GSCUBE SIGGRAPH

Nesh

Double Agent
Legend
Anyone remember this?

Has anyone here attended Sony's presentation at the time?

There were some brilliant demonstrations described then but there was nothing at all shown to the public. Not even a single image of what they have showed. The only thing we saw was the actual hardware and the specs under the hood.

How good were the results at least in a tech demo form compared to what we get today?

We were told that they came close into reproducing visuals from Antz, the Matrix and Final Fantasy Spirits Within
 
Anyone remember this?

Has anyone here attended Sony's presentation at the time?

There were some brilliant demonstrations described then but there was nothing at all shown to the public. Not even a single image of what they have showed. The only thing we saw was the actual hardware and the specs under the hood.

How good were the results at least in a tech demo form compared to what we get today?

We were told that they came close into reproducing visuals from Antz, the Matrix and Final Fantasy Spirits Within

I saw one of the tech demos... It had a shot of the female lead character from final fantasy looking through the window of a space craft in zero g. the camera as I recall, sorted travelled through or very close to her floating hair. as I recall there was alot of polys making the hair up but, as you got closer you could see the angles in the hair.

The quality of the rendering was not super brilliant, lighting wise etc. But poly counts were nothing short of breath taking at the time. What I saw only lasted a few seconds. I cant see anything on the net either. But def saw it tho. Cant think where from.
 
PS. compared to todays real time rendering it was nowhere near as good overall (minus ploy count perhaps. Tho it t was good for then. The scene setup was very candid and limited to help achieve detail in very small area only.

I would love to see some of this type of stuff revisited for when the next gen engine renderers such as Unreal Engine 4 / Cry Engine 4.

I would like to see them have a stab at

Toy story 1 and 3 in real time.

1 im sure would be close and 3 would be an extreme approximation, but it would still be fun to see them try!
 
It puzzles me that there is not a single media released. Was it such a big secret?

Interesting. I assume the HW wasnt designed to use any of the standard techniques used today commonly in real time graphics.
 
Interesting. I assume the HW wasnt designed to use any of the standard techniques used today commonly in real time graphics.
It was 16 PS2's in a cluster. It could only render what a PS2 could, just 16x faster. I suppose with 16 EE's you could do things like normal mapping in software, but the system isn't ideally suited for that sort of thing. PS2's crazy polygons and fill was an okay choice for a last gen console but the architecture never had a future.
 
It would be interesting to see how it scales, compare to XFire and SLI. Anyone know how it divides the rendering ? It had the 32 MB GS on each cluster, so it could output 1080p ?
 
It would be interesting to see how it scales, compare to XFire and SLI. Anyone know how it divides the rendering ? It had the 32 MB GS on each cluster, so it could output 1080p ?

I think Sony demonstrated video at that resolution using the PS2 HW at the time. Now real time graphics? I dont know
 
All the GSCubes except the odd few for collectors were destroyed, that's why there's very little information on them.
 
It's all on wikipedia

Used on the Matrix, Resident Evil, and Antz. Good at what it did, they just forgot to implement any decent way of actually getting the results transferred from the box.

16 × Emotion Engine CPUs clocked at 294.912 MHz
2 GB of DRDRAM Rambus main memory (16 × 128 MB)
(128 MB was a common memory allocation on devkits vs. the 32 MB on shipping units)
Memory Bus Bandwidth 50.3 GB/s (3.1 GB/s × 16)
Floating Point Performance 97.5 GFLOPS (6.1 GFLOPS × 16)
16 × "Graphics Synthesizer "I-32" Graphics Processors clocked at 147.456 MHz
512 MB of eDRAM Video Memory (16 × 32 MB)
(The "I-32" Graphics Synthesizer was a custom variant that contained 32 MB of eDRAM instead of the typical 4 MB)
eDRAM Bandwidth 755 GB/s (47.2 GB/s × 16)
Pixel Fill Rate 37.7 GB/s (2.36 GB/s × 16)
Maximum Polygon Drawing Rate 1.2 Gpolygons/s (73.7 Mpolygons/s × 16)
 
It's all on wikipedia

Used on the Matrix, Resident Evil, and Antz. Good at what it did, they just forgot to implement any decent way of actually getting the results transferred from the box.

Being used on films is actually not correct, Sony said the machine was under powered for film like CGI and did actually intend to launch a version with 32x EE and 32x GS but that version never saw the light of day.

The machine couldn't render Final Fantasy Spirits Within at any where near the quality of the final film.

It was in most ways a flop which is why they were not in circulation for a long period of time.
 
The thing was probably way too expensive to build and knowing Sony, probably would've charged 2 to 3 times what it was really worth.

No GFLOPS figures are given for the GSs, though I think I remember seeing something like the equivalent of 16 GFLOPS for the PS2's GS somewhere
 
yea if you have them could you post them or give us the name of the book?

I don't know about any book, but the videogame magazine EDGE ran an article on it with pictures.

Does say due to basic inefficiencies of it's parallel architecture that it has the rendering power of 10 Playstation 2 consoles but contains 16 PS2 CPU/GPU's.

I'll see if i can find the article, scan it and post it.
 
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