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Interesting 'new' public PS3 GPU facts emerge

Razoric said:
holy shit thats mainly only using CELL? :O
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Woah woah woah. The graphics are all being done on RSX. I think when they're classing it more as a "cell demo" they mean in terms of the simulation of the city, the AI, the traffic etc. There's no suggestion it was rendered by Cell alone. I'm sure the GPU was providing that end of things.
 
I'm not convinced Harrison isn't being mis-read here concerning the Getaway demo. I have a hard time believing that that's using just software rendering via Cell.
 
Razoric said:
holy shit thats mainly only using CELL? :O
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928374_20050516_screen002.jpg


Impressive, innit?
 
Wax Free Vanilla said:
WOW! The Getaway looked amazing and it was only running on Cell. I would have been happy with just those quality graphics next gen, but it seems Sony set the bar even higher. :D
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If you look at the very bright area in this screen: http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2005/136/928374_20050516_screen003.jpg

This is where the RSX will be much better with it's 128bit precision. That's actualy why I was sure from the beginning that this demo was done mostly without the RSX.

Fredi
 
McFly said:
If you look at the very bright area in this screen: http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2005/136/928374_20050516_screen003.jpg

This is where the RSX will be much better with it's 128bit precision. That's actualy why I was sure from the beginning that this demo was done mostly without the RSX.

Fredi
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Indeed - like the man said:

obviously Cell allows you to do complex collisions, physics, dynamics, simulations, all of those things. Though, the Getaway demo was a good example of how you can have a living city brought to life as a result. Although it was pretty graphics, most of that power was actually Cell-based.
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I'm pretty sure that's not just Cell.

Where are you getting this from? IIRC, Harrison classed it as "more of a cell demo" because of its simulation load. But there wasn't the suggestion that it was being cell-rendered, I don't think.

The HDR may look better in the final product on final hardware, but I don't think that's because it's being rendered by Cell, but more because it's being rendered by the unfinished gpu in the dev kits (i.e. probably dual 6800 ultras).

ou're right; obviously Cell allows you to do complex collisions, physics, dynamics, simulations, all of those things. Though, the Getaway demo was a good example of how you can have a living city brought to life as a result. Although it was pretty graphics, most of that power was actually Cell-based.
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This doesn't suggest to me the Cell was rendering the graphics. The last sentence seemed to suggest the opposite to me in fact - he was saying that although the graphics were nice, the more impressive parts were the bits cell were doing (the simulation).

?

edit - also, to clarify, a big ballyhoo is being made of RSX's 128-bit colour precision. Isn't this pretty much standard now? Wasn't it with the most recent GPUs? Doesn't Xenos have this?
 
teiresias said:
I'm not convinced Harrison isn't being mis-read here concerning the Getaway demo. I have a hard time believing that that's using just software rendering via Cell.
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Well he doesn't say the RSX is completely idle, but the strong implication of his statement is that the majority of the simulation and graphical effects were accomplished via the CELL, with the RSX picking up slack on the parts that the CELL can't do.

That or his statement is unfortunately ambiguous... but I think it's pretty clear; you don't mention, "most of that was done with cell" and "pretty graphics" in the same sentence if you don't mean the CELL is capable of alot of the graphical effects we've come to associate with vid cards alone.
 
Zaptruder said:
Well he doesn't say the RSX is completely idle, but the strong implication of his statement is that the majority of the simulation and graphical effects were accomplished via the CELL, with the RSX picking up slack on the parts that the CELL can't do.
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Indeed.
 
I think that Getaway demo was involving both CPU and GPU. I think Phil is being misinterpreted too. I think the Cell modeling is actually the AI and interaction bring the city to life, so to speak. If I'm wrong, I'm mightily impressed. But the graphics demos that were definitely running off Cell didn't look this good. I'm really not sure what the purpose of writing a software renderer of that quality just to demonstrate Cell would be. I'll withhold judgement until further confirmation, but I think the RSX is very much involved in that demo. PEACE.
 
gofreak said:
I'm pretty sure that's not just Cell.

Where are you getting this from? IIRC, Harrison classed it as "more of a cell demo" because of its simulation load. But there wasn't the suggestion that it was being cell-rendered, I don't think.

The HDR may look better in the final product on final hardware, but I don't think that's because it's being rendered by Cell, but more because it's being rendered by the unfinished gpu in the dev kits (i.e. probably dual 6800 ultras).



edit - also, to clarify, a big ballyhoo is being made of RSX's 128-bit colour precision. Isn't this pretty much standard now? Wasn't it with the most recent GPUs? Doesn't Xenos have this?
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It's not about 128-bit HDR - it's about its rumoured implementation.
;)
 
gofreak said:
edit - also, to clarify, a big ballyhoo is being made of RSX's 128-bit colour precision. Isn't this pretty much standard now? Wasn't it with the most recent GPUs? Doesn't Xenos have this?
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Yup, AFAIK, Xenos does this as well. The question is the effectiveness since I understand it's a major bandwidth sucker. Not nearly enough info in this regard IMO. But it was a major feature of the PS3 presentation. I think RSX is supposed to have more complex shaders (128bit). Is this standard for all HDR-capable GPUs? I've been out of the PC card loop since....2000? :lol PEACE.
 
Pimpwerx said:
And as for the 360, it has the memory controller on Xenos, which has access to UMA. I wouldn't doubt that you could do the same sort of thing with it. They have ~20GB between them. But Cell's FLOPS advantage is gonna pay dividends in this regard. PEACE.
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Also doesn't PS2 have this capability with the vector units?
 
Here's Masayuki Chatani's (SCEI CTO) comment on the Cell/GPU use in the Getaway demo, FWIW :)

For example we showed the demo that renders London City, it's not rendered in the GPU but the CELL does lighting and texture processing then outputs it to the frame buffer. Even without GPU, only CELL can create good enough 3D graphics.
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o.O
 
Izzy said:
Indeed.
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Yeah, and I want to reiterate something mentioned before. Sony initially planned to have a Cell as the GPU, but they went with NVidia instead. They obviously though it had alot of graphical power, just not enough to make it worth not going with NVidia.

Can't say for sure until more info is released.
 
Add this to DeanoC's revelation that Heavenly Sword is currently entirely done on the PPE (Single-threaded, No SPE use) I think next gen (Both X360 & PS3) is going to be an absolute graphic whores paradise.

Gamers win!

:D
 
Vennt said:
Add this to DeanoC's revelation that Heavenly Sword is currently entirely done on the PPE (Single-threaded, No SPE use) I think next gen (Both X360 & PS3) is going to be an absolute graphic whores paradise.

Gamers win!

:D
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This we all can agree with
 
Haha, OK, Backtrack time...

DeanoC's post stating it was done just on the PPE seems to have been deleted.

(I read it, but it's not in the thread any more)

But his next post (After being asked if it really was just PPE) has also been edited.

DeanoC before edit and post deletion said:
We haven't yet made the jump to a multi-thread game architeture yet.
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DeanoC After edit said:
We haven't yet made the jump to a multi-thread game architeture yet. Almost everything sits on a single thread...
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Looks like *some* SPE use to me following a backtrack. Who knows how much :)
 
Pimpwerx said:
No, that's one-way. EE->GS. PEACE.
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yeah your right. I was thinking more along the lines of having a dedicated unit for processing graphics on the CPU.
This is something the X360 lacks unless they allocate 1/3 of the CPU cores to process graphics. Right?
 
Razoric said:
some of us are hardware idiots, what does this mean? o.O
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It means, as amazing as Heavenly Sword was, it was hardly using Cell power at all. Only the main core (PPE) - SPEs (7 of 'em) were idle. o.O
 
It looks like Heavenly Sword will be in 1080p

Deano Calver said:
Sony asked for 1080p for the trailer, so we provided it... Assuming all things being equal I can't see why the final game wouldn't...
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o.O
 
I'm not sure if I'm overeacting here, but if these news are true Sony didn't lie a bit about the Killzone, Motorsport etc etc footage, and these games can easily be done on PS3.

Damnit I'm turning into a graphics whore this gen and I can't stop it.
 
gofreak said:
Again, I'd love to hear Pana's thoughts on this. Or anyone who's qualified enough to talk about more potential Cell/RSX collaboration.
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Agreed. Pana, at least give us the introduction or a couple chapters worth. I know you are working on an opus of epic proportions, but we need something.
 
Count me in the o_0 group as well! I mean, I'm no huge techie, but I can follow along the gist of things as long as it's in fairly layman terms...watching the conference, this was the impression I got from the "This is done on the RSX" "This is done on the CELL processor" comments...but now that actual techies and developers have confirmed this...

o_0 0_o o_0 0_o o_0 0_o o_0 0_o o_0

:D
 
Vennt said:
Here:

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23162
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Nice interview. Besides the comments about the London demo, I thought these other comments were very welcome to here:

Yes. A communication tool is embedded in the firmware of course. You want to communicate while gaming, don't you? You can popup a chat window in the main screen or in the sub screen.

You know PSP has much more functions in the OS than PS2 does. Likewise, the PS3 system will be extended and evolved one, in which a communication tool via internet is included.
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To begin with we expect use with a digital camera as you can see from the fact that it has a CF slot too. Also, SD card is in many devices including mobile phones. Users will be annoyed if media have to be converted except for memsticks. Of course you want to put save data in all media types, don't you?
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yeah your right. I was thinking more along the lines of having a dedicated unit for processing graphics on the CPU.
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Over at D3D DenoC posted a great article regarding using the tri cores in the 360 in the same manner as Cell can be used with regard to GPU functions.

"XeCPU has 3 VMX128 cores at 3.2 Ghz, at worst it could get within 30% of Cell doing the same job, because the cores of Xenon are more flexible then SPU in all likelyhood it could achieve results much closer than that.

Cell has a FLOP advantage, XeCPU has a flexibilty advantage... I suspect a tuned advanced software engine for both would be within 70-80% of each other. I'm not even sure that if you have lots of vertex and texture data, that XeCPU would lose..."
 
Pug said:
Over at D3D DenoC posted a great article regarding using the tri cores in the 360 in the same manner as Cell can be used with regard to GPU functions.

"XeCPU has 3 VMX128 cores at 3.2 Ghz, at worst it could get within 30% of Cell doing the same job, because the cores of Xenon are more flexible then SPU in all likelyhood it could achieve results much closer than that.

Cell has a FLOP advantage, XeCPU has a flexibilty advantage... I suspect a tuned advanced software engine for both would be within 70-80% of each other. I'm not even sure that if you have lots of vertex and texture data, that XeCPU would lose..."
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He seemed to be talking in the context of a general software rasteriser, which I would agree with, but I think few are entertaining the idea of all-purpose rendering being done on Cell. Just the bits where it could help in a meaningful and significant way..
 
Theres no way the Getaway was using just Cell. What this is suggesting is that all the graphics are done in software. It would be impossible to achieve those results, you would get like 1frame/30seconds right there. Try running a game and setting it to a Reference device rather than hardware.
 
That Getaway quote is really something. :)

I think I've fallen in love with HDR lightning, jesus it looks good in that video of the Getaway:D
 
They also described rendering the frame and outputting the results and assembling them into a movie for somethings due to framerate issues.
 
RiZ III said:
Theres no way the Getaway was using just Cell. What this is suggesting is that all the graphics are done in software. It would be impossible to achieve those results, you would get like 1frame/30seconds right there. Try running a game and setting it to a Reference device rather than hardware.
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Lighting and texturing is mentioned. Not all rendering.

I'm particularly excited by the potential for doing lighting on the CPU, or helping with lighting from the CPU.
 
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