Megadrive1988
Veteran
Sony's GSCUBE had immense fillrate and aggregate bandwidth for all the eDRAM, each GS I-32 had 32 MB eDRAM.
Specs for the first one, the "GSCUBE 16" or 16 Blade version shown at SIGGRAPH 2000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GScube
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?18036-GSCUBE-information
The realtime Final Fantasy:The Spirits Within scenes done on GSCUBE were 60fps and much more impressive than the FF TSW scenes Nvidia did the following year on its NV20/GF3 based Quadro DCC using its shaders. Hardly fair though, of course, 16 EEs + 16 GS I-32s vs a single NV20-based chip with zero eDRAM.
Would've been interesting to see what the canceled 64 blade version of GSCube could've done. As well as the never-developed (or never seen) Graphics Synthesizer 2, especially in those workstations Sony was planning to build with lots of EE2 and GS2 chips.
I suppose EE3 in a sense became CELL (?) and the GS3 (or Visualizer?) was scrapped in favor of Nvidia and the RSX.
The "I-32" Graphics Synthesizer was a custom variant that contained 32 MB of eDRAM instead of the typical 4 MB)
Specs for the first one, the "GSCUBE 16" or 16 Blade version shown at SIGGRAPH 2000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GScube
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?18036-GSCUBE-information
- CPU 128Bit Emotion Engine x 16
- System Clock Frequency 294.912MHz
- Main Memory Direct RDRAM
- Memory Size 2GB (128MB x 16)
- Memory Bus Bandwidth 50.3GB/s (3.1GB/s x 16)
- Floating Point Performance 97.5GFLOPS (6.1GFLOPS x 16)
- 3D CG Geometric Transformation 1.04Gpolygons/s (65Mpolygons/s x 16)
- Graphics Graphics Synthesizer I-32 x 16
- Clock Frequency 147.456MHz
- VRAM Size 512MB (embedded 32MB x 16)
- VRAM Bandwidth 755GB/s (47.2GB/s x 16)
- Pixel Fill Rate 37.7GB/s (2.36GB/s x 16)
- Maximum Polygon Drawing Rate 1.2 Gpolygons/s (73.7Mpolygons/s x 16)
- Display Color Depth 32bit (RGBA: 8 bits each)
- Z depth 32bit
- Maximum Resolutions 1080/60p (1920x1080, 60fps, Progressive)
- Merging Functions Scissoring
Alpha Test
Z Sorting
Alpha Blending
The realtime Final Fantasy:The Spirits Within scenes done on GSCUBE were 60fps and much more impressive than the FF TSW scenes Nvidia did the following year on its NV20/GF3 based Quadro DCC using its shaders. Hardly fair though, of course, 16 EEs + 16 GS I-32s vs a single NV20-based chip with zero eDRAM.
Would've been interesting to see what the canceled 64 blade version of GSCube could've done. As well as the never-developed (or never seen) Graphics Synthesizer 2, especially in those workstations Sony was planning to build with lots of EE2 and GS2 chips.
I suppose EE3 in a sense became CELL (?) and the GS3 (or Visualizer?) was scrapped in favor of Nvidia and the RSX.
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