Game development is a quick and dirty process, and they need to be multi-platform to sell more. There is no time to learn the specifics of a platform and designing your game to exploit it.
And that's why you use platform specific libraries to exploit it if you don't have the time to do it yourself. God of War III's morphological anti-aliasing is a good example of the capability enabled by Cell:
According to director of technology Tim Moss, God of War III worked with the Sony technology group in the UK to produce an edge-smoothing technique for the game that the developers call MLAA, or morphological anti-aliasing. Indeed, Moss's colleague Christer Ericson took us to task on the specifics of MLAA a few months back in this DF blog post, revealing that the team has put extensive research into this in search of their own solution.
"The core implementation of the anti-aliasing was written by some great SCEE guys in the UK, but came very late in our development cycle making the integration a daunting task," adds senior staff programmer Ben Diamand.
The specifics of the implementation are still unknown at this time (though Ken Feldman suggests it "goes beyond" the papers Ericson spoke about in the DF piece) but the bottom line is that the final result in God of War III is simply phenomenal: aliasing is all but eliminated and the sub-pixel jitter typically associated with this technique has been massively reduced compared to other implementations we've seen.
The custom anti-aliasing solution is also another example of how PlayStation 3 developers are using the Cell CPU as a parallel graphics chip working in tandem with the RSX. As Richard Lemarchand discussed in his Uncharted 2 post-mortem, the basic theory is all about moving tasks typically performed by the graphics chip over the Cell. Post-processing effects in particular work well being ported across.
The more flexible nature of the CPU means that while such tasks can be more computationally expensive, you get a higher-quality result. The increased latency incurred can be reduced by parallelising across multiple SPUs.
In the case of God of War III, any given frame typically takes between 16ms and 30ms to render, give or take a millisecond or two. The original 2x multisampling AA solution took a big chunk of rendering time, at 5ms. Now, the hugely more impressive MLAA algorithm takes a total of 20ms of CPU time. However, it's running across five SPUs, meaning that overall latency is a mere 4ms. So the final result is actually faster, and that previous 5ms of GPU time can be repurposed for other tasks.
Formula 1 is seen as the apogee of engineering excellence and automotive power.
Formula 1 is the apogee of engineering excellence, but that's engineering excellence under the restrictions on car development imposed by the FIA. As a consequence of those restrictions it's very easy to build a car that's better than a Formula 1 car. There are limits on the aero package and the engine size, for example. Features like traction control are banned and so on.
The FIA imposes restrictions on car development for three reasons:
1. Safety. So drivers can walk away from this sort of thing with just a few bruises: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIAG8DvUc9c
2. To promote good racing (i.e. making the races are competitive and unpredictable).
3. Cost control. Formula 1 imposes cost limits to ensure that the larger teams don't just out spend the smaller teams in car development.
Gee, hire MS drone, big surprise when he decides to "standardize" on MS software. Who could have predicted that?
Nokia apparently talked to Google about using Android but the ultimate decider was that Microsoft was willing to pay them more money. In this section of Nokia's Q&A session at Mobile World Conference about three weeks ago, Elop claims the deal is a nett benefit to Nokia in the billions:
How are they going to explain to the million of Windows users that no application they know will work on ARM Windows?
I think they'll do two things. First, Microsoft will advocate.NET development as the one true way to build applications compatible with both ARM and x86. Second, Microsoft will deploy an app store for Windows so ARM users can easily find applications that will run on their system.
Slashdot Mirror
Game development is a quick and dirty process, and they need to be multi-platform to sell more. There is no time to learn the specifics of a platform and designing your game to exploit it.
And that's why you use platform specific libraries to exploit it if you don't have the time to do it yourself. God of War III's morphological anti-aliasing is a good example of the capability enabled by Cell:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-making-of-god-of-war-iii
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-mlaa-360-pc-article
To quote the relevant part of the first article:
According to director of technology Tim Moss, God of War III worked with the Sony technology group in the UK to produce an edge-smoothing technique for the game that the developers call MLAA, or morphological anti-aliasing. Indeed, Moss's colleague Christer Ericson took us to task on the specifics of MLAA a few months back in this DF blog post, revealing that the team has put extensive research into this in search of their own solution.
"The core implementation of the anti-aliasing was written by some great SCEE guys in the UK, but came very late in our development cycle making the integration a daunting task," adds senior staff programmer Ben Diamand.
The specifics of the implementation are still unknown at this time (though Ken Feldman suggests it "goes beyond" the papers Ericson spoke about in the DF piece) but the bottom line is that the final result in God of War III is simply phenomenal: aliasing is all but eliminated and the sub-pixel jitter typically associated with this technique has been massively reduced compared to other implementations we've seen.
The custom anti-aliasing solution is also another example of how PlayStation 3 developers are using the Cell CPU as a parallel graphics chip working in tandem with the RSX. As Richard Lemarchand discussed in his Uncharted 2 post-mortem, the basic theory is all about moving tasks typically performed by the graphics chip over the Cell. Post-processing effects in particular work well being ported across.
The more flexible nature of the CPU means that while such tasks can be more computationally expensive, you get a higher-quality result. The increased latency incurred can be reduced by parallelising across multiple SPUs.
In the case of God of War III, any given frame typically takes between 16ms and 30ms to render, give or take a millisecond or two. The original 2x multisampling AA solution took a big chunk of rendering time, at 5ms. Now, the hugely more impressive MLAA algorithm takes a total of 20ms of CPU time. However, it's running across five SPUs, meaning that overall latency is a mere 4ms. So the final result is actually faster, and that previous 5ms of GPU time can be repurposed for other tasks.
Formula 1 is seen as the apogee of engineering excellence and automotive power.
Formula 1 is the apogee of engineering excellence, but that's engineering excellence under the restrictions on car development imposed by the FIA. As a consequence of those restrictions it's very easy to build a car that's better than a Formula 1 car. There are limits on the aero package and the engine size, for example. Features like traction control are banned and so on.
The FIA imposes restrictions on car development for three reasons:
1. Safety. So drivers can walk away from this sort of thing with just a few bruises: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIAG8DvUc9c
2. To promote good racing (i.e. making the races are competitive and unpredictable).
3. Cost control. Formula 1 imposes cost limits to ensure that the larger teams don't just out spend the smaller teams in car development.
Gee, hire MS drone, big surprise when he decides to "standardize" on MS software. Who could have predicted that?
Nokia apparently talked to Google about using Android but the ultimate decider was that Microsoft was willing to pay them more money. In this section of Nokia's Q&A session at Mobile World Conference about three weeks ago, Elop claims the deal is a nett benefit to Nokia in the billions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NRBtTz9p6A#t=13m1s
Part of that deal is advertising revenue from Microsoft's search and maps (which will now use Nokia's maps) services.
How are they going to explain to the million of Windows users that no application they know will work on ARM Windows?
I think they'll do two things. First, Microsoft will advocate .NET development as the one true way to build applications compatible with both ARM and x86. Second, Microsoft will deploy an app store for Windows so ARM users can easily find applications that will run on their system.
bad bad hits on the web-o-wonders.... its down baby.
It's working fine for me. It doesn't seem to be slashdotted.