At the GDC conference, God of War developer Sony Santa Monica delivered a keynote speech about the power of the Cell processor. Most of you will know by now that the Cell consists of a main processor, the PPU, and seven specialized processors known as SPUs. A number of multiplatform developers have actually ignored the SPUs, but according to Santa Monica, they are incredibly powerful.
The studio’s main point was that the SPUs are not simply coprocessors, but are in fact fully functional general processors. They can handle code taken directly from the PPU, and when used properly, can run this code at incredibly fast speeds. They are so fast in fact, that Santa Monica is using them to speed up not only the PPU, but the RSX (the PS3’s GPU) as well. There are a number of systems running on the SPUs, including animation, cloth, collision, procedural textures, culling, shadows, push buffer generation, meta tasks, geometry conditioning, and sound. According to Santa Monica, the key to getting the most out of the Cell is taking advantage of the parallel nature of the processor.
Santa Monica definitely knows what they are talking about; their GOW III trailer was nothing short of spectacular. Hopefully other developers are able to use this knowledge to improve the standard of games on the PS3. You can check out Santa Monica’s actual presentation
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