Apparently GabeN once declared the Ps3 cell to be a waste of everyone’s time. I didn’t hunt down the quote but I think it’s legit. Regardless in hindsight I love how that might be the best and most concise description of that arch. choice
-
-
Replying to @kenpex
one big win from SPU is that it forced game developers to come to terms with cache- and multicore-friendly programming styles fairly early, which made them better developers on all platforms, and softened the blow when conventional CPUs also went 8-wide.
4 replies 1 retweet 30 likes -
Replying to @bmcnett
The 360 was enough&better for that. 6 hw threads were already enough to make all that multithreading changes happen.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
On x360 people still had render thread, physics thread, game thread, animation/particle thread, etc. 6 threads wasn’t enough to force task/job system.
2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes -
Source 1 was a monolithic engine, very unfriendly to multithreading. It was a giant rats nest written for a single thread, then they dropped in a coder to try and exploit multithreading after the fact. Even on X360, it only used a fraction of the CPU power available.
1 reply 2 retweets 4 likes -
We used all 6 HW threads. But because every thread did one task (render, physics, UI, game, particles, culling) most threads usually only used around 1/2 of their 16.6 ms budget. And fps dropped if any of the threads failed their budged, even if other cores were doing nothing.
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
Replying to @SebAaltonen @richgel999 and
And the Flash (Actionscript) based UI required it’s own thread. UI took 16.6 ms to run (logic + render). Those PPC cores were awful in running pointer chasing code. 600 cycle mem latency and no prefetcher and no OoP. Full 600 cycle CPU stall at every cache miss.
2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @SebAaltonen @richgel999 and
No doubt, took more hand-holding for sure, but OTOH 3+GHz clock helped. I remember
@BartWronsk telling me they had a hand-optimized piece of code that ran faster on X360 than XB1 :)1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @msinilo @SebAaltonen and
It wasn't Scaleform but some in-house Flash/AS solution with hand optimized renderer - remember profiling it on X360 and then X1 and seeing worse performance :)
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
Ah, Scaleform. I am so glad I will never have to work with that piece of software again.
-
-
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.