Putting royalty and software (CG) licensing to one side, what is your impression of how much Sony has paid NV for "tweaks"? Do you realize that, for comparison, Jen-Hsun Huang has said that G8x had $250M R&D invested in it as of March 2006, and $500M by the time the entire family launches?
any news about RSX?
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Putting royalty and software (CG) licensing to one side, what is your impression of how much Sony has paid NV for "tweaks"? Do you realize that, for comparison, Jen-Hsun Huang has said that G8x had $250M R&D invested in it as of March 2006, and $500M by the time the entire family launches?
Sorry, but no. Xbox could likely do it in VGA mode (since XGPU is pretty much a beefed-up GF4), PS2 can not since there's not room in eDRAM to hold such a large frame. GC can't do it either, video out doesn't support such a resolution, I am more than a bit doubtful the cube even supports PS2's approximate limit, which is around 1280*1024.
Anyway, claims of "feature X is a useless bulletpoint feature" is nothing but purest nonsense. If it's there, you got it for free. Be glad you have it, it's always better to HAVE X, than to NOT have X. Well, unless you happen to severely dislike X's manufacturer of course.
Sugarcoat,
Didn't Sony announce that they were working with NVIDIA on the RSX around 2004ish? That would have given them time to at least customize the 7800 (which they were already working on due to the fact they plan so far ahead for each new generation of graphic cards) for the PS3?
We already at least somewhat know from unofficial leaks that the RSX has increased texture cache and vertex cache. Those are at least two tweaks that will hopefully help the GPU. Although, you are correct in that those are probably pretty basic and are there to help the RSX fit in with the general environment of the PS3. But what really gets my goat more than anything else is that right now we have a GPU you can buy off the shelf called the 7950GT which is pretty much the exact match of the RSX. I don't know exactly how much money Sony paid NVIDIA, but I would think they would not be paying them all kinds of money for what would *eventually* be something they could just grab off the shelf so to speak.
I'm NOT trying to be critical of the RSX. From what I have seen so far it's obviously working very well in the PS3. I'm satified with the graphics I am seeing. It's out of sheer curiosity that I want to know what if any additional modifications are inside of the chip.
Now, once I get a PS3 in my hands I will want to play the games more than anything else and you probably won't find me posting on the internet very much at all!
But until then I can't help but be facinated with the internal architecture of the RSX.
Didn't Sony announce that they were working with NVIDIA on the RSX around 2004ish? That would have given them time to at least customize the 7800 (which they were already working on due to the fact they plan so far ahead for each new generation of graphic cards) for the PS3?
We already at least somewhat know from unofficial leaks that the RSX has increased texture cache and vertex cache. Those are at least two tweaks that will hopefully help the GPU. Although, you are correct in that those are probably pretty basic and are there to help the RSX fit in with the general environment of the PS3. But what really gets my goat more than anything else is that right now we have a GPU you can buy off the shelf called the 7950GT which is pretty much the exact match of the RSX. I don't know exactly how much money Sony paid NVIDIA, but I would think they would not be paying them all kinds of money for what would *eventually* be something they could just grab off the shelf so to speak.
I'm NOT trying to be critical of the RSX. From what I have seen so far it's obviously working very well in the PS3. I'm satified with the graphics I am seeing. It's out of sheer curiosity that I want to know what if any additional modifications are inside of the chip.
Now, once I get a PS3 in my hands I will want to play the games more than anything else and you probably won't find me posting on the internet very much at all!
But until then I can't help but be facinated with the internal architecture of the RSX.
By now, all that you need to know about RSX is already in the public domain. The clock, the bus, the number of pixel and vertex pipelines, etc. Accept that it is what it is.
The texture caches that you talk about, indeed they were increased, only to cope with the higher latency when pulling data from XDR memory. And just so you don't get any ideas, the texture buffers were increase from 48k to 96k. Nothing ground breaking.
Also the shaders got a couple of extra instructions - a fast vector normalize and some extra texture lookup logic. Nothing fancy again.
So don't look for any miracles here. If you want to feel better, understand this - noone has ever used the 'lowly' 7800GT's to it's full potential yet. That's the beauty of fixed hardware, you know all that the hardware is capable of and you don't have to worry about compatibility with 5 year old crapy cards. So that's where the true power of RSX lies - in developer's talent to extract incredible effects from a very capable and robust piece of silicon.
well if it did indeed get downgraded its going to be pretty much on par in some areas and slightly weaker in others. Its not some day and night difference, you can still expect to see the best visual effects from both consoles to be very comparable. The only thing that seperates them is the devs imagination.
Jugding from what ive seen at TGS, it's even more than just on par IMO - and these are just launchgames! Don't forget the PS3 is not so reliant on the RSX than 360 is on Xenos.
On PS3 you have a very close GPU<->CPU relationship where the CPU adds alot to the graphical experience.
If that was the case, the RSX would have be a custum GPU much like the Xenos, not a G7x with slight modifications.
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That'd create a chip in the order of 550 million transistors I think. One of those would probably cost a few thousand dollars. I wouldn't hold your breath...
I'd like to see a CPU+GPU hybrid or something in future consoles. Wouldn't you think that would be possible by now? It would seem like a nice performance boost if the CPU and GPU were combined into one... maybe this is wishful thinking though?
Dodo3 meet AMD/ATI, AMD/ATI meet dodo3.
Barbarian,
Thank you very, very much for letting us know about that information. I really do appreciate it!
Basically, we now know that the texture cache is 96KB (per texture pipeline or quad?) and the maximum texture_transform cache is 63 per vertex pipe? (which I dug up earlier in these forums).
Along with the other information you released I'm honestly relieved to finally get this information! I feel like I can just go ahead and talk about this with all of you for a bit and then move on to the great games of the PS3.
Thanks so much Barbarian!
At least we know the RSX is indeed more than an ordinary N47.
Thank you very, very much for letting us know about that information. I really do appreciate it!
Basically, we now know that the texture cache is 96KB (per texture pipeline or quad?) and the maximum texture_transform cache is 63 per vertex pipe? (which I dug up earlier in these forums).
Along with the other information you released I'm honestly relieved to finally get this information! I feel like I can just go ahead and talk about this with all of you for a bit and then move on to the great games of the PS3.
Thanks so much Barbarian!
At least we know the RSX is indeed more than an ordinary N47.
IMO, the coolest thing about RSX is its interface with CELL. Internally, its a pretty standard-fair, albeit reasonably powerful, GPU. But externally, it's got Flex I/O. The bandwidth here, if I'm not mistaken, is 7x what it is in the average PC. Should we look for much more cooperation between CELL and RSX than between CPUs and GPUs of other machines? The way the PS3 is configured seems to set the stage for lots of composite rendering techniques.
I just found this guys, RSX has been downclocked and so has its memory : http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20060925/3d_tgs.htm
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