DTS-HD/Full HDMI 1.3 compliance - May not make PS3 launch. RSX is on audio duty.

[ban25]

Well I'm certainly not going to dispute you here, Dean, as you are certainly in a position to know. I agree that it does make more sense to handle audio on the CPU. I wonder where this confusion with RSX and audio is coming from...there have been a few similar threads in the past. Perhaps the RSX just acts as a passthrough for audio in the event HDMI is used and it's being misconstrued as being more than that.

Having RSX do any kind of work for TrueHD makes no sense at all from a system architecture point of view. Audio decode (or encode, in the case of runtime DD5.1 encoding) should be performed by an SPU, if only because it can then run completely in parallel to the main body of an application. RSX is - for pretty much most of the frame - under complete application control.. it's not like you just do a CreateThread() on it, and have it swap between game & OS control. Infact, I doubt that GPU's are particularly effective at running complex sound decoder/encoder algorithms anyway, given the nature of that kind of code. It's definately easier to port existing codecs to CELL (whether PPU or SPU) than to a GPU.

 

[DeanA]

I wonder where this confusion with RSX and audio is coming from...there have been a few similar threads in the past. Perhaps the RSX just acts as a passthrough for audio in the event HDMI is used and it's being misconstrued as being more than that.

I also wonder where the confusion is coming from

I think other devs have said on these boards that audio is just passed through RSX to allow for it to be shoved through the HDMI transmitter hardware (or DAC, in the case of component/AV connections). It certainly sounds like a decent idea ().. and if that was the case, then there are obviously no problems related to bandwidth by shoving 7.1 LPCM data through it.

Cheers,
Dean

 

[Shifty Geezer]

So who's the source of this RSX idea above? What reason have we to think they know what they're talking about? And moreso, how credible is any of the DTS-HD+HDMI 1.3 'news'? From the idea of RSX doing sound, it sounds like someones talking about soething they don't actually understand, but are technically voiced enough to give an impression they do!