Hollywood the GPGPU and hidden Memory

[MDX]

Since there isnt much tech talk on the Wii front.
I thought why not bring up some research done by Tapion.

You can find all his research and theories here:
http://tapionvslink.weebly.com/
Note, English is not Tapion's mother language.

I will attempt to summarize his position:

1. Wii's Hollywood is actually a GPGPU.
2. Wii's edram is made of UX6D and can either be 41MBytes or 54MBytes depending on which of the two dies inside Hollywood(vegas 72mm2 or napa of 94.5mm2) is the eDRAM.

Why does Tapion think Hollywood is a GPGPU?
Well for one:

Answer is simple, remember the Nintendo displacement mapping patents?

Nintedo displacement mapping patents
http://nintendo-revolution.blogspot.com/2005/12/is-displacement-mapping-last-secret.html


The patents mention two key important thins, the reduction of strain on the CPU, meaning that the gpu will help with tasks that only the cpu was meant to do, and the addition of two dot-product units; a dot-product is an operation which takes two vectors over the real numbers R and returns a real-valued scalar quantity. And a scalar quantity is a data related to int, float values, something that previously only the cpus were the ones suppos
ed to process this kind of data; and as all we know, these characteristics are only covered bya a GPGPU...

Why to make use of a GPGPU for displacement mapping, simple, displacement mapping requires a lot of floating power calculations, so heavy that even high end cpus will not be able to perform, and since GPGPUs can do from 100 to 250 times faster the arithmetich calculations that the cpu does, is a good idea to implement it and use it fo this purpose

While the poly count is significantly lower, there is some strain on the CPU. Johannes Hirche writes:

Rendering displacement mapped surfaces is a process that involves a significant number of geometric and arithmetic operations. When applied to a triangle mesh, it involves prior retessellation of the base domain surface and transformation of the vertices and normals. Even on fast CPUs, it is a time consuming operation, wasting bandwidth and processing power.

This is why displacement mapping has not been widely used in real-time graphics. However, new and refined techniques allow for displacement mapping to be implemented in real-time. Again, Johannes Hirche writes:

The main focus was to explore new techniques suitable for hardware implementation in order to reduce the bandwidth strain on the system bus by moving the tessellation process onto the graphics subsystem. (...) A possibility to overcome these problems is to tessellate the individual triangles sequentially and to adaptively add triangles where necessary, until a desired level of accuracy is
reached. (...) With only minor user interaction or conservatively predefined input parameters the sampling schemes produce adaptive tessellations with very low error measures.

According to ATI, Gamecubes flipper could perform displacement mapping with twicks on the hardwre ,of course, gamecube would only produce a displacement mapping image, but could not use displacement mapping for gamecube but no games could make use of it

ATI gamecube capable of displacemetn mapping but not for gamming
http://ati.amd.com/developer/gdc/GDC2003-DisplacementMappingNotes.pdf


The reaon of why until now no games hace take adventage of Wii´s gpgpu can be answered by Epic Game.

Epic Games
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Sweeney-Epic-GPU-GPGPU,8461.html

There has been discussion that Excite Truck actually uses displacement mapping in real time.

Indy83

It does indeed use displacement mapping, I was very sad to see excite bots didnt.

Not only did excite truck use displacement maps, it generated displacement maps on the fly from information from the games physics engine, which is why in excite trucks, you can literally watch cars crumple like coke cans, instead of the pre modeled asset swaps that motorstorm and project gotham used.

The vehicle body was one peice, and then detachable parts were placed on it (Wheels, bumpers, head light racks etc). Well the main body had a displacement map layer all over it.

When the vehicle gets an impact bad enough to crash it, the speed, direction, and siZe and place of the impact area data is recorded as numbers, numbers which would visually be represented as, you guessed it, a height map meant for polygon displacement.

The displacement map was implemented with a morph animation to bridge the gap between pre damage and post damage, and you have excite trucks fantastic never two crashes the same damage system.

Ironically, this system was infinately more advanced than motorstorms pre modeled damage swaps+ pour arseloads of metalic parts from some spot inside the model.

Wii sports likely uses displacement mapping as well as the key to how they aped Digital Molecular Matter for Sword fightings quick slice.

Tapion has more reasons that he sees supporting his assertions, but that you can read about it on his website.

And why does he think Wii has more memory available in it?

Tapion:

Yes, of course that HD is possible on wii, even considering that if wii had 24MBytes of 1T-SRAM, which we already know that its in reality as much as 41MBytes for vegas or 54MBytes for napa by the reasons exposed before like that in Mosys homepage we can clearly see in the table of 1T-SRAM available macros that neither 1T-SRAM nor 1T-SRAM-Q are avaible since 90nm and starting at that shrinking technology only 1T-MIM is available and that NEC´s UX6D(1T-SRAM-Q using MIM2 which produces a smaller capacitor over 1T-SRAM-Q using FAC) is the only macro that appears to be similar to 1T-MIM(fabricated by TSMC), is more than enough since we are talking about embedded memory.Plus, lets not forget that many wii titles right now have shown an advanced improvement of graphics thanks to the proper use of the TEV and by saving resources, that are used for more boost on graphics, using the GPGPU for physics.Not to mention that wii might be using a better compression technology than the S3TC that Gamecube used.


And again, Wii cannot be using normal 1T-SRAM for these reasons(The same goes for 1T-SRAM-Q):
*Far more expensive
*uses more material for fabrication
*requires more processes for fabrication and thus more time
*Not available since 90nm

is Tapion on to something?
And what can this mean for the future of the console?

 

[AlexV]

No he's not on to anything. Now stop posting and reposting this....ugh...stuff (and I'm using a very kind term there). There's a reason for which it was deleted the first time and subsequently not allowed, and no, it wasn't a random error.