Gollum said:I might be pulling this out of my arse, but with 1000 characters on screen at once, wouldn't your chances of seeing more than a handfull of them close up and actually notice wether their hair/clothing bounces off everything realistically or not be pretty slim? No seriously, that's what clever coding is there for, even with such a monster CPU, why waste power for something nobody will ever notice? Any sane game coder would implement a LOD system and only calculate the full physics for the hair and clothing close to the viewpoint as long as they're not essential for gameplay. On the other hand if the graphics rasterizer that's being fed all this data couldn't handle per-pixel shading, lighting, proper filtering and antialiasing of those 1000 characters (that's theoretical too of course, I have little doubts that the GS2 will be at least as advanced than any graphics hardware out right now), wouldn't that be just as or even more noticable than less detailed physics ?
Theoretically we can think up any number of scenarios where the monster power of such a CPU cannot be matched by a Xbox2 or GC2 using stock components. We can also theoretically think up scenarios where a less fully featured or powerfull GPU would run into its limits, but what good does it do us? Practically the instances where you'd really get to see a difference inside an actual game would be pretty rare IMO. Its all a question of how balanced the next systems will end up being. Personally, I expect the visual and computing power of next generation's consoles will be so good overall that a few rendering or physics capabilities lacking here and there wouldn't really kill any of the systems.
Actually, after watching the amazing physics in the HL2 vids (that will supposedly run without a problem even on the lame current XCPU), I'm not that worried about a lack of processing power of an off-the-shelf CPU a couple years down the road anymore (which Nintendo and MS will likely use). All the more so if it again takes programmers ages to even tap the powers of such a computational beast, tame it and then actually use its superior processing power for .. well anything at all really. And don't get me started about the load of nightmarish work artists will have to make all those programming work shine! If you listen to game designers complain about the cost and time content creation eats up today already, think about how they will complain if their modelers have to actually build all models with fully functional clothing for soft body dynamics... <shudders>
YEAH OF COURSE the 1000characters example was just a theoretical example, just to know what the difference is... the thing is, IF this PS3 REALLY turns out to be a >1TFLOP monster, the others will be left behind not just by *a few rendering or physics capabilities lacking here and there* but by orders of magnitude....
of course i'm pulling this out of my head though....
and regarding the modellers complaints... well, one day they will have to cope with the workload, even if its not next generation, one day photorealistic graphics will be a given, budgets will be much higer than nowadays and those artists will have to just shut up and work...
j/k
