If a GPU was a dedicated to pushing sprites instead of polygons...
- Thread starter Flux
- Start date
Well, technically the most powerful 2D sprite-based GPU ever was the Atari Jaguar's. When doing 3D graphics, most Jaguar games tried to fit in clever framebuffer/blitting effects to jazz up the otherwise primitive images.
I believe Jaguar was capable of a few hundred sprites per line with little to no slowdown.
Other than that, though, you can always "pretend" you're rendering 2D by using pairs of triangles parallel to the camera lens and making the "sprites" textures... in which case you're limited by overdraw and fillrate, but you could probably squeeze out a few thousand sprites per line, possibly tens of thousands, before really breaking down, on a PS3 or 360.
Don't make Dean cry! on the other hand can you imagine how many sprites could one render just using CELL?
Well, actually I can! Someone (tweakoz at ps2dev.org) was playing around with the Cell, using 4 SPEs to blit to the framebuffer under Linux, and got the following results (full screen mode under Linux):
1080i: fps: 801 [6336 MB/Sec]
720p: fps: 1577 [5544 MB/Sec]
480i: fps: 2759 [3637 MB/Sec]
So just decide the size of your average sprite and you can calculate how many of them you can push.
(http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=7209)
Rainbow Man
Veteran
I heard the same said abiout the sega saturn many many years ago.
Considering Sega's solid arcade heritage I'm inclined to believe it..
eace.
That would be a very unefficient way to do sprites on CELL..Well, actually I can! Someone (tweakoz at ps2dev.org) was playing around with the Cell, using 4 SPEs to blit to the framebuffer under Linux, and got the following results (full screen mode under Linux):
1080i: fps: 801 [6336 MB/Sec]
720p: fps: 1577 [5544 MB/Sec]
480i: fps: 2759 [3637 MB/Sec]
So just decide the size of your average sprite and you can calculate how many of them you can push.
(http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=7209)
In answer to this, more than you would find practically useful in a 2D game.
To answer this, yes they can push more sprites at lower resolutions because they have less pixels to draw.
Though as has been hinted at in the above responses, this whole question is moot. It's improbable you'll hit any sprite limits, unless you're drawing millions of transparent sprites over each other with alpha-blending.
Saturn cheated, it has two GPUs. One for backgrounds (up to 5 layers, or 3 with 2 of them using scale/rotate/skew "mode 7" effects), and one for foreground objects. Saturn, however, still had hard coded limits on how much you could draw. Jaguar was only limited by how much slowdown you generated from adding more junk. XD
Tagrineth said:
Thinking back to my youthful Hudson/Saturn days, the Saturn doesn't cheat, it simply doesn't count as it doesn't really use the traditional blitter/line-buffer sprite engine where sprites per line . The Saturn draws 1-4 vert (depending on sprite type) sprites into a frame-buffer then fills with either CLUT values or texture data. But there's no "hard coded" limits.
The Jag's Object Processor OTOH reads sprite object headers (phrases in Atari parlance) and writes out pixels to a line buffer. It'll write 2 CRY pixels (16-bit pixels) per clock, but you're constrained by the read rate of the Object Processor (1 phrase per clock (2 phrases for a normal sprite, 3 for a scaled sprite)). So for both systems it boils down to command issue/read rate, pixel clock and data transfer...
I've made a demo in the past, using sprites to simulate balls.
with a complex vertex shader, I can push 80M sprites/sec on 78GT. It means that I can draw 1 million balls on screen without having geometry problem.
Sprites are really fun, but ATI limits its size
Would it be possible to make a orb based graphics drawing mechanism for a GPU based on something simmiliar, using arrays of 2d units, a GPGPU element who calculate surfaces to 2d sprites in immense layers?
I got no idea if its even remotely feastible, it just struck me the result could be kind of "uniqe", and full 3d
Would it be possible to make a orb based graphics drawing mechanism for a GPU based on something simmiliar, using arrays of 2d units, a GPGPU element who calculate surfaces to 2d sprites in immense layers?
I got no idea if its even remotely feastible, it just struck me the result could be kind of "uniqe", and full 3d
The only thing I see that is related to what you are talking about is "Volume shading"
but it's nothing to do with point sprites.
JohnyBeGood
Newcomer
Actually, PS2 could draw 18,75 million 8*8 pixel sprites per second ,i think.Gamecube had a 648 MPixel fillrate , so that could mean 10,125 million 64 pixel sprites/sec.Pls correct if i'm wrong.
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