Confirmation: PlayStation 3 will use an in-house GPU(proof)

[marconelly!]

Notice this is a Sony-of-America job posting. My guess is that Sony-of-Japan doesn't think a shader compiler is nescessary, but Sony's American developer support people have been flamed by American developers for the PS3 lacking a shader compiler.

SCE's software technology group is located at SCEA, so it's not surprising they are the ones developing this compiler.

 

[FatherJohn]

Isn't SCEA's software technology group really more of a developer tech support group, similar to Xbox's Advanced Technology Group? I've always gotten that impression from reading their GDC papers. It seems that they spend most of their time helping 3rd party developers tune their games, with the odd small demo code thrown in.

 

[one]

Isn't SCEA's software technology group really more of a developer tech support group, similar to Xbox's Advanced Technology Group? I've always gotten that impression from reading their GDC papers. It seems that they spend most of their time helping 3rd party developers tune their games, with the odd small demo code thrown in.

http://www.research.scea.com/

 

[FatherJohn]

Isn't SCEA's software technology group really more of a developer tech support group, similar to Xbox's Advanced Technology Group? I've always gotten that impression from reading their GDC papers. It seems that they spend most of their time helping 3rd party developers tune their games, with the odd small demo code thrown in.

http://www.research.scea.com/

The "research" on that page looks pretty developer-tech-support-and-small-demos to me. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

Did SCEA's tech group do the GCC backend work for the PS2? Did they do the compiler for the VU? Are they doing the compilers for PS3? If so then I'd say they are certainly more than just dev tech support.

 

[Farid]

Isn't it kind of late in the day for them to be looking for someone to design such an essential component of the system? What are they going to show or talk about at E3 if 6 months out, they're looking for what looks like an architect?

They're beefing up their team, they're not "creating it", at least nothing in this add says otherwise:

The successful candidate will develop a state-of-the-art shading language compiler for an advanced forth-generation graphics processing unit (GPU). With the assistance of other team members, the individual must be capable of designing and implementing the major components of the compiler backend.

BTW, if the GPU is designed by Sony alone, then... We might, at least, expect a lot of fillrate... :?

Seriously, though, this announce doesn't rule out any kind of alliance for the GPU.
It's old news that Sony won't buy any "ready to fab" GPU from any IHV, the only possible involvement of an IHV was some kind of technological exchange or IPs licensing for some technologies. This news, knowing Sony is the one developing (or co-developing) the Shader Compling tech, doesn't really rule out, without any doubts, the previously mentioned hypotheses.
And for Toshiba, it wouldn't change anything, since they could only be involved in the hardware design, seeing that they don't have any track record on the shader software field, AFAIK of course.

 

[Quaz51]

http://upsilandre.free.fr/images/SCE-R&D.jpg

 

[Megadrive1988]

Vysez:

BTW, if the GPU is designed by Sony alone, then... We might, at least, expect a lot of fillrate... Confused

it would seem so, yeah

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12899

[0005] In making computer graphics, many kinds of discrete operations are normally conducted, such as operations within a two-dimensional pixel or between pixels, collision detection, object creation or composition, or geometry operation. In such an application, when only the main CPU of a computer is employed, a large amount of computing power is required which cannot be obtained by a computer having a single CPU. For example, a rendering process capacity of the order of several hundreds [Mpolygon/sec] and several tens [Gpixel/sec] is frequently required.

 

[jvd]

Hmmmm how about a bunch of gs's clocked at like 2 ghz each on one core . That would be a fillrate monster and then i can say it compares to a voodoo2 in feature set for another 5 + years !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Panajev2001a]

Isn't SCEA's software technology group really more of a developer tech support group, similar to Xbox's Advanced Technology Group? I've always gotten that impression from reading their GDC papers. It seems that they spend most of their time helping 3rd party developers tune their games, with the odd small demo code thrown in.

http://www.research.scea.com/

The "research" on that page looks pretty developer-tech-support-and-small-demos to me. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

Did SCEA's tech group do the GCC backend work for the PS2? Did they do the compiler for the VU? Are they doing the compilers for PS3? If so then I'd say they are certainly more than just dev tech support.

Last I checked they are the people behind VCL (the VU's "compiler") which is quite good IMHO.

A westener also did back-end work for GCC... which was VERY quickly ported and needed a nice fix to properly work, but those might eb rumors derived from the fact that GCC on PlayStation 2 is quite shitty :lol.

SCEA also have job postings related to "Sony's answer to DirectX" which they (with some help ? who knows...) are working on and they had job postings related to work with the Eclipse IDE (they are working on this with IBM on this to create their own multi-platform IDE to be used with CELL).

 

[Fox5]

This would not be needed if they relied on ATI, nVIDIA, IMGTech.'s PowerVR or BitBoys made GPUs as all of those would come with a shading language compiler designed by the GPU provider: especially big boys like ATI, nVIDIA and IMG Technologies.

Good grief, is bitboys still around? Did they ever release a product?

I bet the shaders will focus on functionality over performance.

BTW, what are the chances ps3 won't be a traditional renderer?

 

[nAo]

BTW, what are the chances ps3 won't be a traditional renderer?

very low

 

[London Geezer]

BTW, what are the chances ps3 won't be a traditional renderer?

Define "traditional".
Then, define "untraditional".

 

[Megadrive1988]

hmmmmm
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18690&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

 

[Fox5]

BTW, what are the chances ps3 won't be a traditional renderer?

Define "traditional".
Then, define "untraditional".

Umm...

Traditional- uses pixels and polygons and is an IMR

Untraditional- could be a TBDR, and could use something else besides pixels and polygons...how about NURBs or voxels?

 

[Cryect]

No way in hell is the PS3 using voxels. Most memory hungry stuff ever. Not that I dislike voxels just the RAM requirements is a little high for consoles.

 

[London Geezer]

BTW, what are the chances ps3 won't be a traditional renderer?

Define "traditional".
Then, define "untraditional".

Umm...

Traditional- uses pixels and polygons and is an IMR

Untraditional- could be a TBDR, and could use something else besides pixels and polygons...how about NURBs or voxels?

There were a lot of discussions on here regarding the practical use of NURBS in games. In the end the curves get transformed into polygons at rendering stage anyway...
Pixels will always be pixels, that what you need to display an image and it's not gonna change until we have 3D displays or "jack in" the whatever...
Voxels would ne nice if done properly, shame that they need as much memory as i need to go to the loo just about now: a lot.

 

[Squeak]

Pixels will always be pixels, that what you need to display an image and it's not gonna change until we have 3D displays or "jack in" the whatever...

I think Fox5 is thinking of a renderer where the GPU/VPU defers "thinking" in pixels until the very last stage before rasterisation.

Voxels would ne nice if done properly, shame that they need as much memory as i need to go to the loo just about now: a lot.

You can get around that with compression. A voxel model, if stored with the right kind of compression, needen't take up more memory than a polygon model.

 

[Wunderchu]

Vysez:

BTW, if the GPU is designed by Sony alone, then... We might, at least, expect a lot of fillrate... Confused

it would seem so, yeah

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12899

several tens [Gpixel/sec] is frequently required.