Austin Game Conference - Programming the PSP

[McFly]

Any new things from there? I did a search on the web and found this:

Well today at the Austin Game Conference Sony kept up the tease act it's been doing since early 2004. Promising us a demo of the first full game at the Tokyo Game Show, as well as some solid benchmarking numbers, they did reveal some more information about the Hardware and Software side of the PSP.

Hardware
- The PSP will be a modern game console with capabilites matching or beating the PS2
- The PSP will hook up directly to your PC with a USB 2.0 Connection
- It will feature 10 Digital buttons including a anolog Joystick
- Features a color 480X272 24 bit screen with NO video out
- 1800 MhaLion (Battery which can be replaced by the user)
- Launch accessories should be Camera, GPS, and Keyboard
- 802.11B LAN (can play with others via P2P or traditional Client/TCP servers
- Only one memory stick (up to 1GB, 1.8 Mbps Transfer)
- They joked it wil have No Dolby Digital out, just stero
- The UMD will go in the back of the PSP from the Top.

Software

- Closed Hardware (API Programming)

3D Hardware
- Display List for programming
- Clipping (Hardware enabled)
- Bezier
- Morph
- Pixel Pipeline

DMA Processing decouples GPU from CPU and allows both to share the bus
at the same time

Development machines will feature an emulator and DVD-R masters sent to Sony to be transferred to UMD.

It will feature Parametric Surfaces so the GPU can handle Bezier Patches and B-Spline

It will be the only handheld that can handle morphing technology to render facial animation in close-ups. Only handheld that can handle skeltal animaton.

It will also be able to run tri-linear and bi-linear Filtering without a performance hit. Can also do mipmapping and shade mapping.

All in all it was a ton of slides and a ton of information to digest in one meeting. Let me know if any of this makes sense and please comment away. I wonder what the first finished game will be at the Tokyo Game Show?

http://www.consoleconspiracy.com/News/archives/2004_09.html#000100

Anyone of you there?

Fredi

 

[Simon F]

Only handheld that can handle skeltal animaton.

What a load of ...

 

[Panajev2001a]

Only handheld that can handle skeltal animaton.

What a load of ...

Oh come on, I am sure they are not ignoring you guys .

How many bones does MBX support max ?

 

[V3]

- 1800 MhaLion (Battery which can be replaced by the user)

That's an improvement from 1400 mAh. They need to get it up to around 2500+ mAh, since the CPU alone is eating up 0.5 W when decoding.

 

[nAo]

I wonder if Panajev missed that:

It will also be able to run tri-linear and bi-linear Filtering without a performance hit

8)

 

[thop]

- The PSP will be a modern game console with capabilites matching or beating the PS2

Finally Guden Oden can give me a rest! 8)

 

[Panajev2001a]

I wonder if Panajev missed that:

It will also be able to run tri-linear and bi-linear Filtering without a performance hit

8)

Tri-linear without any performance hit ?
Sounds good, almost too good... hopefully it is true.

That would be quite something: 648 MPixels/s with tri-linear on is about 1.08x faster than what the PlayStation 2 achieves with tri-linear filtering on.

PSP has a performance lead over PlayStation 2.

Considering the screen resolution (~2.2x lower screen resolution) the gap widens:

PlayStation 2 does 1200 MPixels/s with bi-linear and 600 MPixels/s with tri-linear (and bad LOD ).


PSP does 648 MPixels/s (or considering the screen resolution difference 1296 MPixels/s [scaling PSP performance to 640x448 from the 480x272 screen resolution the PSP supports]) with either bi-linear or tri-linear.

 

[Simon F]

How many bones does MBX support max ?

I guess however many you can do with VS1.1 - which'd be quite a few.

In practice, though, I suspect you wouldn't want to do more than 16 bones since that would be up to about 1/2 of your "constant" budget.

 

[Panajev2001a]

How many bones does MBX support max ?

I guess however many you can do with VS1.1 - which'd be quite a few.

In practice, though, I suspect you wouldn't want to do more than 16 bones since that would be up to about 1/2 of your "constant" budget.

That is quite good.

Last I checked PSP's Hardwired GPU was doing up to 8 bones, but you still have a nice 2.6 GFLOPS VFPU sitting on the R4000i CPU that cna help IMHO.

 

[marconelly!]

What a load of ...

Simon, to be fair, even if MBX does have skeletal animation hardware support (which I assume by your response it does) there isn't really a gaming handheld that uses that chip yet, nor it seems there will be one in the time of PSP release. So I think they are comparing their PSP with what they know will be on the market by this december (GBA, DS, Zodiac, Gizmondo, nGage) none of which, to my knowledge, have hardware support for skeletal animation.

 

[Simon F]

I don't know about the timing(of when companies want to release products) but I would have thought that a PDA or a phone could be considered "hand held".

 

[Guden Oden]

Finally Guden Oden can give me a rest! 8)

Hahaha!

Anyway, I think this is just marketroid bollocks, and we KNOW that PSP can't surpass PS2 across the board no matter what - it doesn't have the screen res to do it for starters.

Still, I wish they would just RELEASE the damn thing... It looks so hot.

 

[Megadrive1988]

Panajev, what about the recent revalation that PSP can do only
332 Mpixels/sec textured / 664 Mpixels/sec untextured ?

wouldn't 664 Mpixel/sec tri-linear filtered pixels/sec indicate texture mapping?

....just woke up and haven't had enough coffee yet so excuse me if i missed something

 

[Farid]

Panajev, what about the recent revalation that PSP can do only
332 Mpixels/sec textured / 664 Mpixels/sec untextured ?

IIRC, that wasn't revelations, thoses were simples conjectures based on the available datas about the PSP's GPU.

wouldn't 664 Mpixel/sec tri-linear filtered pixels/sec indicate texture mapping?

Indeed, linear filtering on gouraud shading... might be useless.