The Art of PS3 Programming

The Guardian Gamesblog has a longish piece talking with Volatile Games, developers of the title Possession for the PS3, about what it's like to make a game for Sony's next-gen console. From the article: "At the end of the day it's just a multi-processor architecture. If you can get something running on eight threads of a PC CPU, you can get it running on eight processors on a PS3 - it's not massively different. There is a small 'gotcha' in there though. The main processor can access all the machine's video memory, but each of the seven SPE chips has access only to its own 256k of onboard memory - so if you have, say, a big mesh to process, it'll be necessary to stream it through a small amount of memory - you'd have to DMA it up to your cell chip and then process a little chunk, then DMA the next chunk, so you won't be able to jump around the memory as easily, which I guess you will be able to do on the Xbox 360."

Comments

Re:8 Threads?

[AuMatar]

Its worse than that.

Controlers- no reason to have a thread, you use interrupts and wake up once a second when an input changes. No thread needed.

Sound- unless you're doing heavy duty software mixing (not hardware mixing or channels), you don't need a thread, its all interrupt driven.

Network IO- a thread probably isn't the best way to do it for the client. Just poll for IO once a frame. Or use select to sleep if you have no other processing to do

AI- this one makes more sense, a smart AI can try and predict moves and counters ahead of time.

I really don't see most games making use of 8 threads. Most games now are still single threaded.