There's a fascinating interview over at a site called PSI-Next, with Mike Acton, who is the senior architect of High Moon Studios. Mike has decided that Cell is something that is here to stay, and is the next logical progression of processor design. To try and make the transition easier for developers involved not only in the game industry, but also medical, military and film industries, he has decided to create CellPerformance.com. A few tidbits he closes off with:
o Compression; both image and geometry data. For the amount of content I expect to see over the course of this generation of games, real time decompression of just about everything that is pumped to the GPU will be a must-have. With the right techniques, at times working with compressed data will actually be faster than uncompressed data on the SPUs!
o Improved 2D graphics. Not just user interface elements, which in my opinion don't get nearly enough attention in games, but in any 2D image used in the game. I expect to see animated image, normal and depth maps - not the wasteful and uninspired flip-book style we see occasionally now, but fully skeletal, curved animations. It could, for example, be a tattoo with dozens of different animations depending on the mood of the character, or maybe leeches that attack and crawl under the skin of the character. And fonts. Real fonts. I want to see beautifully rendered, perfectly set fonts at any scale.
o More complex character skeletons. Transforming a character's skeleton animation data on the GPU generally means limiting the number of influences each vertex can have. I'd like to see some complex characters with a thousand bones or more, where the skeleton can be re-arranged depending on the circumstance, and some amazing animation (for which you'd need the above compression) to go along with it. For instance, fantasy games have a lot of opportunity to explore character complexity on the Cell. While it's not impossible to achieve that character complexity using the GPU, it is a task well suited for the SPUs.
There's much much more to the article, which is pretty tech heavy. Enjoy!
