How powerful is Cell at graphic rendering.

[scatteh316]

With RSX and 360's GPU looking to be about on-par in terms on power, the only deciding thing that is left is the CPU's present in both console's. And as Cell was built to graphics at the start of its life cycle, just how powerful is it???

More powerful than:

GF3??
GF4??
9600??
9800??

Just how much help can Cell provide to RSX???

 

[DeanoC]

Roughly on par with a 68000

Course you might need to make more tea with the 68000 doing the rendering but can you ever drink too much tea?

 

[a688]

Roughly on par with a 68000

Course you might need to make more tea with the 68000 doing the rendering but can you ever drink too much tea?

How many cookies will you need to go along with your tea?

 

[Acert93]

Roughly on par with a 68000

Course you might need to make more tea with the 68000 doing the rendering but can you ever drink too much tea?

While tea is important DeanoC, I must take exception this one time and disagree. We all know deep inside that the sweet spot is truly biscuits with honey. The 780's accelerated "extreme honey pipeline" is really in more in tune with the eye candy CELL can produce, if for no other reason honey cone cells and CELL should be very compatible.

Would you not agree?

 

[scatteh316]

Roughly on par with a 68000

Course you might need to make more tea with the 68000 doing the rendering but can you ever drink too much tea?

That powerful ???? i was'nt expecting it to be that powerful. so PS3 is like having a souped up 7800 with extra help from a 6800??? extremely nice.

And no you can never drink to much tea

 

[dukmahsik]

That powerful ???? i was'nt expecting it to be that powerful. so PS3 is like having a souped up 7800 with extra help from a 6800??? extremely nice.

And no you can never drink to much tea

oh boy here we go!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

PS3 Dev confirms underpowered Processor

A leading PS3 developer has been spotted making references to $ony's baby Cell's performance, and the prognosis doesn't look good for the overhyped Marchitecture. He actually likened it to the 16 bit Motorolla 68000 series CPU, last in computers about the time the dinosaurs died out. This prove longheld beliefs that PS3 is a pile of poo.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=68000

 

[Acert93]

That powerful ???? i was'nt expecting it to be that powerful. so PS3 is like having a souped up 7800 with extra help from a 6800??? extremely nice.

And no you can never drink to much tea

If you did not notice he said 68000 not 6800.

We are mocking your question because 1. it is based on a number of conjectures and variables that are not established and 2. your trying to compare CELL, that will be functioning as a CPU in the PS3, to a dedicated PC GPU. While CELL will assist in some rendering techniques and will aid visuals with advanced physics and lighting/shadowing models and procedural synthesis, to compare it to a GPU is really not a relevant comparison.

Because of the above and the nature of your question we decided to kindly derail your thread before a flame war errupted.

You can thank us later.

 

[scatteh316]

oh boy here we go!

Stop provoking people into an argument. its cool with all that extra power..thats all i was gettin at, i was'nt knocking anything or comparing it to anything.

So please be nice

 

[Acert93]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=68000

Whoa! Stick a fork in her people, she is DOA!



Ps- Funniest thing I have read all week Shifty. Really, spot on parody! No harm, no foul. No one gets hurt or offended but truly busting a gut here!

 

[scatteh316]

If you did not notice he said 68000 not 6800.

We are mocking your question because 1. it is based on a number of conjectures and variables that are not established and 2. your trying to compare CELL, that will be functioning as a CPU in the PS3, to a dedicated PC GPU. While CELL will assist in some rendering techniques and will aid visuals with advanced physics and lighting/shadowing models and procedural synthesis, to compare it to a GPU is really not a relevant comparison.

Because of the above and the nature of your question we decided to kindly derail your thread before a flame war errupted.

You can thank us later.

Fair enough

 

[ihamoitc2005]

With RSX and 360's GPU looking to be about on-par in terms on power, the only deciding thing that is left is the CPU's present in both console's. And as Cell was built to graphics at the start of its life cycle, just how powerful is it???

More powerful than:

GF3??
GF4??
9600??
9800??

Just how much help can Cell provide to RSX???

Heres one way to think of it:

Xenon theoretical maximum vertex transform rate = 6 B vertices per second (ignore setup limit, no pixel shading), while one SPE has theoretical max = 800M vertices per second. Not including the PPE, CELL has theoretical max = 5.6B vertices per second. Including PPE vector unit, CELL = 6.4 B vertices per second.

XeCPU has 3 vector units = 2.4 B vertices per second. (not too shabby no?)

Real world graohics performance by XeCPU and CELL would be much much less due to lack of support hardware ... real graphics cards have much more components than just shader units.

 

[dukmahsik]

darn i had my popcorn and coke all ready

 

[Phil]

With RSX and 360's GPU looking to be about on-par in terms on power, the only deciding thing that is left is the CPU's present in both console's.

You're looking at it from the wrong angle: You can't compare CPU vs CPU and GPU vs GPU. These units you are comparing work hand in hand with one another and thus need to be considered as a whole architecture. A ( cpu + gpu ) vs ( cpu + gpu ) would be more appropriate and then, there's still differences between the architectures to consider in that one might be better at certain tasks then the other and vice versa... where do you draw the line?

Answer: You can't.

 

[Jawed]

The answer's simple: RSX is 1.8TFLOPs and Cell is 0.2TFLOPs.

Jawed

 

[Titanio]

Trying to draw a line from Cell to a GPU isn't going to work.

Graphics was one workload that Cell was targetted towards. It's not a dedicated graphics processor like a GPU, however.

It's role in PS3 is as a CPU, but as a CPU it can help with graphics, of course. Can it help more than usual? Probably. But it's role in that regard will be in specific areas rather than general graphics rendering, like a GPU has to worry about. So comparing them directly isn't very viable.

 

[ihamoitc2005]

The answer's simple: RSX is 1.8TFLOPs and Cell is 0.2TFLOPs.

Jawed

Not really since those numbers describe very differenct things. Remember the ludicrous 80Gflops of xbox? Nvidia has history of misleading specs no?

Looking at it from the standpoint of billion dot products might be more effective than merely flops.

SPEs=22.4 (7x3.2)
SPE&PPE=25.6 (8x3.2)
Xenon=9.6 (3x3.2)
Xenos=24 (48x.5)

 

[Titanio]

Not really since those numbers describe very differenct things. Remember the ludicrous 80Gflops of xbox? Nvidia has history of misleading specs no?

Looking at it from the standpoint of billion dot products might be more effective than merely flops.

SPEs=22.4 (7x3.2)
SPE&PPE=25.6 (8x3.2)
Xenon=9.6 (3x3.2)
Xenos=24 (48x.5)

I think what Jawed is saying is that GPUs have an awful lot of logic dedicated to specific graphics tasks that would going to eat into your programmable CPU power if you decided to do all graphics on the CPU i.e. software rendering.

 

[Lysander]

Amiga had M68000, right. Oh beautiful computer.

 

[Jawed]

I think what Jawed is saying is that GPUs have an awful lot of logic dedicated to specific graphics tasks that would going to eat into your programmable CPU power if you decided to do all graphics on the CPU i.e. software rendering.

Yep.

Jawed