Is Hollywood capable of GPGPU?

[meaculpa]

((Mods, there is a huge image in this post. I'm not sure how "thumbs" tags work on these boards or even if you have them, so please feel free to fix it for me))

;

I sent this to Panda:

The TEV unit (Texture EnVironment) is a part of Flipper and there is only one of those on the chip, as seen in this (not to scale) blow-up from IGN:

What Panda seems to be referring to isn't the TEV unit, but the texel units. The Flipper does in fact have four texel units, one for each of it's four pipelines.

His response was as follows:

Almost, The Single TEV Unit has 4 Inputs which are for the Texel Units it processes the Data from... So, I tend to think of the Texel Units as Part of the TEV... It's not a Correct way to look at it but it's Logical...

Note: HollyWood has 8 inputs on the TEV...

Yeah, DevKit... "Check your Messages"...

So that, really, explains where the issues with what he was saying came from. He also sent me a message with a bit more information:

ModNote: ImageShack automatically generates a thumbnail. --> filename.jpg & filename.th.jpg -AlStrong

Welcome to Page 159 of New Hardware Features in the 2007 DevKit Docs...

What they refer to as Registers are the Inputs of the TEV Unit itself... GC had 4 that worked with the 4 Texel Units, Wii has 8 Inputs (still 4 Texel Units though)... As they are Tied together and Must be used in Tandem it's easy to see why I Lump them together...

I guess that explains things, at least in terms of how he was thinking. Now I don't agree with his lumping them together like that and referring to the texel units as TEV's, but then neither I nor any of ]you control peoples quirks.

 

[psychospam]

I just want to say...I think we all know now not to use a forum post as a source, am I right?

And on behalf of The Wiire...please, come join our forums. We love having new, intelligent beings on our boards. Makes the job of the staff/moderators much easier. So please, come have some intelligent conversations with us.

I'm sure Pandakun would love to debate/discuss many topics with all of you.

And if you do join...get used to meaculpa correcting you. That happens a lot. He's a good guy, really. When he's not typing drunk, that is.

 

[swaaye]

This reminds me of how some folks back in the day were saying that Matrox Gx00's programmable "WARP" geometry engine could be used as hardware T&L. Maybe so, but it wouldn't be good at because that wasn't what it was designed for.

 

[Megadrive1988]

So, Wii's Hollywood GPU has 8 inputs instead of 4, for the 4 texel units within its single TEV unit (even if that's not logically exact, is that a simple way of understanding it ?) ?

 

[Entropy]

Some pretty interesting snippets of headlines to the left in that pdf page.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

So do we trust PandaKun or not? I still find it fishy how he's able to find out about what others are doing if he is indeed unrelated to F5 or Ubi Soft.

Also... what's a GPGPU anyway? I mean, I assume it's something powerful beyond the Wii, but outside of that, I have no clue what it stands for.

 

[AlNom]

Also... what's a GPGPU anyway? I mean, I assume it's something powerful beyond the Wii, but outside of that, I have no clue what it stands for.

GPGPU stands for General-Purpose computation on GPUs. With the increasing programmability of commodity graphics processing units (GPUs), these chips are capable of performing more than the specific graphics computations for which they were designed. They are now capable coprocessors, and their high speed makes them useful for a variety of applications. The goal of this page is to catalog the current and historical use of GPUs for general-purpose computation.

http://www.gpgpu.org/

 

[theafu]

Ok so Hollywood could technically do physics, if everything sent into it was properly portioned, programmed, etc. just like any processor. For practical work I would say no though it's best suited for what it was intended for. Wii should've had better hardware anyways.

I could've sworn in a Rebel Strike ign interview eggebrecht said he used flipper for physics unsure about the exact method, yet it seems someone realized that already with the architecture.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

http://www.gpgpu.org/

Excellent! Thanks for the info. It's actually pretty easy to understand.

So now going back, can we trust Pandakun on the info?

 

[Mobius1aic]

I could've sworn in a Rebel Strike ign interview eggebrecht said he used flipper for physics unsure about the exact method, yet it seems someone realized that already with the architecture.

I find that really unlikely but honestly you could probably pull off a bit of effects physics to help make special effects better. But even still for older GPUs, that would be a waste of processing power I would think.

 

[wsippel]

So Hollywood actually isn't just an overclocked Flipper after all? It's hard to tell from the screenshot, but there seem to be least ten new hardware features listed.

 

[Johnny_Physics]

I just want to say...I think we all know now not to use a forum post as a source, am I right?

And on behalf of The Wiire...please, come join our forums. We love having new, intelligent beings on our boards. Makes the job of the staff/moderators much easier. So please, come have some intelligent conversations with us.

I'm sure Pandakun would love to debate/discuss many topics with all of you.

And if you do join...get used to meaculpa correcting you. That happens a lot. He's a good guy, really. When he's not typing drunk, that is.

No, a proper source is your own experience, am I right?
There's so much wrong both here and there and it's all just a re-run, sure Pandakun have some information but keep your ear to the ground and listen and you'll have it too.
He has some documentation that he dishes out information from, but even during the last generation where official Xbox-sdks where leaked every other month we still saw gaping holes in 'known' information on these forums and nothing has really changed. What does that tell you? The people who know, don't tell. And who doesn't know?



If you've worked for a big developer you'll have tons of dirt from the production of whatever thing you're working on, and not even the ones your company is working on. It's the same but different if you've worked for a publisher, this is a fact. It starts with persons you dislike(like any other working enviroment) and continues with things you think is done wrong and ends with things no one thinks is right.
But you don't tell, because you know who will really hear what you're saying.


If you've worked for a big magazine you'll have stuff that you'll never be able to put it in print, because you don't want to bite the hand that feeds you, so you write only about stuff that is in the open - like what Surfergirl writes, that's okay to repeat because it wasn't you who shared it and it's not even about individuals(something the gaming press is allergic to).
The other stuff - "the things you don't know, that I won't tell" you keep to yourself, because you know who might be listening.

With time you learn to identify, in my opinion, where a person is in this chain or ladder based on how they're running their mouth. But that's just my opinion.

 

[Mobius1aic]

I really don't understand why Nintendo is so adamant about holding back on hardware specs. It doesn't matter by this point if someone cries foul for Wii not being an "HD machine." It's as if they have something being held back or they're hiding something. There is no consumer faith to be lost anymore. Wii is a hit.

Maybe their is some relation to the idea that this ties around to some idea that only Nintendo and major technically credited developers/publishers (Factor 5, Capcom, Konami, etc) that even though Nintendo is all for the 3rd parties this time around, they can construe the public to thinking that only those major publishers know how to create good titles that also look excellent for being on a low spec system? Which by doing so keeps shovelware publishers from gaining good sales, all while Nintendo looks to be the personal Jesus of the industry? Wow what a conspiracy theory of insanity on my part, shovelware has proven profitable on the Wii already

But still, why all the secrecy? Keeping the hardware underwraps to the general public is as if some way to control reviews/details on the games and allow Nintendo to really control the extent of opinions because no one has absolute facts. Fucking assholes. Screw your Mario Galaxy, it wasn't that great (and yes I mean that whole heartedly, I didn't care for it). I'm going to go play more S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl.

 

[Kiloran]

I really don't understand why Nintendo is so adamant about holding back on hardware specs. It doesn't matter by this point if someone cries foul for Wii not being an "HD machine." It's as if they have something being held back or they're hiding something. There is no consumer faith to be lost anymore. Wii is a hit.

Maybe their is some relation to the idea that this ties around to some idea that only Nintendo and major technically credited developers/publishers (Factor 5, Capcom, Konami, etc) that even though Nintendo is all for the 3rd parties this time around, they can construe the public to thinking that only those major publishers know how to create good titles that also look excellent for being on a low spec system? Which by doing so keeps shovelware publishers from gaining good sales, all while Nintendo looks to be the personal Jesus of the industry? Wow what a conspiracy theory of insanity on my part, shovelware has proven profitable on the Wii already

But still, why all the secrecy? Keeping the hardware underwraps to the general public is as if some way to control reviews/details on the games and allow Nintendo to really control the extent of opinions because no one has absolute facts. Fucking assholes. Screw your Mario Galaxy, it wasn't that great (and yes I mean that whole heartedly, I didn't care for it). I'm going to go play more S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl.

I think Nintendo wants us to focus on the Wii experience and not the tech. Now from a more cynical perspective... it's not exactly good PR to tell the world your upcoming console is simply the last generation in a smaller chassis with a fancy new controller. Nintendo did exactly what it should have done; they didn't lie but they also didn't reveal their entire hand either.

 

[Mobius1aic]

I think Nintendo wants us to focus on the Wii experience and not the tech. Now from a more cynical perspective... it's not exactly good PR to tell the world your upcoming console is simply the last generation in a smaller chassis with a fancy new controller. Nintendo did exactly what it should have done; they didn't lie but they also didn't reveal their entire hand either.

Doesn't matter anymore really. We know it's low spec, we know it's below HD, and people want it anyways, of whom the general public doesn't care. Funny cause when a bunch of people buy something, others do to, because keeping up with the Joneses never ends, especially to a bunch of God-forsaken materialists like us

 

[Megadrive1988]

Wii's GPU is lower spec than R200 / Radeon 8500 from 2001, in most areas. Not to mention it's nowhere near R300 / Radeon 9700 from 2002, but it hardly matters with Wii selling out like hotcakes, a year and a half after release.


Another good thing about Wii's incredibly low spec, is that IF Nintendo goes with a reasonably powerful spec next time around, and I mean reasonably powerful by 2011-2012 standards (or whenever they launch Wii2) is that it will probably mean a tremendous leap from Wii, as if Nintendo's leaped forward almost 2 console generations. Though that would only happen if Wii2 is not too far behind Xbox3/PS4. Much like Gamecube was not far behind Xbox1 dispite Xbox1's significantly higher paper spec.


As for anything hidden about Wii's hardware, I don't believe it. I believe Wii is basicly as already understood--little more than a higher clocked Gamecube with a few, very modest enhancements to the chip architecture. The largest improvement is the 64 MB of GDDR3 RAM, and that IS a significant improvement. It gives Wii 3.5 times the amount of fast memory that Gamecube had (24 MB vs 88 MB). I don't believe any of the GPGPU rumored stuff. It just doesn't make any sense.

 

[Mobius1aic]

I remember hearing about how much of a bottleneck the 24 MB of fast RAM was. The other 16 MB was extremely slow (81 Mb/second if I remember right) used for sound and disc read buffering. While I'm sure it could be put to use efficiently, there is nothing like real usable RAM. Question is, how much of an improvement can we expect with a 50% overclock in the CPU and GPU as well as much more efficient RAM? At least with world expansiveness, I'm expecting huge increases in level size/detail. However I'm perplexed to know if the added texture inputs will really do anything significant in terms of advancing the capabilities or techniques of shaders on the system. Also increased texture inputs was never clarified Megadrive1988, do you really mean "inputs" or do you just mean ability to add 8 instead of 4 layers?

 

[darkblu]

As for anything hidden about Wii's hardware, I don't believe it. I believe Wii is basicly as already understood--little more than a higher clocked Gamecube with a few, very modest enhancements to the chip architecture (i.e. 8 texture inputs to the 4 texel units in TEV). The largest improvement is the 64 MB of GDDR3 RAM, and that IS a significant improvement. It gives Wii 3.5 times the amount of fast memory that Gamecube had (24 MB vs 88 MB). I don't believe any of the GPGPU rumored stuff. It just doesn't make any sense.

hope you'll excuse me mega, but i cringe each time i see that 'intrawebz lore' repeated: there are no '8 texture inputs' to the TEV per se - it's just 4 new constant registers in hollywood's TEV. but before there were already more than '4 inputs' to the TEV to begin with (interpolants from the rasteriser, texels from the TUs, EMBM matrix registers, etc) - there were never '4 inputs' that 'doubled from flipper to hollywood'.

let me recommend a paramaount document to you - hitmen's YAGCD - check it out.

 

[Megadrive1988]

hope you'll excuse me mega, but i cringe each time i see that 'intrawebz lore' repeated: there are no '8 texture inputs' to the TEV per se - it's just 4 new constant registers in hollywood's TEV. but before there were already more than '4 inputs' to the TEV to begin with (interpolants from the rasteriser, texels from the TUs, EMBM matrix registers, etc) - there were never '4 inputs' that 'doubled from flipper to hollywood'.

let me recommend a paramaount document to you - hitmen's YAGCD - check it out.

Okay I stand corrected.

 

[PS3MAN]

I think Nintendo hardware is suitable for basic GPGPU rather than heavy massive GPGPU process.