Ostepop said:
Uh? I was under the impression that a FX-60 CPU pretty much kills the cell for general perpus proceccing. I dont care if its slower at vector math or calculating physics. I got a PPU and four GPU's for that.
You're totally comparing apples and oranges. 'General purpose processing' does not a great gaming machine make, if that was the case then the K6 would have spanked the Pentium back in '97; it did not, as we all know. Or well, would have known, if we'd been around back then.
You were involved in the PC hardware scene back then yes?
PPUs remain unproven, and even if they turn out to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, they'll only ever be helpful to you in titles that were specifically coded to take advantage of them. Without a PPU, physics will be less than stellar on your FX-60 simply due to the anemic nature of a general purpose processor and built-in choke-points in a PC system. For example, a FX-60 lacks the brute horsepower to do tens of thousands of physics collisions per frame (not cost effective to include such hardware in all CPUs), and even if it had, there's not enough system bandwidth to feed such a CPU anyway. GPUs can't help either, because A: you don't REALLY want your graphics processor to sit there and NOT draw graphics, and B: there's no read-back mechanism worth a damn in a GPU that would allow the game engine to access the results of these physics calculations so that gameplay can take advantage of it. All GPU physics can do is visual stuff like swirling cloth, fluttering leaves, smoke effects etc, and all these operations will take away from 3D rendering performance.
Take a look at the internal bandwidth of cell, it's a total monster. No current general purpose processor compares in the slightest, you have 7*128 bit SPU SRAM access/clock, 256 bit/clock PPU L2 cache/clock and 768 bit/clock EIB, all at 3.2GHz. PC main RAM bandwidth is typically less than half of PS3 XDR memory as well.
On top of that, PCs have to contend with dozens of background processes, layers of OS overhead and countless and needless (in a console) state changes during drawing calls that all add up to suck significant juice out of even a high-powered PC. Then add sloppy programming from overstressed developers who take the easy way out and rely on users upgrading their hardware rather than having to write good, solid code.
You sink $3500 into a PC today, PS3's gonna spank it black and blue I guarantee it. If not on release games (though titles like Warhawk is making me suspect it will), then for sure when 2nd gen software launches.
Yeah, you'll be able to game on your expensive PC in screen and texture resolutions far greater than on a PS3 by virtue of more RAM and fillrate, but that's not a true testament of system power.
