Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles.
This rather alarmist statement came out of a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference. One of the panelists, Chris Hecker, suggested that the next generation consoles such as the XBox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3 may be better at doing pretty graphics than current hardware but be worse at gameplay and AI code.
Why? The reasoning is that the graphics code is predictable, straight line code and the processors on the new systems are good at in order code execution. The AI code on the other hand is quite random which doesn’t suit the new processors at all. Currently out-of-order execution is used to speed things up, but the new chips have less capability in this area, so performance on this type of code is worse. This problem was, to some extent, predictable but it seems that the level of performance is much lower than expected with the development kits.
My guess is that the Sony hardware may prove worse at this than the Microsoft hardware, simply because Microsoft is running something closer to a standard PC on the XBox added to the fact that the PowerPC chip range has been fairly solid in terms of performance so far. The Sony cell processors are completely new, so this remains something of an unknown quantity.
Since the hardware hasn’t been released yet, this might be less of a problem than is anticipated, but given that this new information comes from people with direct experience of the hardware it seems unlikly to be wrong.
However I’m no expert in this area so I think it’s going to have to be a case of wait and see.
[Via Alice at Wonderland: Burn the house down (Link)] via [A Gamer’s Manifesto]