect - FlexIO The I/O Interconnect connects the Cell processor (the EIB) to the external world, e.g. other cell processors
The Memory Interface Controller The MIC connects the EIB to the main DRAM memory, which is in this case Rambus XDR memory which offers a bandwidth of 25.2 GB/s. The memory is ECC protected...
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
There are scientific applications where single-precision is sufficient that do not need denormalized values, or use them infrequently enough that the special cases can be handled in software.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
IMHO OoO execution is not at all important for an embedded processor such as that found in a game system. Since the physical processor and system is known, instructions can be reordered by the compiler.
Additionally the Cell is not a traditional vector processor. Each of the 8 nodes can be made completely independent, and can function in a sort of SMP mode. I took a class in Parallel Computer Architecture last semester and we covered the Cell processor in detail.
While coding for the cell is very different from coding for other cpus I don't think it will require massive amounts of programmer work -- just careful research and design.
Cell counters this problem by using SIMD [wikipedia.org] in combination with what they call "Local Storage". Instead of having to wait for every single memory transfer, threads can read blocks of memory into storage actually on the SPE, process it, and then read it back. All with a couple of instructions, and execution continues even while the memory is been read/written.
The closest that present-day multi-processor computers can get to that is by caching the data. However, that still means that a cache miss will halt execution for many cycles, and each processor / core has to constantly check what other processors / cores have in their caches, ocassionally invalidating them.
What this all adds up to, is a level of efficiency that hasn't been seen before. However, I don't think it's gonna be anyway near "movie quality" graphics, you'd need a farm of Cells for that.
The Cell is not that new of an idea. Just look up the various TI 32xxx series of DSPs (RISC core plus a number of DSPs) which are at least/nearly 10 years old. The idea of this "local storage" is just high speed SRAM on a chip that has a bunch of DMA engines to it. Again, see many DSPs - particularly the SHARC (and again, nearly 10 years old in production). And, of course, SIMD is as old as the hills relatively.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3591350722.html
Jan. 10, 2006
The first product based on IBM/Toshiba/Sony's Cell processor has shipped, reports Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury's Cell Technology Evaluation System (CTES) is a 470-pound behemoth with one or two dual-Cell blades running Linux. It targets defense, medical, and industrial inspection markets.
The CTES system is available with one or two of Mercury's Dual Cell-based Blade units. Each Blade features two Cell processors clocked at 2.4GHz, and running Linux in SMP (symmetric multi-processing) mode. Each Blade also has 512MB of "XDR" SDRAM, a 40GB hard drive, and dual gigabit Ethernet interfaces (dual PCIe Infiniband HCA add-in cards will be available in Q2). The Blades run a net-bootable Yellow Dog Linux variant called "Y-HPC" that was developed by Terra Soft Solutions, one of Mercury's VARs (value-added resellers).
The CTES system is housed in a 19-inch, 11U IBM Blade-Server chassis with a Web-based management module, dual gigabit Ethernet switches, and an "acoustic attenuation module." Additional components include a 17-inch flat-panel display with integrated keyboard and touchpad, 2000-Watt power supply, and an Intel Xeon-powered IBM xSeries 336 PC Server development and simulation system (a dual-PowerPC alternative will also be available) running RedHat Fedora Core 4 Linux. The system measures 34.4 x 20.5 x 24 inches, and weighs 470 pounds.
On the software side, an included IBM SDK offers compilers and gdb's (GNU debuggers) for the Cell processor's PPE (Power processor elements) and SPE (synergistic processor elements), along with a Cell simulator, and PPE and SPE libraries that support 32-bit PPE applications.
CTES additionally integrates a variety of Eclipse-integrated Mercury middleware, including its MultiCore Framework (MCF), aimed at managing the distribution of data across multiple computing elements working in tandem; its Scientific Algorithm Library (SAL); its Parallel Acceleration System (PAS); and its Trace Analysis Tool and Library (TATL).
Randy Dean, Mercury's VP of business and technology development, stated, "Our customers have expressed high expectations with the implementation of the Cell Technology into their application development."
Availability
The CTES is available now to "early access" customers at an undisclosed price.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
I distinctly remember the PS2 being marketing with the same "movie quality graphics" line prior to its launch.
Marketing weasels - you gotta love 'em!
Just what we need. More uninformed Cell zealots that don't understand the Cell's weaknesses. Even better, they'll be management types that can't be reasoned with because they don't understand anything past the word "parallelism".
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Hoping that the compiler will manage to do much useful is much too optimistic, it is true though that the Cell is quite doable in a game system compared to more generic settings.
Additionally the Cell is not a traditional vector processor. Each of the 8 nodes can be made completely independent, and can function in a sort of SMP mode. I took a class in Parallel Computer Architecture last semester and we covered the Cell processor in detail.
The cell is a bit of a hybrid, for one each of the SPE's is a SIMD processor, which one can consider a short vector processor, in addition the SPE's are set up to be able to work in sequence on a piece of data, which is pretty obviously a vector setting.
While coding for the cell is very different from coding for other cpus I don't think it will require massive amounts of programmer work -- just careful research and design.
Careful research and design is what takes time. Writing for a single SIMD unit in one of the more normal general purpose CPU's of today is tricky enough, daisy-chaining 8 is pretty damn tough.
The kind of problems that are feasible on the Cell in the scope of a game is really only algorithms that can be picked up from parallel computing research. Being able to actually develop any useful algorithm within the relativly short development cycles of games seems very unlikely.
For the exact reasons you say. If they don't have some software to help, then the new games will be no better looking than PS2 games and it'll stunt the platform.
And Katamari Damacy would be made for exactly the reasons you state. Using all the power of the machine would entail too much development cost, so a fun but not technically magnificent game would be made.
This will happen a lot on both 360 and PS3 is my guess. 360 already is showcasing "microgames" like Geometry Wars.
I do think that all but the highest-line titles will not make the full effort to max out the machine on graphics (actually, this is the case on PS2 and 360 also) due to development costs. But Sony will do everything they can to make it possible for the average game to have better graphics and use the new hardware well, just like MS will.
The current generation has a lot to offer outside of what would be done on the specialized processors. Good wireless controllers and HDTV just might be enough to get people to buy a new console once it hits a reasonable price. And for some playing Blu-Ray discs helps too.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Does anyone else remember that this was reported over a year ago?
Of course, the inclusion of Cell in the PS3 was only a rumor at the time.
My friend at a video game company has been saying everyone much prefers working on XBox 360 than the PS3, and the biggest complaint is no one really knows how to write the high performance code Sony boasts about. Also, he says Sony's developer support has gone down hill and Microsoft has been bending over backwards to help developers working on 360 games.
Anyone else in the game industry care to confirm/refute this?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
From a pedantic point of view, Sony has only released two consoles so far. How can you say they've lied out their ass about 3 consoles? Is it because you somehow know the new one doesn't measure up? Is it your special fanboy sixth sense that gives you the ability to know that?
Additionally, I don't remember PS1 being a disappointment at all. Toshinden was ready for PS1 at launch in JPN, and look great. It played well too, but it had 3-d fighters and 3-D backgrounds. By the time the US PS1 launch rolled around months later Battle Arena: Toshinden was ready with further improved graphics including use of transparency in the backgrounds (waterfall). Meanwhile on Saturn, they had Virtua Fighter which by the US release wasn't even texture mapped! Do you remember receiving your free "VF 1.5" CD in the mail from Sega? I do. And it still didn't look as good because the backgrounds were not 3-D and the platform itself couldn't even do transparency (it used stipples instead).
PS1 handily beat the competition on technical merit and games.
So I don't get your complaints there. Perhaps they are with PS2?
PS2 isn't as clear cut, but as a performance thing, I have to say it works for me, despite a truly bad architecture (very little VRAM) that could have sunk it. It is long in the tooth right now, but it is at the end of its life-cycle.
But is it a failure? Did Sony lie out their ass? Not that I noticed. Yea, they hyped it a bit. Who doesn't? There were references to Toy Story-graphics made, but Toy Story was the big thing at that time and MS made them also for Xbox. It was the first all-CG movie ever. Should I bitch at Bally-Midway because they made two TRON arcade games back when it was new, and neither was even 3D? That's a much more major failing at matching movies. Yes the two games were quite fun (one is a saught-after classic), so why complain?
I would note that except for Dolby Digital, PS2 has actually kept up with the times quite well. This was a platform that wasn't even advertised or planned to do 480p when it came out, and yet does 480p in a fair number of games now and even does 1080i in one (GT4)! It even bested Xbox in the Sim-racing graphics wars of 2005. GT4 definitely has better/fancier graphics than Forza (and has 1080i support while Forza maxes out at 480p), although Rallisport Challenge 2 is still the best looking racing game of its generation (maxes out at 480p, although it looks so good there's no way to complain). And the biggest/most fun racing game of 2005 turned out to be neither GT4 nor Forza but Burnout 3.
As to Sony claiming the CPU would be the new PC CPU, I don't remember that. I don't think Sony thought they would unseat x86. I do remember them saying the PS2 chipset (I'll call it the EE although it's really more than that) would be used in other things. For the most part this wasn't true, but they did ship a PVR using the EE in JPN (the PSX). They also attempted to license the chipset for use in TVs and set-top boxes, but no one took them up on it, probably wisely.
Sony also has plans to use the new (Cell) chipset in TVs/media devices again. Go back and find the Digital Reality Creation 2 announcement, it sounds a lot like it uses a Cell chipset.
Why they keep saying this stuff is basically because they partner with Toshiba to make a custom chipset for them (in this case they even built a new fab specifically for it). When you make that kind of investment, both companies tend to get thinking about how they could use the chip even more, thus making even more profit off a fixed asset (the fab). It is a Japanese tendency to wax poetic about the future of a significant new design/advance like this, and often it doesn't come true. I mean, you can't go buy an Asimo down at your Honda dealer, can you?
I like my 360. The games are almost universally awful, but the hardware is good. I have high hopes for it. But I also have high hopes for PS3. PS1 and PS2 have been very good consoles, and had plenty of titles worth buying the consoles for. So I expect PS3 will be good too. I have to say I find the $400-$500 price ridiculous, but then again, I did buy a 360 at that ridiculous price.
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...but this time they really, super mean it!
The question remains, were there any quality movies this year?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I know, I know, RTFA, but when I read the blurb on the front page of slashdot containing the following phrases:
new revolutionary
create movie-quality games
blazing-speed graphics
PlayStation 3
100 million homes in five years
usher in the next microchip revolution
prowess to a microprocessor called Cell
chip wizards at IBM
I get the sick feeling that the article has a more then slight bias, and I will get no real information from it.... but thats just me
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
Hmm...
The new PlayStation will be revolutionary... it will mark a breakthrough in computing power. It will cook your dinner. It will smite your enemies. It will do your job for you.
It's the same absolutely false and empty promises they hyped the PS2 with -- which, incidentally, killed off the Dreamcast. I have trouble believing anything about any Sony product now until the thing is actually in front of me.
All's true that is mistrusted
Sony said the same thing about the PS2 (toy story quality real-time renders), and we all know how it turned out (looks great to be sure, but nowhere near Toy Story quality). The cell's strength is the sheer amount of parallel processing units, and it's weakness is that each *individual* unit is underpowered by today's standards. Currently, game makers are not the best multi-threaded programmers. If they can make the transition from 1-2 threads to 8 threads, then this will get interesting. If not, then the PS3 won't seem as giant a leap as they say it will be.
Not going to happen, especially at an introductory price of $500+ The PS3 will sell well, but it will also cost Sony a fortune to subsidize it for a few years. Unlike Microsoft, Sony needs their game division to be profitable ASAP because it's one of the few divisions they have that makes money right now. So, Sony needs quite a few killer apps right out of the gate to help soften the blow of eating a substantial amount per console sold.
The vast majority of the expense in adding another AI character to a scene is that each does a proximity query, maybe some Line-of-Sight tests, has its skeleton animated, does collision detection with its environment, has a shadow calculated and then renders a few thousand elegantly shaded triangles. Now the Cell will do each of these heavily-linear, heavily FP tasks at full speed in parallel.
The AI Logic section isn't even a blip. "Lots of branches" won't affect performance until 'Lots' becomes a few hundred thousands, where a typical AI does a few dozens maybe a hundred per frame.
If you have wicked enough code that the branching and integer calculation in AI Logic is your bottleneck, then the Cell has done its job! Maybe the Cell architecture isn't revolutionary, it was designed by many of the same people who designed the Supercomputers that were its precursors. The revolutionary part is that it is so low cost with such low energy consumption.
Combining all the necessary computational power of current games, the percentage of processing time devoted to AI is completely insignificant to the computations required for multimedia. Games use very simple 'AI' (if you can even call it that in the field of AI), I doubt next-gen game is going to be shipped with the neural nets that you mentioned.
Back 10 years ago, you need to constantly upgrading your processor to keep up with the demands of game rquirements. Now, you will likely see that your old 2.4GHz works just fine on newly-released games. The reason is because the bulk of the computational power is serviced by the video card.
The PS3 is the same way. It is designed to take the load of computation-heavy processes such as multimedia and 3D applications. And guess what? That is what a console is.
Did this guy come back from the future to publish this article? Check out the date...01.30.06
I don't bear Sony's gme division any bad blood, but you won't find me buying any Sony CDs. Or any CDs from the RIAA, for that matter. The RIAA's has, in recent years, proven themselves unworthy of my trust, my respect, and my dollar.
/. being hijacked by people's personal agenda. i.e. How Patents/DRM sucks, or how MS sucks, or how Apple's proprietary shit is the bee's knees, and Sony's isn't. It's all fine when it's on-topic and relevent, but can we please have an intelligent discussion rather than digressing into irrelevent bashing?
I'm sticking to indy artists that torrent and http their stuff, as well as my existing CD collection, and CDs I buy at shows.
My view is that we should be supporting the artists while screwing the middlemen. That's the only way to rid ourselves of the middlemen.
Please, mod parent down. . .
Clearly off-topic. I'm tired of every topic in
The Cell won't be terribly well suited for AI either
I don't see why not. Each vector processor should be particularly good at, e.g., evaluating or training a single neural net. And while it is true that most AI algorithms today are not suited to parallelism, don't forget that most games have a bunch of stuff going on at once (maybe 10 enemies on screen at a time that need AI, plus physics, graphics, etc). The game itself is inherently parallelizable, so the AI algorithms don't have to be.
Cell-Processor.net has a lot more info and resources if you are interested in the Cell.
A little bit of evidence that the Cell will probably work as advertised is that Mercury Computer Systems is shipping Cell based evaluation systems intended for the following industries:
"medical imaging, industrial inspection, aerospace and defense, seismic processing, and telecommunications"
Given that companies (both sellers and buyers) perform due diligence before jumping into something like this, and IBM's track record with processors (especially recently, Power4, Power5, etc.), I'm inclined to believe Cell won't disappoint.
It's a beautiful processor... in spite of being inorder. I think it will work in games once developers figure out how utilize the architecture properly. Again, so much of how successful this platform is depends entirely on the compiler and the quality of tools provided. The thing about having Cell in a game console is that it allows developers a chance to really get down and dirty with a platform, something a PC developer never really gets to do. We won't see the 'movie-quality' games anytime soon... realistically it will be a year or two minimum, but there is the power there to do some impressive stuff. Really tho'... I think it will be best in high-performance application specific stuff... maybe replacing DSPs/FPGAs?
Damn, my latest batch of modpoints expired last night, otherwise I'd mod it up more.
You're saying the PS3 can't make "movie quality" games because it's leashed with a run-of-the-mill PC graphics chip. Then you say even the demos are overblown because they're shown on run-of-the-mill PC graphics chips.
I don't get your drift. The graphics chip in the PS3 is expected to be an NVidia 7800 equivalent. That's a lot of power. At 1280x720 and 1920x1080 this puppy should scream.
As to your comments about choked on bus bandwidth, that's all directly from the mouth of MS. MS added up the sum total of all the busses in their system and then compared to some figures from Sony and pronounced that the PS3 doesn't have as much bandwidth.
Throughput depends as much on design and interconnection of the busses as their rated burst speed. And summing busses is completely ridiculous. I mean, if you do that, a machine with SATA 3.0Gb/sec to its optical drive (which maxes out at about 240Mb/sec) looks far faster than one which has a PATA ATA/100 (800Mb/sec) interface even though neither can use that speed anyway.
We'll see some amazing things on screen. I think the hardware is definitely good enough on both platforms that it'll be difficult/expensive for developers to max out the hardware anyway.
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I don't see the Live stuff as a problem for developers. Are you saying EA wouldn't be happier just integrating Call of Duty 2 into the PC gaming community instead of having to have a separate realm of 360 players whom are limited to 8 players/game by Live limitations?
Now, it might hurt Sony in the gamer community, we'll just have to see.
As to the PS3 docs being in English, I don't think there's much chance of that. Sony may be headed by a Brit, but they're still Sony.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Doing separate AI over the game-state as a whole on each SPE is not a good way to go either since the SPE's means of memory access isn't that great, and memory access is where it hurts. The intent of the SPE's is very clearly to operate a lot on its little piece of private memory (256 kilobytes) and the data-passing between the SPE's, doing random-access work over the whole gamestate will work poorly.
If one does not manage to leverage the SIMD'ness though the performance suddenly becomes a whole lot less impressive even under ideal parallelized conditions. Even then considering the SPE's as proper PowerPC cores is quite flawed, the means of random-access memory access just don't exist on that level. They are very clearly intended to work with their 256 kilobytes of private memory and to pass small pieces between each other. Other than that they can DMA in a large block with high latency, but doing general purpose computation with random access will cause horrible performance.
Several years for a good movie? Where are you from? Idiotville? Few movies go over production time of 2 years, and that includes editing and sound. Even the Lord of the Rings movies took only 3 years *doing them all at the same time*, which comes out to guess what, 1 year apeice for those long, graphics intensive movies. Games take 10 times longer? what? Are you even going to say anything relatively coherent? Most games take between 1-3 years to make. Anything more and you have to rewrite what you've already written.
Furthermore, clarify what you mean between "art" and "graphics", as someone with a dictionary would probably think you mean the same goddamn thing. Do you mean "art" as in the "art of games"?
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
I can't speak for the 68K, because, I don't know how that one ended (it seems that Moto didn't have any issues with Apple using their processors from Lisa on up to 68040 and the advent of the PPC). Heck, NEXT was looking at the Moto 88000 and that got axed. IBM delivered PPC 601 that Apple snapped up, through the 603 and 604 (and 604e), but those stalled. Then moto took over with the G3 and G4 and got stalled for the longest time at 500 mhz, (when Intel was past 1Ghz). It took Moto forever to break through 1.5 Ghz. Apple's only out was dual processor and vector processing, and this was true even when Apple switched back to IBM for the G5, and it stalled (been waiting 3 years for 3Ghz) while on one of the world's most modern fabs (Killfish) with yield problems. Apple demands a lot, true, but, IBM and Moto couldn't deliver the PPC that they promised. Ever.
Yeah, it did some 2D stuff better. I never saw Alpha blending done on Saturn. Every game I saw used stipples (patently obvious if you used the S-video output, but low-pass filtering on the composite output hid it). I know Alpha blending was possible because the Saturn had much more CPU power than the PS1. You could surely have gotten on of the SH-2s to do some blending.
Internal memory on the Saturn was not a good thing. It meant you couldn't take your save games over to a friend's place. It also meant when you filled up memory you were boned (although it did have a cartridge slot, did someone make backup memory for that?). It didn't even really save money at least in my case since Saturn cost $399 at launch. I could get a $299 PlayStation and a memory card and still have money left over.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Cell processor runs you!
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
I didn't realize Forbes was a techie mag, I always thought it was for rich guys who made their money selling sugar water. I'll have to check it out. I assume I'll see articles for quants on derivative pricing side-by-side with Cell VLSI how-to's.
[ducks...]
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
The PowerPC was jointly designed and developed by this alliance.
a rs/1
You can read here:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/ppc-1.
I've read about AMD's planned multicore technology, and I've heard that it will be far better than Cell or even Intel's multicore plans.
In my opinion, it is certainly 960x540. Regular 1080i is 1920x1080 30 times a second (in two fields), this would be 960x540 60 times a second. You're right, the PS2 video hardware just can't do anything past 1024x768 (and that's 16-bit), so it has to be a lot lower than that. 960x540 may seem anemic, but the Xbox is only doing 640x480 (perhaps 720x480), so the PS2 scores a clear resolution victory.
It isn't really scaled up, since the signals have the same timings as as 1080i signal, your TV samples it at a higher rate than it is emitted. So it isn't scaled up anywhere, it is simply interpreted differently by the TV than it was emitted.
I did notice the zones in the replays. I figured they were just trying to simulate depth of field. Either way, it doesn't look all that good, does it?
I do agree the vehicle appearance is mixed. Some vehicles look better in Forza, for the most part, I would say the vehicle models are better in GT4. This is shown by the high-res snapshots you can take in the game. But it's clear the highest fidelity models aren't used in-game. In-game, I think that the cars virtually always look better in replays on GT4 than on Forza. While racing (in-car), it's a toss-up, as you say, some cars look better in GT4, some look better (a lot better) in Forza.
The big difference is beyond the cars.
The track looks like smeary crap in Forza. It's too bad, because it's actually better modelled, with dynamic tire skid marks and everything. But the colors are so muted that it just comes off as a muddy mess. The track walls come off the same way. A real shame.
In GT4, the track and track walls are very contrasty, which is likely not realistic. But it works very well in the game. It's important you can see where to turn, and on some tracks in Forza it is difficult to tell which way the track is turning and where.
Beyond the track walls, sometimes Forza looks good. The trees look good. But other things don't look as good.
The real clincher is this: both games have a downtown New York. And the city (the parts outside the track) look much better on GT4 than on Xbox.
All in all, a very impressive win for the aged PS2 over the more graphically capable Xbox.
I've played Forza in 720p on 360 in emulation mode. It doesn't look any better except for the trees. The car models and textures just aren't very high-res. The bad news is that the frame rate is terribly low. When driving down the esses in Road Atlanta, the frame rate drops to about 4 (I'm not kidding). I suppose this might be fixed some day, but right now it's a killer. Oh, and there's no way to use your own music in the game in emulation, so you have to put up with that awful built-in music. Whoops.
Of course, PGR3 looks great. It definitely has the best computer version of the N-ring I've played so far. Too bad the driving model isn't up to par. Don't get me wrong, it's very good for an arcade racer, but as a veteran of sim racers, the model doesn't pass muster.
It's good to see there's someone else out there who both likes racing games (I guess) and isn't completely polarized over this stuff.
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But ah, there's a problem.
Game code, especially these days is BIG. Million line codebases are commonplace. Of those hypothetical million lines, perhaps 10-15% is real nitty gritty hand tweaked, down-to-the-metal stuff (maybe a tad higher with the heavyweight 3rd party physics engines like Havok). But the reality is, in volume the vast vast majority of game code is random access, ordinary-programmer written, spaghetti-like stuff. It is engineered to really hammer the heck out of the gobs of available ram on modern hardware (256+). It is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing that the Pentium excels at.
Here's the rub. These vaunted Cell processors only have 256k (that's kilobytes, friends) of ram accessible to them. No sharing of main ram, or ram between the Cells. You gotta go to DMA (very fancy on the PS3) to do that. That 256k, incidentally, is shared between code and data.
If you can tell me how you're going to cram 800,000 lines of random access code into convenient 256k bundles at a time, using (armies of) "normal" programmers and non-infinite amounts of time, well....you da man. The difficulty of doing this (forget about reverse engineering existing codebases onto the thing) cannot be understated. Most houses simply aren't going to be able to do this. The classic example is AI code. Imagine writing your little A* search on a modern pathfinding graph. You're talking megabytes of data. How you gonna do this in 256k at a time? Well, you probably can, but instead of the 15 minutes it would take you to do it normally, it's going to take you days (not including training on the darn hardware) to do this. Multiply that by the 5,000 other marginally complex bits of code in the game.
Simply put, Cell architecture of the PS3 is going to artificially impose huge additional complexity and overhead for programmers who are working on systems that are already becoming too hard.
Modern AAA titles are mega hard, $20 million dollar, 3 year affairs. Many many companies are incapable of pulling them off properly on "normal" hardware. The PS2 threw people for loops for several years until the general knowledge base was large.
So what's going to happen? Well, the same thing as with the PS2. People are going to compile their code to run on the main processor (a weakish Mips processor, of which the 360 has 3), drop in the "obvious" Cell code (graphics, physics) and then hand port little morsels of the rest of the code to the Cell processors as they can. This will result in pathetic speedups, and the gigantic horsepower hidden within the Cell units will remain unused. Because such a disproportionate amount of processing power is in the Cell processors, the overall utilization of your average PS3 game is going to be pathetic. Compare the PS2 games at launch to now (where "now" == totally optimized) - huge difference right? Well, the "worst" PS3 code is going to be proportionally far far worse.
Not a few people have wondered if Sony chose this direction because it would force developers who want to make top flight games to write their code
Yes, there will be the whiz-bang amazing games. But not many. There will be kickass studios that can really nail the hardware. But not many. Consequently, a box which at least on paper has a comparable graphics card, and FAR more processing power will lose bigtime to the 360 because at least the 360 is approachable.
It's really, really nasty.
Well, IANAD (not a dev) but i can imagine how games can easily cost less to develop.
For games you need to make the character models, worldmap, set the effects, etc. For movies you have to do something similar for many scenes. However, whereas a movie will usually rush through that scene and much of the artwork used will only be on the screen for a few minutes or less. In the game you will usually spend a great deal more time in a map or whatever the environment in which the character roams around is called.
You can reuse textures and make walls for a 5 story building with a similar texture throughout the entire building. There will be quite a few other things in the building (well thats oversimplifying but it's still true) but a lot of that can also be repeated. You can have teh player spend one hour or 4 hours in just one of these maps/environments.
Currently, the ps3 should easily have enough graphics power to outdo old movies like toy story or match it on regular old ntsc tv's. HDTV will be a bit harder to match the quality on but i don't think it will be too far off.
Hmmm... Pie...
...don't buy a cell processor.
Single percision is often sufficient, but their single percision mode isn't IEEE complaint, and doesn't support a full range of floating point ops. This implementation was very much driven by the requirements of media and graphics.
It'll be interesting to see if IBM applies the same basic design philosophy to a more general purpose implementation though.
The article writes, "The new Cell didn't deliver the 1,000X gain that Sony wanted--but it did deliver 50X." At least 50x is better than the improvement of the PS2 over the PS1.
Go Gusties
There's no doubt about that in my mind.
I dug up an old review I did of Forza (esp. vs GT4), and reposted it. Here's a link.
On the Clarkson thing. I have to disagree, Forza did not get those things right. It got more right (see my review), but in Forza, turn 1 still doesn't exist, just like in GT4. Clarkson seems to refer to this. Now, in real life, I've never seen a vehicle that can ignore turn 1 on Laguna Seca. Even an underpowered car like a Spec Miata has to set up for turn 1 a little bit. I do feel that such a vehicle could perhaps exist. It would have to have slow acceleration and lots of lateral grip. In GT4 and Forza, you just drive right through (using the pit-out lane in Forza, you don't even have to do that in GT4).
Additionally, Clarkson is again right on with the area between turn 7 and 8 (8/8a is the Corkscrew, Clarkson refers to it as turn 7). In both games, you blast right over 7 (it's as much a bump as a turn), then do the braking after it. This is impractical in real life. First of all, as Clarkson alludes to, you'd simply fill your shorts. Cresting 7 at full bore, you'd have a wall about 300 feet ahead and a downhill zone to do your braking in. Additionally, most cars in the world just couldn't slow down in that short a distance in a downhill braking zone. Really, neither game gets good marks in this area.
Forza also for some reason has a very sticky turn 9. High-powered cars will drift out quite a bit in 9 in real life, and do somewhat in GT4. But not so in Forza. It's odd. Of course, in GT4, turn 10 is a real joke (like 6 is), so Forza still wins in this part of the course.
Referring to your comments about worthless cars being in GT4, often games do seem to bulk up on cars. None has an SUV race like PGR2 does though! I actually liked the SUV racing in PGR2, it was a change (like the Strana trucks in TOCA 2). But both are only gimmicks, I hope they don't expand upon them in the future. Drive PGR3 and you'll wish these shitboxes were back. PGR3 removes nearly every car any person could reasonably own from the game. I think the only ones left are the Mustang GT, Corvette C6 and Corvette ZR-1. I also know people who own Ferrari 355s (although not the F1 model) and Aston Martin DB9s, but I don't count those. The slowest car in the game is the Ferrari Testarossa. Annoying.
Lack of damage in GT4 doesn't bother me. Damage is mostly a hassle. Forza does try to keep the stupid AI mistakes from hurting your outcome, but it isn't completely successful. There's nothing worse than having to restart a race because the AI punched a hole in your car. This happened in TOCA 2 (most damage modelling yet), and it drove me nust. And TOCA 2 had fewer AI problems than Forza.
I do prefer that games try to keep you from driving on the wall and across the grass to reduce times, especially as online play becomes more important. Unfortunately, Forza didn't penalize you enough for hitting walls strategically, so it can be done to advantage. PGR3 adds slow-down penalties (like GT4 does in the rally races, but not as long) but left out the penalties for crossing the grass. So people cut several corners in the game. Very sad.
I don't feel GT4 feels a lot like GT3. Even GT4 Prologue had significant improvements over GT3. I'm not justifying their lack of online play or the zillion years it took to come out either, but to me it's quite a different game. Do you remember how bad GT3 was? It was greatly inferior to GT2 in game progression, because the removal of cars (and thus the removal of entry qualifications) made the game difficult and pointless at times.
I liked Forza, but as I mentioned in my review, there is plenty of room for improvement. I didn't finish Forza, the races become very difficult due to AI mauling at the high levels, and that's just not fun. And I didn't like the endurance racing in Forza. Despite the technological advancements of the Drivatar, it just didn't work for me.
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I thought those cores are serial, if not, its' not as great. It didn't look THAT great at C.E.S '6, which was merely "Mock Up", as it turned out. Yet, if you increase core speed, as in todays top game cards to 700 mhz/sec & increase memory speed to 1.6 ghz/sec & run dual gpu on dual OR LATEST INTERGRATED(All 4 coordinate into one display output) QUAD card system, numbers probably could, even today, beat "cell". That costs at least: $4,000.oo. Also AMD/INTEL is solid 4 core mfg. by 2008, not 32 core. 32 core barely is better than 8 core, only 25% faster, so don't hold your breath there. Within 3 years solutions to beat "cell" are certain. yet PUBLIC wants 1080p. 1080p needs 150 mb/sec output deveice. Thats 150,000,000 times 7,200 seconds in 2 hours & your in "HOLOGRAPHIC DISC" territory only. Optical Disc layering is just too soft for that much. "Cell" should be able to hit Extended Eefination now, however, 12 mb/sec, Maybe more,looks like "Cell" will come in on top of performance pack or flop.Yet, its' going to be 5 or even 10 years before output is up to quality demanded by Public right now.Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D..
WINDOWS XP Service Pack -X- 396 mb. http://www.geocities.com/tsvondrashekmd/WASHINGTO
You're right. My sample size regarding OS/X stability is entirely too small to support my conclusion, and I spent too much time developing points based on that shaky conclusion. I had an uneasy feeling when I was writing that part -- I should have recognized it more clearly as ass-talking.
.NET leaves you in managed-code land (?), such that you're still stuck with crappy Win32/MFC if you want to compile natively (I could be wrong). I would love to see things swing toward Mac again, at least as a kind of public trial, to see if Apple can keep up.
I do miss working with Macs. I learned how to use them in the 80's, loved using QuarkExpress to lay out my high school newspaper, and used to support a Mac lab for the education department of my university in the 90's (as well as various department Macs and PCs). They have always been superior in terms of ease-of-use and troubleshooting. I looked through the new OS/X APIs way back when it was released but haven't developed with them. They looked much cleaner than what Windows had at the time. I assume they still are, considering that I think
Right now I'm running Windows XP on a Pentium 3 450 with 128 MB ram. While I can't do very much with it, it hasn't crashed when I tried to do a lot with it. It bogs down like you'd expect and then eventually recovers. On the high-end workstations and product prototypes at work, XP crashes maybe once every four months per computer. On my mom's computer, once a year. Friends' computers are a mixed bag -- mostly very stable, but one guy I know who has a non-reimaged Dell XPS couldn't make it 2 hours without a crash. I have 2 data points on OS/X: a PowerBook user doing typical desktop stuff and a recording studio doing audio recording. I don't know the shapes of their computers, but they have stability problems. Which is the worst thing to have when you're doing audio recording (losing a take kills -- multiple crashes every recording session), and which probably influenced my poor decision to push on with a conclusion based on little evidence.
Anyway, when Mac/x86 comes out, and if/when it supports Windows, I will seriously consider trying to get a cheap one to see what it's like. I'm platform agnostic -- consider as many factors as you can then choose what fits best.
Yet Sony still has not explained how developers will get around the weakness of cell processing on the PS3 when it comes to AI development, one of the biggest concerns that several developers I work with have been researching. The very architecture of the cell process could make decent AI problematic.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
He saw a demo at CES and thought it was so much better than anything else he saw that he was ready to declare the cell revolutionary. That's saying something, despite the source. Forbes has always loved M$, and does have a tendency to hype things, so they are not the best source but I'm looking forward to seeing PS3 in stores for myself. The buzz for this is much more earned than Xbox's.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.