Killzone 3 Uses All PS3's SPUs

THIS GAME IS AMAZING!!!

@MikeB, pretty amazing isn't it?

@ APKenna Physically the PS3's Cell processor includes 9 seperate processors. However 1 at this point is considered disabled to improve production yields (which makes the PS3's Cell processor cheaper to mass produce). The SPEs are more than a just a processor though they function as seperate systems on a chip within which the processors acts as a CPU for these micro systems.

can playstation even play music when ur not on the dashboard??

@Narishma, you may want to do a bit more research regarding the cell processor, MikeB is more accurate but he still wrong on one thing...the cell processor actually has '9' cores, not 8 or 7, 1 for PPU, 1 for OS and 7 for gaming, one of the seven is there as a back up in case one of the six that are currently working "stops/fails" for any given reason, if that were to happened then the seventh one steps up to fill the gap. But yeah, this article is a bit of a joke, and NO, the cell processor has not been maxed out at all, even though they claim to be using every single SPU, that does not mean they are utilizing 100% power out of them, as explain, they can be used for many tasks and jobs, including to create graphics which Uncharted Games takes advantage of to take the load off the GPU.

Wow! Killzone 3 did better than BulletStorm.

I didn't actually read the article until now. Wow! What a screw job on getting the right facts. I think the other members have corrected them for the most part but wow... this has to be a new low in journalism on this site.

Reading the actual Eurogamer article, it's a good read. However nothing stated in there should come as a surprise if you read my past writings on the Cell's SPUs. > Eurogamers work IMO they should have written about the potentials half a decade ago, like I did. IMO that would have meant a lot more, rather than just writing when potentials are already realized in software. For example I wrote articles with regard to smartphones more than a decade ago on how today's smartphones would allow full webbrowsing, GPS functions, 2D/3D gaming, etc. IMO writing such an article today doesn't mean much if anything at all...

Wildly inaccurate article and doesn't do justice to the remarkable technical accuracy of Eurogamers work. The SPU bit is clearly an error, but the bit about dedicated physics processor is totally made up. It doesn't say anything like that in Eurogamers article. the RSX usually handles physics. All Guerrilla said was they no longer had wasted spu cycles. In killzone 2 they used roughly 4/5 cycles. In kz3 they used as close as possible to using every cycle. I could write a line of code that uses every cycle of any cpu on the market. Using cycles doesn't mean anything unless they are used efficiently. They are using roughly 15-20% more processing power, that's all it means.

And yeah I forgot about that 32 SPUs nonsense. The PS3 only has 7 of them, and one is reserved for the OS, so only 6 are available to game developers, and one of those 6 can be taken by the OS whenever it needs it.

This article is full of fail. First of all, the PS3 doesn't have any dedicated physics processor. Secondly, using all the SPUs doesn't mean that you have maxed the system, so Herman Hulst's statement is still valid. In fact "maxing" a system doesn't mean anything really. Developers are constantly finding new and more efficient ways of using the hardware. Just look at what people can do with a Commodore 64 nowadays...

They do not claim to have maxed out the PS3. They only state they are using all the processors available to them. By further optimising their code they are able to yield more results in the future. Fully optimising for a single CPU will take a lot of time (and will never be achieved), it takes far more to optimise your code for several of such processsors. The PS3 does not have 32 of these SPUs as the article states. The PS3 has eight active 3.2 Ghz clocked processors. 1 PPU and 7 SPUs. These SPUs processors which require some extra care to code for but are extremely powerfull and flexible. 1 SPU is currently fully dedicated to the PS3's operating system, used for some functions which would else take processing time elsewhere. The advantage of this approach (keeping to load seperate) is that for what it is used for will not impact/degrade the performance of the other operating processors, for example if Sony decides to use this SPU to run extra tasks in the background it will not affect the processing performance of the game code running.

the main problem of killzone 3 is that it doesnt use in deep the pockets of the customers ;)

Distributed computing FTW! ;-)

No, I mean that it uses the combined power of every PS3 in existence. :-P

Yeh thats what I thought?

Funny headline, sounds like it uses every SPU of every PS3 ever created. :-D