"Impossible to make it look the same on any other system." I'm sure a decent gaming PC would have been able to handle it. But, other than that, it's good to see the PS3's hardware getting some good utilization.

He's right. For once someone actually says something meaningful about the PS3. It's very telling though, that the thing that is exclusive to the platform is "rendering 200,000 blades of grass", rather than, say, "simulating a city full of people interacting, each with their own unique personality)", or even just "the best FPS game ever"

The PS3 is a beast when it comes to straightforward simulations of physics and the like. 200,000 blades of grass that have to be treated exactly the same way, with no branches in the code, no surprises, nothing that makes each blade stand out, the PS3 can run circles around the 360, and probably also around a modern gaming PC. (probably, but it gets trickier there because of the beefy GPU a PC might have)

But it's a double-edged sword. The developer didn't say "of course, this is *all* the PS3 is good at", but it'd have been equally true. It is truly lousy at what you might call gameplay code. Logic code, conditional code, anything that "depends" for each character, each frame and each interaction with another entity in the game. Unpredictable, "messy" code. In those situations, an old Pentium 3 could probably outperform a PS3. And in most modern game, that kind of code takes up a lot of the processing time (after all, most of the other kind of code, the stuff the Cell is good at, has gotten offloaded to the GPU for years now)

That's the tradeoff Sony made, and while yes, the result is impressive when one picks a game like this to showcase it, I'm not really convinced it was a smart move on a *games* console. It is truly graphics (and physics) over gameplay.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. In order to kick ass at grass-rendering (ok, complex physics simulations in general. It could do some kick-ass clouds or sea waves as well), they had to sacrifice all the stuff that usually makes a game be a game, and not a CG movie.

(and before the inevitable shitstorm whenever people discuss the CELL processor's capabilities, yes, I have worked on one. I spent some 9 months programming one for a research project. So I'm not just making this up, thank you. ;))

The PS3's Cell processor is composed of one larger CPU very similar to one of the Xbox 360's CPUs, and 8 smaller CPUs which are controlled by the central CPU and dedicated to floating point-intensive math. These smaller CPUs are called synergistic processing elements. This is a unusual architecture; if software is the boss and processors are the employees, on a PS3 the boss tells the employee what to do and the employee then manages eight different tiny elves who actually get all the work done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)

That's true. Also, Sonic the Hedgehog could NEVER work on a Super Nintendo because of "Blast Processing".

Right, 200,000 blades of grass on anything but a PS3, that just sounds impossible.

Oh wait! http://www.indiegamejam.com/igj0/index.html (2002: 100,000 sprites)

@Neuromancer: lol :D
@Sean: This isn't sprites though, by simulated, animated polygon meshes. There's a bit of a difference. (Although as I said above, it is very much graphics over gameplay. Like you pointed out, getting lots of entities on screen is easy enough if you're willing to sacrifice visual quality, so it's a valid enough question whether this is really worth it - but it does showcase a lot of horsepower far beyond what your 2002 example had available or required)

Really, animated polygon meshes? It looks like a 3D quad (polygon) per blade of grass, which is exactly what igj0 was (perhaps the term "sprite" is misleading). I don't have a PS3 to check for myself.

I can't check it either, but that's my understanding. (Of course I don't doubt it's a very simple polymesh. We're probably not talking 3000 triangles per blade of grass ;))
As far as I can figure out (check http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBqKb8xe-9Y as well), each blade of grass is animated individually, affected by the environment/wind and other forces. And that wasn't possible in 2002. Rendering huge batches of the same thing is easy enough. Actually animating hundreds of thousands of entities independently is a bit more impressive.

NERDS!!!!!!!!!!!

Y'hear that, Tom? You have actual CELL programmers here in this topic.

Jalf, buddy, what you're talking about you can pick up from freaking Kotaku. I'd suggest you get experience in multiplatform engine development before coming back to tell us what's what. Or just lurk on someplace like B3D, go through the old threads, that'll give you enough fodder to fake it somewhere else.

And I'm not defending the CELL here, it's just that all Jalf is saying you can extract from the CELL's tech sheets, you hardly need '9 months on a research project'.

WOW a $600.00 console that can render blades of grass!

Any mid-range PC can do that.

Meh.