The Cell Effect - PS3 Hardware Ready?

[jvd]

Hence, 10 time more power, but really less ram than actual PCs... That's where the problem reside. Tricks will be found, used, but will developers/artists have enough time to create models with Bézier patches? And will that save that much space?

But what game right now uses 256 megs of ram besides doom3 ?

You can play half life 2 on x800xt pes with 6x fsaa at 1600x1200 .

The consoles wont be using such high reses or such high fsaa settings thus saving storage area .

Also with dxtc and 3Dc being used the ram will go a long way .

The only reason why doom3 ultra quality used so much room was because nothing ws compressed .



Basicly the xenon will be like taking something faster and more feature rich than a r420 and matching it up with a cpu that has 6 cores and is able to work on 6 threads at once . Coding just for that set up and u will get games that look better than anything on a similar set up on the pc . I would wager you would get things that look better than a game made with a generation advanced tech on a pc .

For example if you programed to the metal for a r420 and a monster cpu like descirbed it would most likely look better than a game for the pc based off an r520 and a top of the line athlon 64 .


Whats going to happen is each of the three systems is going to be better than another at doing things but the final images will all look remarkably close to each other

 

[passerby]

Another Cell/PS3 topic... eyes... hurt....

Assuming these 'Cell workstations' are unveiled before the end of the year, we only have 2-3 months to wait before we can deduce about half of what Sony's next-gen console will be like. So we just need a little patience. And assuming that people intend to get one during launch, that's still 1.5 years away for the japanese launch, and 2 years away for a US launch. Now, you pple sure you want to go on with this for another 2 years?

Why don't we think about something more immediate, like next week's TGS?

 

[Farid]

But what game right now uses 256 megs of ram besides doom3 ?

Are you serious here? Or are you talking about Video RAM only, if that's the case, then yes, not a lot of games ask for 256Mo of video RAM, but Next Gen consoles are expected to have 256Mo for the whole system. And there's tons of games that uses more than 256Mo of RAM, as a whole (Main system RAM + CG RAM, without counting Windows) and those are far from what people expect from a next gen game (Graphically speaking).

The consoles wont be using such high reses or such high fsaa settings thus saving storage area .

I don't think framebuffers will be the problem.

Also with dxtc and 3Dc being used the ram will go a long way .

TC is used in almost 99% of the PC Games out there. And what's with the 3Dc fixation?

The only reason why doom3 ultra quality used so much room was because nothing ws compressed .

Ultra quality setting asks for a 512Mo GCs, High asks for 256Mo, and look how many people are actually complaining about the textures being low resolution.

Still, my conclusion was that developers would, and i'm sure, will squeeze the next gen machines , so they can deliver top notch graphics.

I was just saying that the amount of RAM that the consoles will have, will play a greater role, next gen, than this one.
Or else we might end with power that can't be used for anything really useful with regards to "in-game" scenarios.

 

[Fafalada]

Why don't we think about something more immediate, like next week's TGS

That's no fun - everyone knows there will lots of media to cover it, no mysteries to speculate about. I'm sure PSP and DS will both get more bashing once TGS starts - but even bashers can use a breather before the big event
Not to mention for some, why bother speculating on what we'll see in a week in person

Also with dxtc and 3Dc being used the ram will go a long way

They already are used and you get projections from Epic for at least 1-2GB requirements... these methods are at the point where they are becoming the minimum required compression, not a solution...
Anyway I may be overly optimistic, but I kind think some much more effective schemes will become viable for use with nextgen hw...

 

[Farid]

Anyway I may be overly optimistic, but I kind think some much more effective schemes will become viable for use with nextgen hw...

Wavelet compression scheme? Or some hybrid method?

 

[jvd]

Are you serious here? Or are you talking about Video RAM only, if that's the case, then yes, not a lot of games ask for 256Mo of video RAM, but Next Gen consoles are expected to have 256Mo for the whole system. And there's tons of games that uses more than 256Mo of RAM, as a whole (Main system RAM + CG RAM, without counting Windows) and those are far from what people expect from a next gen game (Graphically speaking).

Yes but many console games stream data from the discs thus less need for system ram. I can't think of any pc game currently that will stream from your cd rom drive. Most current pc games load the lvl into system ram. Thus the high requirement of ram

 

[Deepak]

I do find myself wondering, how can graphics get any more better than this??

When they start looking like this;

Paul, PS1 has already achieved it years ago, I played X-files on it....

 

[jvd]

Paul, PS1 has already achieved it years ago, I played X-files on it....

Bah even my sega cd / turbo graphics cd acomplished this !?!?! Its called sewer shark !

Not only that but sega cd had a game that stared the coreys of 80's fame !

 

[kenneth9265_3]

I do find myself wondering, how can graphics get any more better than this??

When they start looking like this;

Yeah, but we won't be see stuff like that till PS4/XBox 3 or beyond right?

 

[Paul]

Yeah, but we won't be see stuff like that till PS4/XBox 3 or beyond right?

We'll see what happens; I'm through trying to predict the future.

 

[Evil_Cloud]

Graphics technologies will keep improving, but wether we will notice an increase in graphical quality or not depends entirely on the production studio and art assets.

 

[jvd]

Graphics technologies will keep improving, but wether we will notice an increase in graphical quality or not depends entirely on the production studio and art assets.

I highly doubt they will get to the picture he posted anytime soon .

The changes in image quality are going to come much more slowely because its going to take more and more power to make the leaps in visuals we've been seeing.

 

[Pepto-Bismol]

Squeezing realism into mathematical models has a funny way of breeding some of the most unwieldy equations.

And for this reason, complicated models (that choke the life out of finite processors) are a poor excuse for reality.

Personally, I think the practitioners of photorealism should act more like filmmakers and apply special effects to motion pictures rather than try to cook up entire scenes from scratch. I think this kind of workload is better served in hand-drawn worlds, where fiction makes less demands on other aspects of gameplay, like control and physics.

 

[MfA]

That just doesnt work all that well in a 3D world where the camera is out of your control.

 

[passerby]

Not to mention for some, why bother speculating on what we'll see in a week in person

Ooo... you should give us a report about that when it's over, minus the media propaganda.

 

[Pepto-Bismol]

That just doesnt work all that well in a 3D world where the camera is out of your control.

Trust me. Camera angles won't be a problem – even arresting ones like those rotation scenes in The Matrix!

Perspective, after all, is just another stylized special effect . . .

 

[MfA]

We dont control the actor to the same degree either, although I guess Keanu Reeves wouldnt need that many poses to be shot to get his full range

 

[London Geezer]

Keanu Reeves.... poses.... Keanu Reeves.... poses.... Keanu Reeves.... poses.... Keanu Reeves.... poses.... Keanu Reeves.... poses.... Keanu Reeves.... poses....


Too much.... I's too much....

 

[Pepto-Bismol]

We dont control the actor to the same degree either, although I guess Keanu Reeves wouldnt need that many poses to be shot to get his full range

Capturing the subtleties of life is all the more reason to stream motion pictures!

You don't have to be a graphics geek to see that cooking up entire scenes from scratch (and babysitting trillions and trillions of polygons) just to approach the reality captured in that photograph would have be the work of a sweatshop full of supercomputers . . . from the next millennium.

Truth is, the world as we know it – and we don't know everything – is staggeringly complex. :|

Physicists have a knack for mind-boggling theories, complicated equations, and utterly confounding jargon, but they actually love simplicity. They assume reality is simple at its foundation.

That's why they aren't comfortable with their own standard model of particle physics.

This model describes the characteristics and interactions of 57 (at last count) different particles—from electrons to quarks to muons—that make up everything in the universe.


SOURCE: National Geographic (September 2004)