Is PS3 able to preform ray tracing via cell

[leechan25]

http://www.us.playstation.com/newsstories.aspx?id=2228

This report said landscape demo was realtime ray tracing.

http://www.us.playstation.com/newsstories.aspx?id=2228&print


Could this be true

 

[Tacitblue]

Yes, but a caveat, it was a 2 Cell IBM blade server prototype. 400GFLOPS. Use the search button, its been talked about before.

 

[leechan25]

Yeah but will this be one of the many fuctions RSX and cell can preform together? I ask because they said its done without a graphic card. What happen if you use RSX instead of the second cell chip?

 

[Titanio]

I heard the term "ray-casting" being associated with those demos before, not ray-tracing, which is a bit different IIRC.

Anyway, I don't think the purpose of the demo was to show of Cell's rendering capability. They seemed to stress more how it was taking two pieces of data and generating the terrain out of it.

 

[Qroach]

A 486 could perform ray tracing if you wanted. it just wouldn't be fast at it.

 

[_phil_]

I heard the term "ray-casting" being associated with those demos before, not ray-tracing, which is a bit different IIRC.

Anyway, I don't think the purpose of the demo was to show of Cell's rendering capability. They seemed to stress more how it was taking two pieces of data and generating the terrain out of it.

It was raytracing.

 

[leechan25]

Well those reports say ray tracing. I think it should possible because RSX and cell generate way more than 400 gflops of processing power. So my question is why can't it be done. It would seem the power there?

 

[Titanio]

I heard the term "ray-casting" being associated with those demos before, not ray-tracing, which is a bit different IIRC.

Anyway, I don't think the purpose of the demo was to show of Cell's rendering capability. They seemed to stress more how it was taking two pieces of data and generating the terrain out of it.

It was raytracing.

Positively sure? Dare I ask for a link?

Just seems a little too much even for 2 Cells..

 

[jvd]

Well those reports say ray tracing. I think it should possible because RSX and cell generate way more than 400 gflops of processing power. So my question is why can't it be done. It would seem the power there?

errr if i recall the ps3 cell will be 218gflops ? So figure a 1x8 at 3.2ghz will be 250ish ? So if thats what htese were that be 500gflops of course we know that multi chip soultions don't scale a 100%

Personaly i have my doubts . Is the whole scene raytraced ? How many lights are there ? What is the geometry load ? What are the effects

 

[leechan25]

Yeah,

paste those url.

 

[PC-Engine]

It's RC not RT...

 

[Titanio]

Personaly i have my doubts . Is the whole scene raytraced ? How many lights are there ? What is the geometry load ? What are the effects

I'm basing this off a video of the sony conference, but the geometry load looked high (the geometrical detail on the terrain looked quite fine), but it looked like they were just texturing it with little further effect (this was hard to tell though, given the vid). There may have been some other atmospheric effects thrown in though, it had a slightly hazy look (though I'd be hesitant to say for sure if they were using atmospheric scattering or not, particularly if they were using raytracing). I presume the only lightsource was the sun.

There was apparently a good pic of it in some business magazine a while back, but it never hit the web AFAIK.

 

[leechan25]

Those cell processors were clocked at 2.4 ghz. PS3's cell is clocked higher.
RSX should be able to stand in for the second cell right? RSX is far beyond a 486. I don't think we really know what cell and RSX can do together. Why can't ray tracing be one of them?

 

[DudeMiester]

Also the ray tracing demo was running on two CELLs.

 

[therealskywolf]

Those cell processors were clocked at 2.4 ghz. PS3's cell is clocked higher.
RSX should be able to stand in for the second cell right? RSX is far beyond a 486. I don't think we really know what cell and RSX can do together. Why can't ray tracing be one of them?

Ray Tracing isnt done by the GPU. Short Answer, no, you couldnt make a game with RayTracing on the Ps3, wait for the Ps4.

 

[DeanoC]

Those cell processors were clocked at 2.4 ghz. PS3's cell is clocked higher.
RSX should be able to stand in for the second cell right? RSX is far beyond a 486. I don't think we really know what cell and RSX can do together. Why can't ray tracing be one of them?

Because
A)GPU aren't very good at raytracing, so RSX isn't going to stand in for a CPU
B)This was a contrived example, it wasn't general ray tracing.
C)You would get far better image quality using a rasterisor approach (i.e. conventional triangle renderer) for the processing time used.

 

[leechan25]

oK, I understand now.

Thanks

 

[_phil_]

semantics...

Raytracing is an extension of ray-casting.
But in fact ,it was voxels.

 

[leechan25]

Phil, what do you mean?

 

[phed]

Given that some demos incorporate neat raytracing that looks passable as gamegraphics, it wont surprise me if there will come raytracing demos for the ps3 that will have high levels of complexity.

But one has to ask himself if raytracing looks good enough. And since the RSX can cooperate with the CPU, plus that the shaders can be fairly complex, there's nothing stopping the renderer from using more than just the CELL.