Quote:
Originally Posted by Vedder
As useful and powerful as grids probably will become, I don't think they'll be useful for real time online games like EU.
The power of grids comes from massive parallelity, which is hard to utilize in EU and other real time games, and which also have overhead of data transfer between grid nodes. |
this is quite right.
its not anything to do with "it wont happen", its a case of games dont lend themselves to parallelism. they are inheirently linear or sequential, even in a MMO context. one of the concepts with Cell is that you have a chip in your TV, one in your MP3 player, one in your washing machine even, and your PS3 utilises the processing capacity. problem is a) bandwidth for over the air data (bluetooth, 802.11) b) not knowing how much capacity is available (so you plan for worst case and dont take advantage) c) interprocessor sync/communiction overhead. In theory you might offload say AI to an external Cell, but then you have to be sure you will get the required dat back in time for a faster local Cell to utilise. realtime graphics is right out, since the bandwidth required just isnt possible with non-physical connections. but making a CGI film would be very well suitted as you are concerned with processing each frame seperately and compling an end product.
parallelism is great for large projects in science or mathematical modeling that are effectivly batch processed or can wait seconds/minutes/hours even days for a result to feed back into the core process, but not good for realtime applications. Its a whole new paradigm to what we currently use, it will create new
types of applications (and games) rather than necessarily improving existing ones.