Has there been any info on the SPU that the PS3 will have?
- Thread starter I.S.T.
- Start date
Not a peep's been heard, though one wonders if they'll even bother with a separate I/O and sound chip this time 'round. The BB will be so powerful it can deal with these tasks in its sleep.
Not that I'd be disappointed if there IS a separate chip, but neither would I be if there isn't...
Think of the speech synthesis PS3 could do if one decided to sit down and program something like that. Jesus, HAL9k-quality would not be out of the question, though the brains behind the voice would be lacking - and for that we should all be very very lucky I guess, ha ha.
Not that I'd be disappointed if there IS a separate chip, but neither would I be if there isn't...
Think of the speech synthesis PS3 could do if one decided to sit down and program something like that. Jesus, HAL9k-quality would not be out of the question, though the brains behind the voice would be lacking - and for that we should all be very very lucky I guess, ha ha.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
Sony better have a sound processor that's fully capable of doing at least DD 5.1 audio in realtime gameplay like Xbox's MCPX. if not a 7.1 capable one.
come to think of it, the PSP processor that handles audio, I forget the name of it, is able to do 7.1 audio, even though PSP's output is said to be just stereo. the chip is rated slightly higher than Xbox's MCPX in operations or instructions per sec. I could not imagine PS3 coming with a less capable audio processor than PSP.
the "media" processors that Sony mentioned, for PS3, will probably be doing the audio.
come to think of it, the PSP processor that handles audio, I forget the name of it, is able to do 7.1 audio, even though PSP's output is said to be just stereo. the chip is rated slightly higher than Xbox's MCPX in operations or instructions per sec. I could not imagine PS3 coming with a less capable audio processor than PSP.
the "media" processors that Sony mentioned, for PS3, will probably be doing the audio.
Guden Oden said:Think of the speech synthesis PS3 could do if one decided to sit down and program something like that. Jesus, HAL9k-quality would not be out of the question, though the brains behind the voice would be lacking - and for that we should all be very very lucky I guess, ha ha.
I don't mean to be a party pooper but let's not overhype PS3. Their were alot of overhyped expectations for PS2 and I see that starting to happen all over again.
What do you mean "starting"?nobie said:
nobie said:
Um, considering some speech synthesis implementations I've heard already sound pretty darned good running on just a fraction of the power of modern CPUs, it's not a very far stretch to imagine what could be done with multiple dozens of gigaflops of computing power. That's not overhyping, that's just extrapolation.
And Zurich, the sound processor does not need, nor use hundreds of MB/s to do DD encoding, it's all done internally in the chip itself by a hardwired DSP. Each stereo 16-bit/44kHz stream is about 175kB/s, you'd need QUITE a few streams to even come close to saturating the HT link, and that's assuming every sound is playing at CD quality, which is probably far from the truth (considering the huge amounts of memory the sound effects would occupy).
Too bad there's not been an S3TC equivalent for sound developed yet.
Guden Oden said:And Zurich, the sound processor does not need, nor use hundreds of MB/s to do DD encoding, it's all done internally in the chip itself by a hardwired DSP. Each stereo 16-bit/44kHz stream is about 175kB/s, you'd need QUITE a few streams to even come close to saturating the HT link, and that's assuming every sound is playing at CD quality, which is probably far from the truth (considering the huge amounts of memory the sound effects would occupy).
Too bad there's not been an S3TC equivalent for sound developed yet.
Like I said, it's been mentioned here by our resident developers more than a few times. I don't quite understand where the bandwidth usage comes from, but I'm inclined to side with them.
zurich said:
They could just have pro logic 2x support and that would be 7 channel surround sound.
BTW, hundreds of MB/sec of bandwidth for DD encoding sounds really demanding, especially when the xbox is already a little starved for bandwidth. It's got 6.4 GB of bandwidth, probably around 5-5.5 GB are left for a chip that in the PC market would have like 8-9 GB. If I had a 30 fps or sub 30 fps game already, I'd probably leave out the dolby digital rather than take the 5 fps hit.
Nvidia audio is kind of funny though, I've seen people argue that soundstorm has superior audio to an audigy 2 because a pci bus couldn't possibly provide enough bandwidth to have full quality sound.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
heh, Playstation 3 hype began in fall of 1999 when Sony came out with the statement that it would be a 1000 times more powerful than PS2.
zurich said:
Really?
Never seen any such claims, and besides, it can't POSSIBLY be true, because not only is DD encoding internal to the southbridge chip itself like I said, the data amounts involved also aren't big enough to generate such bandwidth demands.
Even 256 simultaneous streams of CD-quality audio (which AFAIK is above the level of what the soundstorm system manages in 3D) is less than 22MB/s, where would HUNDREDS of MBs be needed? That's just utterly prepostrous.
The HT link is there because the southbridge of the XB is (more or less) identical to the southbridge of the original NForce, and there you have high-performance IDE, PCI slots, USB and network devices hanging off the chip too in addition to sound. HT is needed to fully satisfy these devices, in the XB, it's mainly just marketing numbers as there are no PCI slots, the harddrive and DVDROM are both slow-ass devices and you won't have lots of network traffic either (unless you chip the box and run Linux on it or something...
)So, have we finished with this nonsense anytime soon then?
According to currently released specs, PSP audio chip has an entire bus to 2MB of eDram for nothing but itself. I don't think memory performance could be much of a bottleneck there.
I also seem to remember Panajev going crazy for a few weeks about some (rather high) alleged performance numbers for PSP sound chip, but I can't quite recall if that was validated or not.
Clearly this must be a rhetorical comparison of some kind though? I mean we're talking about a freaking portable, how much can you really get in terms of surround sound from that.
Panajev2001a
Veteran
PSP's sound chip is Sony Electronics's VME and it was rated, at the Sony event in one of Sony'w own presentation slides, at 5 GOPS.
Well maybe not surround sound in the traditional sense, with four or more speakers. But we only have two ears, so two speakers is enough if the developer can be sure of their position (like with headphones). Then it's only a matter of modulating the sound the right way.Fafalada said:
Except, people's ears aren't all created equal, which is why these virtual speaker schemes never work very well.
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