Matt Lee of Microsoft sizes up the PS3's Cell chip and doesn't think it's much cop
Matt Lee, a developer at Microsoft's Game Technology Group, has again shared his knowledgeable insight - this time shifting his gaze towards the PS3 and saying that it will be "difficult" to port games between the Xbox 360 and PS3.
In an interesting interview with website Ars Technica, Lee said that the asymmetric nature of Sony's Cell processor could cause trouble for Xbox 360 ports. "I think porting from Xbox 360 to PS3 will be reasonably difficult," he said, "since the Xbox 360 has a lot more general purpose processing power that can be flexibly reallocated, and all of the Xbox 360 CPU cores have equal access to all memory. The asymmetric nature of the Cell could easily lead to situations where the game has too little of one type of processing power and too much of another."
He continued, "The content might suffer as well, since you'll never see a PS3 title with more than 256MB of textures at any given time, due to the split graphics and system memory banks. When we announced 512MB of unified memory on Xbox 360, I think all of our game developers (and the artists too) did a little happy dance. It's easier to use and gives developers much more flexibility in how they allocate memory for various resources."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Microsoft dev finished by criticising the PS3's architecture, saying "I don't think the Cell is as well designed for game development as Sony would have you believe."
With Xbox 360 to PS3 ports apparently tricky and Nintendo's Wii lacking the power of the other two, could the age of port dominance finally be coming to an end? All should become clearer this Christmas, when all three next-gen consoles are on store shelves.
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