Sand Rendering in Journey 

it's the only way to shade 😎

@Ariel Garrett CAP

To be fair, sand takes up 90% of the screen 90% of the time so you might as well use 90% of machines spare resources to render as beautifully as possible.

Is there a real difference ?

Yeah, I feel that. Most of the time, when you think "hey, that looks terrible, changing literally anything makes it look better", it's promptly followed by "oh, if I change anything the performance is way worse" and you suddenly understand.

janky???????????????

It's the Synergistic Processor Unit, which is unique to the PS3's Cell architecture, I believe. At least, that's the only meaning I know of.

Oh fascinating thanks for the lead. I don't know why googling SPU didn't reveal that

I don't know the details of PS3 hardware, but now I kind of wish I did considering how much stuff seems to be rendered using these rather than the GPU in this game, and I assume a few other first-party titles.

The PS3 has a few SPUs (8, if memory serves). They are smaller sub-processors, for a lack of a better term. You could offload all sorts of things from the Cell to the SPUs. They also accessed memory in a very unusual way. They are exactly what made the PS3 so strange to work on. It also explains why some PS3 ports of multiplatform games didn't visually live up the to the Xbox 360. Rather than massively changing their game engine to take advantage of the SPUs, lots of devs just cut back the graphics a bit and ran the entire game from the main processor. Shamus Young has a great video explaining a possible reason Sony went with this design: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FoGnDgqNGkk.html

In the PS3 it's 7 SPEs, as one is disabled to improve yield), but there were other SKUs of Cell that had all 8 SPEs active. Interestingly enough in game mode, the hypervisor lives onto one of the SPEs, leaving the PPE and 6 SPEs available to developers. The most comprehensive info I have found about Cell is this part of the documentation issued by Sony to Linux developers : www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/cell/ps3-linux-docs/CellProgrammingPrimer.html It's really interesting, however it's geared towards system programming, and not game rendering stuff. It seems like there is indeed some additional memory management involved, and the SPEs can't be treated like regular CPU cores, instead you have to go through a separate API.

him: *20 minutes of enlightened graphics programming discussion* you: "HERP DERP CANSOLE WARZ LOL"

enlightened? LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

it sucks because many people will probably never play it because of the exclusiveness, including me

What I got about not making a console exclusive is the hardware not being capable of doing what you want and you have to pour money and time into making a facsimile of what you wanted. You could make it for PC as you want then cull it down for the console port and save time and money and have far more market available. Enlightened.

+JETWTF And not have the achievement of conquering the SPUs of the PS3's Cell Broadband Engine?