Seriously, is there a stipulation saying that if you want to release your games on the PS3, you have to praise the Cell processor? Terminal Reality, Bioware, and now DICE.
I've been studying that paper, as well as all the other papers in that course, very interesting We discussed it in a new podcast I'm working on together with some other nice people at Beyond3d (we released a 'public beta' in the forms there
).
The really interesting thing I got from the training is that DirectX has in fact been holding back development on the PC, where the consoles are offering new inroads into handling graphics, by allowing much better integration of CPU and GPU work.
With GPUs on PCs becoming very much multicore (basically, ATI, NVidia and of coures Larrabee all have over 30 properly programmable cores), a lot of new ways of dealing with graphics are possible. Many games for instance are trying to enhance lighting and reflection by incorporating ray-tracing into the rendering pipeline, etc., something which for instance SPEs and similar cores in the GPUs and Larrabee are much better at than the regular CPUs.
Now, DirectX9 and even to a large extent 10 don't allow for much flexibility in the rendering pipeline. The rendering takes place in a number of stages, which are mostly fixed, and sort of closed. With the consoles, you do not have any of these limitations - you can much more freely mix work from the CPU and GPU. DICE in fact mentions Uncharted as an example where a job on the SPE helps out rendering work on the RSX, and then they'd studied that for a bit, they relealised that this kind of co-operation would be very useful for other stuff as well.
Now, they mention that DirectX11 brings some very big improvements here to the point that the PC may well become first in class in this area. But considering that consoles that have been out since 2005/2006 are the ones that have lead to these new ways of looking at this pipeline, PC fans deploring that their systems aren't being used to their full capacity may do well to direct some of their blame from the consoles to DirectX, and some of the gratitude from DirectX to the consoles.
