Is PS3's scaler working now?

[Shifty Geezer]

Firmware 1.8 has added scaling for lots of outputs; PS1 and PS2 titles, DVD upscaling, and BRD resizing to 720p. Warhawk has also added 1080i scaling from the 720p render as an option. Does this mean the scaler is now fully functional? Or whatever Sony's scaling solution was? Or is this a case of doing it in software on Cell, with the softwares all doing their own scaling, and Warhawk implementing it's own manual solution? How will we ever know?!

 

[Gradthrawn]

Firmware 1.8 has added scaling for lots of outputs; PS1 and PS2 titles, DVD upscaling, and BRD resizing to 720p. Warhawk has also added 1080i scaling from the 720p render as an option. Does this mean the scaler is now fully functional? Or whatever Sony's scaling solution was? Or is this a case of doing it in software on Cell, with the softwares all doing their own scaling, and Warhawk implementing it's own manual solution? How will we ever know?!

If I were to guess, I would say no, the hardware scaler that was partially exposed earlier, and covered by B3D, is not fully functional. From earlier reports (pre-launch), many translated by one, they've been working on the software side of scaling things for some time. Definitly with the DVD software, and I would guess the PS1/2 side of things as well. Signs seem to point to a software solution having been implemented for all of the upscaling functionality of 1.80. I'm guessing Warhawk does the same thing VF5, NGS, and others do, use the horizontal scaling functionality.

 

[Arwin]

Considering the fan speeds up a little when I watch Bluray movies in 720p, I'm guessing it's the Cell doing most of the hard work there. And I reckon upscaling DVDs and PS2 games is a lot less work than that.

 

[DJ12]

Personally, I don't think incognito would've deliberately held something back on CELL/RSX just to be able to up scale the output and not have included it in the first place.

Don't forget up scaling 720p to 1080i (which they clearly state is happening, they are not rendering 1280x1080) will also need a vertical scale too.

 

[kyleb]

It's rendered at 960x1080, not 1280x1080, and looking at the PS3's PCB I don't see any hardware scaler.

 

[Crossbar]

Snapped this report from Incognito in the Warhawk beta thread at GAF:

Wanted to make a quick post to let you all know that we have fixed this issue and we now support our 720p signal to be up-scaled to 1080i so those of you who are stuck playing Warhawk in 480p don't get screwed

To be clear, we don't render 1080 natively, we simply up-scale the 720p frame buffer so we can output 1080i -- Still looks great BTW!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's rendered at 960x1080, not 1280x1080, and looking at the PS3's PCB I don't see any hardware scaler.

What's rendered at 960x1080? We know the PS3 supports scaling of those buffers, but WarHawk is supposedly upscaling a 720p framebuffer, and is not limited in vertical resolutionas the old scaling solution.

The actual scaler' is an unknown quantity, though suspicions place one in the large 3rd IC, the 'everso similar to the Toshiba Super Companion Chip' package. That big thing must be doing something. Or the 'scaler' runs on the reserved OS SPE. The question is do developers have to encode their own scaling in their game engines, eating into game resources, or is scaling handled by another part of the system?

 

[Deleted member 7537]

What about the Super Companion Chip ? Does it have a scaler?

 

[kyleb]

What's rendered at 960x1080?

I didn't realize he was talking about Warhawk, I just meant the other games that can output at 1080i/1080p but don't render at 1920x1080. I'd guess they are scaling Warhawk right on the GPU much like DVI scaling offered on desktop cards.

 

[Nesh]

What's rendered at 960x1080? We know the PS3 supports scaling of those buffers, but WarHawk is supposedly upscaling a 720p framebuffer, and is not limited in vertical resolutionas the old scaling solution.

The actual scaler' is an unknown quantity, though suspicions place one in the large 3rd IC, the 'everso similar to the Toshiba Super Companion Chip' package. That big thing must be doing something. Or the 'scaler' runs on the reserved OS SPE. The question is do developers have to encode their own scaling in their game engines, eating into game resources, or is scaling handled by another part of the system?

Yeah that SCC is a mystery. I wonder how come we haven't heard anything more specific on the purpose of that thing.

Shouldn't we have already had some info on it?

I am pretty amazed that thing seats there without actually doing nothing or any one who knows haven't spoke about it yet.

Can beyond3d dig something up from it? Ask anything from Sony or something? I am extremely curious

 

[morlock]

If there was a scaler and Incog used it, should'nt they suport 1080p also then? It seems like they just outputs the signal in 1080i to please the people that has a 1080i (or 480p) only capable display.

 

[Kryton]

Yeah that SCC is a mystery. I wonder how come we haven't heard anything more specific on the purpose of that thing.

Shouldn't we have already had some info on it?

I am pretty amazed that thing seats there without actually doing nothing or any one who knows haven't spoke about it yet.

Can beyond3d dig something up from it? Ask anything from Sony or something? I am extremely curious

I thought no one could ever confirm if it was SCC. It has the same die size as the SCC, but none of the interconnect (USB, SATA, etc.) features were used.

 

[Nesh]

I thought no one could ever confirm if it was SCC. It has the same die size as the SCC, but none of the interconnect (USB, SATA, etc.) features were used.

Are there any other theories or suggestions on what that thing could be?

 

[-tkf-]

Are there any other theories or suggestions on what that thing could be?

I think we a thread where it was discussed.... everything from frankenstein console to omg brilliant move by sony.

Yet, we only think we knew it was the SCC chip

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yet, we only think we knew it was the SCC chip

It seems the only sensible explanation for it, given all the info we had. And we only guess that has a scaler in it too! So really, we're in the dark. But generally, the question is why such a big IO/controller chip? What's it do? Did Sony really buy a huge, expensive chip to do menial tasks a far cheaper solution could handle?

 

[Kryton]

It seems the only sensible explanation for it, given all the info we had. And we only guess that has a scaler in it too! So really, we're in the dark. But generally, the question is why such a big IO/controller chip? What's it do? Did Sony really buy a huge, expensive chip to do menial tasks a far cheaper solution could handle?

The really big question is: why are there chips doing the exact same thing as the SCC is supposed to do all over the motherboard?

 

[jonabbey]

I'd suppose that the SCC was a stop-gap item, put in place because they didn't have anything else ready to mate with the Cell. The presence of the SATA adapter chip, to interface the SCC's PATA support to the SATA hard drive, is a result of this.

I'd expect Sony to have that chip in its sights as one of the very biggest opportunities for cost reduction in an upcoming rework of the motherboard.. along with integrating the GS into RSX.

 

[Crossbar]

The really big question is: why are there chips doing the exact same thing as the SCC is supposed to do all over the motherboard?

Good question, it may have been a stop gap solution as someone suggested. The SCC theory was partly based on the fact that the die size of the north bridge perfectly matched the die size of the SCC. In the PAL board revision, the north bridge has a much smaller die. It could mean that the die has been shrinked to a smaller process or that it has been replaced with a tailored custom chip or both of the above.

I find the theory of the SCC doing the scaling a bit unlikely when looking at the mainboard of the PS3. It seems to me that it is the RSX that is handling the communication to the HDMI chip and the analogue AV output chips. If the northbridge were doing the scaling, the video data had to go through the Cell to get there and then it had to be sent back the same way to the RSX to be sent to the output. It sounds a bit awkward if they would waste precious bandwidth like that.

 

[Truespeed]

Toshiba Super Companion Chip Presentation:

http://www.hotchips.org/archives/hc17/2_Mon/HC17.S1/HC17.S1T3.pdf

Page 13:

The scalers:

 

[Hezz]

It seems the only sensible explanation for it, given all the info we had. And we only guess that has a scaler in it too! So really, we're in the dark. But generally, the question is why such a big IO/controller chip? What's it do? Did Sony really buy a huge, expensive chip to do menial tasks a far cheaper solution could handle?

My understanding from what I have gleaned is that the SCC is a high end I/O chipset that allows the PS3 to essentially be made into a PC with the PS3 embeded. I think the SCC allows for other high speed I/O devices plus the use of DDR2 RAM so that in the future a PS3/PC hybrid media machine can be built. My guess is that Linux and other media apps would be able to use the user expandable DDR2 RAM. Official PS3 games would only use the set hardware of XDR and RSX memory usage.