Could..in THEORY Cell do FSAA.

[coldstorm]

Xenos - 192 simple but dedicated processors running at 500MHz

Cell - 7 "general purpose" SPEs running at 3.2GHz



Jawed

3.2/.5 = 6.4

7*6.4 = 44.8 i give it perfect efficency to just prove the point

192/44.8 = 4.28 <- generalise amount of computation power the daughter die has over the cell spes.

now with that done. what about the wonderful physic,ai that spe suppose to bring. If spe is running the code for aa it can't be doing other things

 

[BenSkywalker]

With acumulation we might run in trouble with texture bandwith... (or even vertex, depending on what you're doing).

Even running with a shader load heavy enough to make HDR worthwhile? I would assume that the RSX would be hitting its shader performance limit some time before bandwidth had much impact at all.

 

[BenQ]

So what I'm geting from this thread is that when it comes to any realtime gaming scenario, there's really no practical way for the Cell to do AA.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It looks like it'll be hard, but I'll reserve 'can't be done' until the end of it's life! Perhaps there will be a way, and rememeber we don't know what EXACTLY RSX is - may have features to enable AA that G70 doesn't have.

Also maybe AA won't hit mainstream in every game, but seeing CON on PS2 wth per pixel lighting, bump mapping, 2xSSAA, etc., some devs can do anything no matter how much the hardware shouldn't be able to!

 

[London Geezer]

but seeing CON on PS2 wth per pixel lighting, bump mapping, 2xSSAA, etc., some devs can do anything no matter how much the hardware shouldn't be able to!

Pardon? CON?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Champions of Norrath from SnowBlind Studios, who started this gen with Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance.

 

[London Geezer]

Champions of Norrath from SnowBlind Studios, who started this gen with Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance.

And that game had per-pixel lighting? On PS2?

Cause i remember BGDA, it had very very nice lighting, which could fool the untrained eye into thinking it was per-pixel, but it was completely vertex based.

Maybe CON was different.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Unless they've got a trillion vertices for every bump in their caves! I can't find any technical explanation other than the inclusion of 'bump-mapping', so I don't know how it's implemented. But whatever they've done every pixel of the game is lit dynamically with bumps, reflections, etc. and it was way in advance of DA.

A quick look at DA screenshots at IGN shows flat textured walls and floors. In CON these are all bumpy.

 

[London Geezer]

Unless they've got a trillion vertices for every bump in their caves! I can't find any technical explanation other than the inclusion of 'bump-mapping', so I don't know how it's implemented. But whatever they've done every pixel of the game is lit dynamically with bumps, reflections, etc. and it was way in advance of DA.

A quick look at DA screenshots at IGN shows flat textured walls and floors. In CON these are all bumpy.

Well i seem to remember that it was not per-pixel as the light sources were not moving, so there was no way to check if the lighting was dynamic or pre-baked. Still i haven't played the game, i'm only speaking out of memory.
Many games on PS2 have surfaces that look bump-mapped but really aren't. And yes, sometimes the devs use a whole lot of small triangles -very cheap on the GS - to convey that effect. TekkenTag was the first game to show that, everyone thought it had bump mapped floors but it was really a whole lot of geometry and clever specular lighting.

Stilll, if it looks good who cares. It's just not per-pixel lighting, which is near impossible on PS2 as we all know.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

CON has dynamic lightsources in the spell effects. You cast a fireball and see the bumps over the wall surfaces.

 

[London Geezer]

CON has dynamic lightsources in the spell effects. You cast a fireball and see the bumps over the wall surfaces.

Again i say, it can be vertex based. All other games on PS2 achieved that effect with vertex based ighting. Not sure why CON would be any different.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You may be right. Beats me. Just looks good!

 

[London Geezer]

This brings me to the point that whatever X360 and PS3 can and cannot do, the devs will ALWAYS find little tricks to make a simple effect look like a more advanced and expensive one. It's all good to me.