Newswise — The success of Sony's PlayStation 3 will rest to a great degree on whether the games it runs can draw an audience. But because PS3, the microprocessor at its heart, is so different from its predecessor, programmers had to relearn how to design a game.
The heart of the PS3 is the powerful new Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor. Developed over the last five years by Sony, IBM, and Toshiba on a reported budget of $400 million, the Cell is a leap beyond the current generation of computer processors. Packing nine processor cores onto a single chip, the Cell can do up to 192 billion floating-point operations per second, a 36-fold increase over the chip that drove the PlayStation 2 to the top of the gaming world.
Of the nine processors, one coordinates the work of the other eight, and each of those eight differs greatly from the kind of processor you'd find in a PC or game console today. Those eight are specially designed to blaze through multimedia tasks like audio decompression, but they are incapable of more sophisticated stuff such as running an operating system. The Cell lets the programmer ask many things of it at once, but it requires those tasks to be molded to the particular abilities of the eight specialized processors.
To see how programmers were tackling the new hardware, IEEE Spectrum's Contributing Editor David Kushner went to Insomniac Games, creator of Resistance: Fall of Man. Last summer, while Resistance was still in the works, Kushner got an inside look at how they were programming the game console.
Game programs have historically been rendered as serial sequences of instructions. With the exception of graphics rendering, which has long been offloaded to specialized chips, the program generally requires that the processor do one thing at a time. But the Cell offers the chance to accelerate gaming by executing some parts of the program in parallel.
Bringing a game to life, Kushner writes, was a tightly syncopated process of a control processor core sending queries to the team of eight multimedia processor cores. The queries request information on real-time events--such as at what point a piece of shrapnel hits a body in the game. By offloading functions to the eight specialized cores, the system has more time to devote to the delectable details: more characters onscreen, more complex artificial-intelligence routines, more realistic skeletal structurs within the game characters' bodies, and, overall, an environment that makes you feel you're inside the game.
For Insomniac's Resistance, the two biggest jobs that were given to the multimedia processor cores were animation and calculating collisions between objects in the game. In fact, the programmers dedicated two of the eight cores exclusively to calculating collisions. In future games, Insomniac hopes to move more complicated parts of the software, such as the artificial intelligence that motivates many of the game's aspects, onto the specialized cores--speeding up games even further.
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