Naughty Dog using only '30 or 40 percent' of the PS3's power

@Mikey

I think thats something the companys just want the consumer to think. If you always think your console can do more than what they are showing... I would imagine you would hold on and wait for more. If they just put it all out there and said "This is all it can do" people would move on to bigger and better things. I see it as a tactic.

Also, I agree with Robin... if they can push more out of it Uncharted 2 is going to be even more amazing, which is really hard to believe.

well great, can I get a 60 to 70 % of my money back until they start using that part of it?

That's bunk, I assure you.
Doesn't Uncharted run at 30 fps? If they had so much power left, why isn't it running at 60?

gland, that's not how it works

glandseck: It doesn't work like that. It's not like the developers decide to only use 30% or whatever percentage of the power. They use 100%. But as you develop for a particular platform you discover tricks to make your programs go faster. So that 100% becomes less and less as you learn your platform.

We've heard boasts like these for ages but at least it's the venerable Naughty Dog that are making such claims which certainly backs them up.

@glandseck

Just because you CAN make it run at a higher frame rate, doesn't mean you SHOULD. Uncharted simply isn't the type of game that requires that sort of speed or pacing.

@Drak,
Why wouldn't the game benefit from 60 fps? I find it quite the contrary; the animation is beautiful, and cutting your framerate by half suddenly limits how many frames can be used. Think of it like the difference between an animated tv show versus it's movie adaptation. More budget goes into inbetween'ing, the overall movement looks better.

You don't need to have a racing game to benefit from higher framerate.

I'm familiar with the PS3's architecture (as I am working on a ps3 title as well). I understand where the difficulty is coming from; using multiple processors is a pain in the ass, and I am aware that it's impossible to reach 100% efficiency short of making all of them spew out unshaded triangles (hence my earlier example).

But I don't think it's fair to say that on a practical scale, most games are using the equivalent of 35% of each SPU's potential because of threading issues. Even if it were the case, it's certainly not fair to claim that it's something that developpers will some day reach.

Well anyway, I often debate the ever-present "power percentage" claims because I feel it's just silly to imply that 60% of cycles are wasted, or that they limited themselves to 90 MB out of each ram blocks, or what have you. It seems it's no different here, and I wouldn't want it any other way ;)

Facts are facts, though:
You have an SPU dedicated to FX and you have free cycles? Up the particle limit.
You have extra ram left after everything is loaded up? Add an extra texture LOD, or better yet, bring down the automatic key reduction epsilon / compression for the animation. Better result, no waste, none of this "35% power" bull.

I don't even understand why Naughty Dog would discredit Uncharted so much. What they did was wonderful and it's inaccurate to say that it wasn't elegantly engineered... Even if they are the ones claiming so.

I'm out!

@Blackhat

Thank you for the analogy, very nicely done. What options are available to circumvent these bottlenecks? Because otherwise, I can't see anyone squeezing any more than this alleged 30-40% out of the PS3.

Cock and Balls.
This may be true but bears no relevance to legitimate game development. This video at quakecon with Carmack talks about the ps3 as a development machine in detail. Watch this and decide for yourselves.

[url=http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/20047[/url]

50% of the time it works every time!

I think he's implying that Cell was inefficiently utilized and that the code could be optimized to squeeze 70%-60% more goodness through the ps3. I highly doubt he meant that the ps3 is basically taking a nap whenever you play Uncharted.

I am excited about Uncharted 2, if they can make the game that much bigger and better looking, great. Let's hope that they don't screw up the story.

if you remember back to the statement Phil Harrison made: "nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capability".

Well, to ppl who know anything about parallel programming see the irony of that statement is unmistakable.

There's generally understood system of determining performance gain through parallel processing (like the cell); Amdahl's Law. It states that If F is the fraction of a calculation that is sequential, and (1-F) is the fraction that can be parallelised, then the maximum speedup that can be achieved by using P processors is 1/(F+(1-F)/P).

In other words, in games not everything can be split into 6 parts to be processed. Just like you cant take 9 women & have a baby in 1 month. There are things which need to run in a single thread; then there are things which need to run sequentially. There are also added costs from parallisation in the form of time to create/manage/coordinate/combine parallel threads. As well as redundant memory allocating because of each thread needing access to it's own virtual bank.

for example in the matrix_mul demo for Fedora 7 which supports PS3's interpretation of the cell, you can see the theoretical computational rate jump 70-80% with each doubling of cores, but if you take into account the time to manage the paralleisation you can see that the real time to calculate only drops from 322 seconds on a single SPU to 280 on 2, & 260 on 4. 2 is 17% faster than 1; & 4 is only 7% faster than 2.

realistically, if they got even 50% of the code parallelised that's some seriously impressive programming. But saying "only 30 to 40% of the PS3s power"; as if to insinuate that approaching 100% is even remotely feasible is a serious bending of the truth. imho

"Just like you cant take 9 women & have a baby in 1 month."

somehow that cleared EVERYTHING up. seriously.

So they will be able to make better looking games in the future? Hurray! Let's just hope they don't suck

WOW!
You guys are looking to much into this.
When they say 30-40% of the power.
There not trying to get all tech on us.
They NEVER said 30-40% of the CPU cycles or even the raw tera flops.

When they say 30-40% there talking to the average joe that knows jack shiz about hardware. And mean 30-40% of what they see as possible with the PS3.

I mean when has any new console been MAXED out in ability within the first 2 years?!?!?

NEVER thats when!!!
Look at 1st gen PS2 games then look at the last GOW.
BIG DIFF!