Are developers ready to cope with multi-core consoles?

[Riddlewire]

While I don't find the idea of defending Sony particularly appealing, I feel it must be done in this case.
Even if the PS3 architecture is horribly complex, I honestly don't think it will be too much of a problem. Take a look at PC gaming for an effective analogy. Licensed engines are becoming more and more common. Many are customized to a particular genre, some are omni-purpose. Yet, despite all the 'underbody' similarity, many PC games manage to end up as unique products with their own look and feel, and gamers are just fine with this.
As long as Sony can generate a reasonable number of foundation technologies (whole engines, discrete renderers, physics engines, etc.) to cover an acceptably wide range of different game types, the developers won't have to invent their own wheels in order to get their games made. I'm sure Sony realizes this and has been evangelizing their hardware to middleware developers aggressively over the past year or so and will continue to do so until launch. They ought to have most developers' needs covered.

 

[MfA]

Assuming we're sorting into layers by geometry, repeating textures a lot will only force you to duplicate texture accesses across layers - the more unique they are, the more you keep them local to each layer.

With unique texturing that doesnt matter, there is no significant benefit either way as far as memory access is concerned.

Following on that, geometry should be completely local to layers, so at best tiles can approach that but never get quite there.

Being close is good enough, win some on the framebuffer ... loose some on geometry.

If you want to do something fancy with the framebuffer such as deferred shading or sort independent transparancy compositing is right out of course (storage would go through the roof).

PS. this looks somewhat interesting.