More info about RSX from NVIDIA

[Tap In]

SCEA conference that not only will 1080p be supported by the system, but that this is considered the standard resolution for the system

it doesn't sound like an edict to developers for all games as MS has made at 720p but more like a projection of hope that it will be met. As well as a great PR number to tout in the store display.

 

[London Geezer]

Sony has said all games will support 1080p as standard, as indicated:
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/614/614661p1.html

Smart move, considering one day eventually we will all have 1080p sets, and nice to know every PS3 game I own, will work at that set's awesome resolution.

RSX looks like it's going to be a monster, as it clearly a significantly more efficient chip, than the Geforce 6 series!

Is it bad that all games will support 1080p? I don't understand what the issue is. You would think that if you can't do 1080p that it would just revert to 1080i..if thats the case there shouldn't be a tremendous drop on visual (meaning just because its 1080p and your only have a tv thats capable of 1080i that the game will look horrible because it has to be displayed as Interlaced instead of Progressive..) just because its not 1080p....

It's GOOD!
the 1080i image would look just slightly more blurred and with the usual interlacing troubles compared to the progressive scan one. Much like in the days of 480p/480i. The difference IS there, some people notice it more than others.
We also have to think that at the distance these HDTVs will be looked at, 1080i and 1080p will look much more similar to each other than 480i and 480p ever did. Smaller pixels, we see them less.

 

[Edge]

> "This implies to me that the increased capability of each pixel pipeline in 7800GTX is completely wasted in real games."

Maybe those games were not shader limited! More shader heavy games might show a greater difference.

Can't believe that 1080p would ever be a negative thing.

 

[Jawed]

SC:CT most certainly is shader limited at 1600x1200 no-HDR, no-AA/no-AF.

Though it's arguable if it's partly vertex shader limited too (shadowing, parallax mapping).

HL-2 is similarly limited, but I don't think there's anything vertex-limited in it.

Jawed

 

[nameless_one]

Requiring 1080p for all games would be very dumb. PS3 will not have the bandwidth, texture memory and/or fillrate to handle that sort of resolutions with AA and complex scenes etc at decent framerates.

 

[Edge]

> "SC:CT most certainly is shader limited at 1600x1200 no-AA/no-AF."

And maybe the shader code in that game, somehow prevents the new efficiencies from being taken advantage of. Nvidia improved the efficiency in some regards, and not all. Other games by developers knowing the difference, may very well show the increase.

> "Requiring 1080p for all games would be very dumb. PS3 will not have the bandwidth, texture memory and/or fillrate to handle that sort of resolutions with AA and complex scenes etc at decent framerates."

What are all the requirements for a 1080p game? The fact I see tons of games running on the PC at 1600x1200 at easily 100 fps, seems to indicated that 1080p can easily be done. 2X AA maybe more than sufficient for such a resolution, and don't forget the RSX has 57 GB/sec of bandwidth, since it has dual busses.

> texture memory

What do you mean by that?

AA is not even critical for a next generation system, as only an extremly small amount of users will be effected by this in their purchasing decision, especially since most users will be running at 720p, and you get free 2X AA, if the original resolution is 1080p.

 

[ERP]

> "SC:CT most certainly is shader limited at 1600x1200 no-AA/no-AF."

And maybe the shader code in that game, somehow prevents the new efficiencies from being taken advantage of. Nvidia improved the efficiency in some regards, and not all. Other games by developers knowing the difference, may very well show the increase.

> "Requiring 1080p for all games would be very dumb. PS3 will not have the bandwidth, texture memory and/or fillrate to handle that sort of resolutions with AA and complex scenes etc at decent framerates."

What are all the requirements for a 1080p game? The fact I see tons of games running on the PC at 1600x1200 at easily 100 fps, seems to indicated that 1080p can easily be done. 2X AA maybe more than sufficient for such a resolution, and don't forget the RSX has 57 GB/sec of bandwidth, since it has dual busses.

AA is not even critical for a next generation system, as only an extremly small amount of users will be effected by this in their purchasing decision.

The downside of requiring 1080P is that it has basically 2Million pixels.
That is a good thing for "crisp images", but it's a bad thing for shader complexity.

A 720P image has only one million pixels so all things being equal you can do 2x the number of shder ops on every pixel.

A 480P image has slightly ove 300K pixels so you can do 6x the number of shader ops per pixel.

Now clearly there is a sweet spot here, but as a dev I wish they'd let me decide where that is.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Well, I'd wait for an official announcement because this is the first I've heard of any standards and an anonymous IGN quote is not proof of anything.

I watched the PS3 E3 conference and there was no mention at all of a 1080p standard.

If PS3 was 1080p standard, not only would they have mentioned it at the press conference, but they would've probably made a bar-graph comparing it to the x360.

I think it's safe to say this is bogus

 

[wco81]

Has Sony told developers to target 1080p, ERP?

 

[supa50]

1080p

If i remember correctly the press conference motioned 1080p many times over. There was even a laymen's explanation (spiderman stills) of the types of resolutions 1080p supports.

 

[ERP]

Has Sony told developers to target 1080p, ERP?

Actually FWIW I don't know.
If they have the info hasn't filtered this far down. But it's a bit early for TCR's just yet so I doubt they've decreed it just yet.

 

[nAo]

I believe most NG games will use a first pass to lay down zbuffer to remove opaque ovedraw.
Now RSX has 24 pixel pipelines clocked at 550 MHz and we have to use them to shade 100 Mpixel/s (a 1080p frame buffer @ 50 FPS).
24*550/100 = 132 clocks per pixel.
More than 200 dot4 and 100 nrm per pixel (efficiency is not 100% of course!)..well..it seems good to me
Even with a lot of texture layers available programmable flops count is still very high

 

[Titanio]

But designing a GPU for "peak" is clearly not working.

In all these reviews, the best case we're seeing is a 50% speed-up over 6800 Ultra in shader-limited cases. That 50% speed-up can be entirely explained by increased pipelines and clock.

This implies to me that the increased capability of each pixel pipeline in 7800GTX is completely wasted in real games.

Real PC games haven't been designed for such a setup up till now, however..

I don't think it'll be so "wasted" in a closed system. And going forward it may be less wasted in PC land, at least amongst NVidia partners.

RSX - 464 (no tex) or 272 (with 24 tex), max 8 vertex fetches & 16 pixels w/ 2xAA
Xenos - 480 (with 16 tex), max 16 vertex fetches & 8 pixels w/ 4xAA

A couple of Qs - How are you figuring these numbers out, exactly? I'm guessing you're mapping the texture address functionality in Xenos to flops, but..how? And if the texture address units can't be used for anything else, I'm not sure if they fall under "programmable" shader power. It may be more accurate to state the given flop numbers for each (240 vs 400.4 - where does 464 come from, btw?) with the caveat on RSX that texture addresses will cost the use of an ALU for that clock.

 

[sonycowboy]

AA is not even critical for a next generation system, as only an extremly small amount of users will be effected by this in their purchasing decision, especially since most users will be running at 720p, and you get free 2X AA, if the original resolution is 1080p.

"Most" users will still be using standard displays. Those that do have HDTV's will most likely not be getting 720p either as no CRT out there supports it natively even if they say they do. For those who have LCD's at 720p or lucky enough to have Plasma or DLP HDTV's they will, but I'm guessing that will be less than 5-10% of the population at least through the end of 2006.

 

[alexsok]

scooby_dooby: well then i guess you and i and thousands of other have watched a different presentation, since the one from this years e3 clearly shows on one of the slides that PS3 will support 1080p and Kutaragi even explicitly discusses it, though his diction lefts much to be desired for hehe (the other question is how fast will it be put to use, since the scarcity of 1080p supporting tv's is quite frightening).

BTW, since G70 has been introduced today, does anyone have any inside info as to the amount of tech borrowed from it for the RSX (or vice-versa)? There doesn't seem to be much going for the G70 except TAA, and if the RSX is close to it feature-wise, then it will be quiet disappointing and not forward-looking (no unified ps & vs, etc), so if that's the case, will CELL sort of smooth out these rough edges, or is the X360 really that much more powerful than PS3?

 

[Titanio]

BTW, since G70 has been introduced today, does anyone have any inside info as to the amount of tech borrowed from it for the RSX (or vice-versa)? There doesn't seem to be much going for the G70 except TAA, and if the RSX is close to it feature-wise, then it will be quiet disappointing and not forward-looking (no unified ps & vs, etc), so if that's the case, will CELL sort of smooth out these rough edges, or is the X360 really that much more powerful than PS3?

You seem to be confusing novelty with power. Different things don't mean more powerful things necessarily. I think it's clear G70, and subsequently RSX, is very very powerful. I'd like to clarify some issues before making paper comparisons though..

..also, will we be getting RSX specifics now that the cat is out of the bag re. G70? I thought after the Chinese site's charts NVidia might be in a position to talk openly about it..

 

[scooby_dooby]

scooby_dooby: well then i guess you and i and thousands of other have watched a different presentation, since the one from this years e3 clearly shows on one of the slides that PS3 will support 1080p and Kutaragi even explicitly discusses it, though his diction lefts much to be desired for hehe (the other question is how fast will it be put to use, since the scarcity of 1080p supporting tv's is quite frightening).

Where in the Press Conference did they say 1080p is a STANDARD?

Exactly. They don't.

Obviously it's supported, we all know it's supported, what I'm saying is Sony has not said they'll require it, it has not been made the "standard" and until I see an official announcement i'll take the IGN rumour as fake.

If it's not required it will not be in very many games at all, that;s why this is important. Look at XBOX how many games used 720p? Something like 20 games out of 1200 support 720p or 1080i. I'd expect the number of 1080p games to be even less, as there's a much much smaller market for Dev's to target than with 720p.

So, if it's not required I wouldn't expect to see it in more the 1-2% of games, at the most.

 

[jvd]

What are all the requirements for a 1080p game? The fact I see tons of games running on the PC at 1600x1200 at easily 100 fps, seems to indicated that 1080p can easily be done. 2X AA maybe more than sufficient for such a resolution, and don't forget the RSX has 57 GB/sec of bandwidth, since it has dual busses.

The rsx will never have acess to 57gb of bandwidth . Unless of course the cell will be disabled in games

 

[Titanio]

To clarify further, there's a 47.6GB/s memory bandwidth..another 10GB/s (to make up the 57.6GB/s) would have to be going "elsewhere" so to speak, directly to other chips or Cell or whatever, I assume.

 

[Bowie]

Here's a quote from the Ps3 press release:

"To match the accelerating convergence of digital consumer electronics and computer technology, PS3 supports high quality display in resolution of 1080p(*) as standard, which is far superior to 720p/1080i."

http://www.us.playstation.com/Pressreleases.aspx?id=279