PS3 / 7 times faster than PCI Express.

[SonyNinja]

I understand you may not be able to talk too much about it right now, but I'm just wondering how you expect Playstation 3 graphics to differ from what we see here today?

Although I can't talk about it too much there are some things we know about the PS3. First, its got a Cell processor, and that affects graphics a lot, and second the front-side-bus is 7 times faster than PCI Express.

Greater bandwidth gives you the ability to download textures more quickly and that's a big, big, deal and at some level the bus bandwidth limits the amount of geometry you can send over the bus so there is a level of fidelity that you are at a theoretical limit to be able to achieve with every bus, so the level of fidelity of geometry and textures is limited by each generation. http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/jhh/index.php?p=03

PSINext: As previously discussed, beyond it's high quality one of the primary reasons for the use of NAO32 is that it saves bandwidth in a bandwidth-hungry environment. In the future do you feel RSX will be at a disadvantage to Xenos when it comes to framebuffer effects due to the 128-bit bus and lack of eDRAM?

Marco: Not at all; in fact for many framebuffer effects I believe RSX will have an edge over Xenos. Don't want to go into details, but let me just point out that RSX is connected to two seperate buses, not just one.

This is real good right?

 

[Cheezdoodles]

1. Cell CPU does not affect graphics by "a lot".

PSINext: As previously discussed, beyond it's high quality one of the primary reasons for the use of NAO32 is that it saves bandwidth in a bandwidth-hungry environment. In the future do you feel RSX will be at a disadvantage to Xenos when it comes to framebuffer effects due to the 128-bit bus and lack of eDRAM?

Marco: Not at all; in fact for many framebuffer effects I believe RSX will have an edge over Xenos. Don't want to go into details, but let me just point out that RSX is connected to two seperate buses, not just one.

This is real good right?

2. Do you honestly belive that nAo from ninja theory, who is now more or less a first party developer for Sony is allowed to say that the Xenos is better?

3. This is like, old as hell.

 

[Iron Tiger]

RSX can access the DDR3 directly, or the XDR through the CELL. I'm sure there's some penalty for crossing through the CELL, but it could work out like the GC/Wii with its pool of multipurpose A-RAM.

 

[Darkon]

Do you honestly belive that nAo from ninja theory, who is now more or less a first party developer for Sony is allowed to say that the Xenos is better?

He never said it was better perhaps , but he did say good things about it.

 

[Carl B]

Ostepop, what's your deal?

(am I debating you on TXB these past 24 hours?)

If you go over the threads here, Marco's certainly defended his comments, and everything is in a context.

Rather than questioning his credibility for being close to Sony, rather one would ask: why don't you agree with him, and what are your reasons?

It's not that there are not valid points to make for the case of Xenos of course, it's just never a good way to start off a discussion for someone to basically accuse someone of lying for the sake of their employer. nAo's frankly just not like that - he'll say what he believes, and is more than willing to discuss it at the debate table.

...now I've got to dig for that old thread link!

EDIT: Here you go SonyNinja (and Ostepop), your means to relive the debates of the past: Link

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Although I can't talk about it too much there are some things we know about the PS3. First, its got a Cell processor, and that affects graphics a lot, and second the front-side-bus is 7 times faster than PCI Express.

Greater bandwidth gives you the ability to download textures more quickly and that's a big, big, deal and at some level the bus bandwidth limits the amount of geometry you can send over the bus so there is a level of fidelity that you are at a theoretical limit to be able to achieve with every bus, so the level of fidelity of geometry and textures is limited by each generation.

You're ignoring the fact that a PC GPU on a PCI-E card has a stonking amount of very fast GDDR3 at 40 or more GB/s (much more on later cards). You don't need to run textures from RAM over PCI-E to GPU because all the textures are loaded into the RAM in the first place. PCI-E will allow faster geometry transfers, but they're only part of the workload. Though PS3's memory configuration allows for more geometry to be passed to the GPU (at a cost of texture and framebuffer bandwidth) what's the point if the GPU can't render that much geometry anyway?

In summary, there's lots more to consider than 'PS3's FSB is 7x faster than PCI-E' to determine where performance between PS3 and PC differs.

 

[London Geezer]

You're ignoring the fact that a PC GPU on a PCI-E card has a stonking amount of very fast GDDR3 at 40 or more GB/s (much more on later cards). You don't need to run textures from RAM over PCI-E to GPU because all the textures are loaded into the RAM in the first place. PCI-E will allow faster geometry transfers, but they're only part of the workload. Though PS3's memory configuration allows for more geometry to be passed to the GPU (at a cost of texture and framebuffer bandwidth) what's the point if the GPU can't render that much geometry anyway?

In summary, there's lots more to consider than 'PS3's FSB is 7x faster than PCI-E' to determine where performance between PS3 and PC differs.

I don't think the "big deal" about the 35GB link between Cell and RSX is about textures. It allows a level of interactivity between the CPU and GPU that is just not going to be there in PCs for a long long long time.

Personally i'm still not sure what exactly that will allow, but it's undeniable that there is a lot more potential there than just "more textures", which is hardly something we should be impressed about these days. I mean, textures are soooo last century!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Undoubtedly the CPU<>GPU link is going to do fancy stuff, but the exact points raised like textures don't fit into that envelope. Also an equivalent PCI-E speed on PC wouldn't help any because the CPU isn't in a postion to help with those task. The 7x BW is only worth considering when you've got a 7x graphical CPU performance to send data over it

 

[Megadrive1988]

Xbox 360 has a huge advantage over PS3 with the (internally) 256 GB per sec EDRAM.

in the last generation, even though NV2A was a far superior GPU than the GS rasterizer, the GS rasterizer had incredible bandwidth. there are things that PS2 could do that Xbox could not because of that. it'll be the same this generation. Xbox360 will be able to do things that PS3 just cannot do because of bandwidth constraints.

neither console has an "ideal" memory bandwidth setup, it's always a comprimise, but I think Xbox360's situation isn't as bad as PS3's.

I expect some PS3 developers to find ways around PS3's bandwidth limitations though, so both consoles will often end up having similar looking games. but there will be examples of PS3 blowing Xbox360 out of the water and Xbox360 blowing PS3 out of the water. it'll be a fun ride

 

[Guden Oden]

Xbox 360 has a huge advantage over PS3 with the (internally) 256 GB per sec EDRAM.

You won't actually be able to USE that much tho unless you do 4xAA due to the way the eDRAM is designed, and so far hardly any titles on 360 do any AA at all.

RSX could potentially boast similar bandwidth figures by counting in frame and Z buffer compression when doing AA instead, or even early Z-rejection and hidden surface removal stuff - something xenos does not feature at all btw - and indeed, Nvidia did do just that with the ill-fated NV30. We can dispute which way of counting BW would be more 'correct' and 'fair', I'd say it'd be pretty much a wash tho.

I expect some PS3 developers to find ways around PS3's bandwidth limitations though

RSX really isn't limited at all as long as you deal mostly with opaque polys, and as evidenced by both the lost planet demo and that WWII flying game whatsitsname, xenos can run out of fillrate pretty quick it also once you start laying on lots of transparencies. It'll probably do it BETTER than RSX, but at this point it's hard to say how big a diff it'll be when all things are counted.

 

[ArturNOW]

I think is good time to stop speculation and just wait. Sony didn't let anyone with PS2 and made hardware which lasted for 6 year and will be there for another 3 year at least, while Microsoft has stopped production of Xbox 1 (I know there many reasons for that). All in all we don't know to much about PS3 spec and how exactly it will works and what part plays in it CELL.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

What the hell are you talking about? How is the PS2 lifetime relevant to this?

 

[compres]

You won't actually be able to USE that much tho unless you do 4xAA due to the way the eDRAM is designed, and so far hardly any titles on 360 do any AA at all.

RSX could potentially boast similar bandwidth figures by counting in frame and Z buffer compression when doing AA instead, or even early Z-rejection and hidden surface removal stuff - something xenos does not feature at all btw - and indeed, Nvidia did do just that with the ill-fated NV30. We can dispute which way of counting BW would be more 'correct' and 'fair', I'd say it'd be pretty much a wash tho.


RSX really isn't limited at all as long as you deal mostly with opaque polys, and as evidenced by both the lost planet demo and that WWII flying game whatsitsname, xenos can run out of fillrate pretty quick it also once you start laying on lots of transparencies. It'll probably do it BETTER than RSX, but at this point it's hard to say how big a diff it'll be when all things are counted.

I think people specting too much in the AA camp on ps3 will be dissapointed. The bandwidth is not bigger than a gForce 7600 gt and has to render at 1080p(1600x1200 pixels) if we are to believe the games will be designed with that target resolution.

So I will say instead: Yes the RSX is bandwidth limited acording to current rumors.

As you said the 360 is far from perfect but it has not this particular limitation. I think the ps3 will(doh) exploit its advantages at the cost of some sacrifices in image quality in this case AA which is the most expensive.

 

[Guden Oden]

I think people specting too much in the AA camp on ps3 will be dissapointed. The bandwidth is not bigger than a gForce 7600 gt and has to render at 1080p(1600x1200 pixels) if we are to believe the games will be designed with that target resolution.

So I will say instead: Yes the RSX is bandwidth limited acording to current rumors.

RSX, like almost any PC chip that does MSAA, has realtime lossless compression to help deal with the fillrate and bandwidth issues. There is a hit of course, but it's partly negated by the compression, in most cases it's actually even MOSTLY negated.

Really, fillrate, bandwidth and AA isn't much of a problem as long as you don't do tons of overdraw, so it'll be important to limit that as much as possible I would think, by ways of smart engine design.

As you said the 360 is far from perfect but it has not this particular limitation.

It has limits. These limits are easily encrouched upon by games AVAILABLE TODAY... Just do that flying game and run the tutorial until you get to strafe zeppelins moored on the ground. If you fly up real close, watch that FPS sag when the screen fills with explosions. It's not a magic box you know that just spits out an image according to a specific time schedule...

I think the ps3 will(doh) exploit its advantages at the cost of some sacrifices in image quality in this case AA which is the most expensive.

We need to take a step back here, wait and see. It's much too soon to speculate about 'sacrifices in IQ' or whatever, we don't even have much in the way of hires in-game movies of games.

 

[Pozer]

memory lane.. woot.

xenos = greater memory bandwidth.
RSA = faster shaders.

xenos shader gap to the rsx is less than rsx bandwidth gap to xenos.

 

[London Geezer]

In the end, we could discuss for hours how PS3 will have "problems with transparency", but if we actually look at practicle examples, Warhawk, a first gen title, has Volumetric Clouds that technically look fabulous (personally i don't like the fact that they look like blobs of sugar puffs thrown in the sky, but technically they really are cool). All at 60fps with lots more going on screen at once, no slowdowns or screen tearing *cough*.

Both systems will have games that slow down when lots of transparency is on screen, and both systems will have games that do the same but never slow down.

What does that show you?

YES! That it's all down to the coders and the developers!! As i've said for years now.

It's not about the hardware, it's all about what people do with that hardware. Some people will get round some obstacles properly and some people won't bother or won't have time to.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

memory lane.. woot.

xenos = greater memory bandwidth.
RSA = faster shaders.

xenos shader gap to the rsx is less than rsx bandwidth gap to xenos.

i was under the impression that Xenos was the shader beast?

 

[zed]

In the end, we could discuss for hours how PS3 will have "problems with transparency", but if we actually look at practicle examples, Warhawk, a first gen title, has Volumetric Clouds that technically look fabulous (personally i don't like the fact that they look like blobs of sugar puffs thrown in the sky, but technically they really are cool). All at 60fps with lots more going on screen at once, no slowdowns or screen tearing *cough*

the thing is the reason u see these slowdown in all(?) games is cause they use the same method for smoke/explosions/clouds ie drawing lots of transparent (well translucent is more correct cause transparent means u cant see it but anyways) particles in an area, ie trying to give the impression that the explosion effect is 3d (but in reality its just 2d sprites) ie the current method is a BAD HACK (which im guilty of)
now to calculate true 3d volumetric effects requires a lot of cpu horsepower
cell enters from stage right, sure its a fast beast but i dont know if its still powerful enuf to do at 60fps (havent researched), but if u could get it going on a couple SPEs u have two results
A/ better looking, as the effect is not a hack so much
B/ faster, no slowdown due to multple read/writes to framebuffer
ie its a win / win senerio

 

[Zeross]

or even early Z-rejection and hidden surface removal stuff - something xenos does not feature at all btw.

Where did you read that ? Xenos has early Z and even early stencil rejection.

 

[nAo]

Where did you read that ? Xenos has early Z and even early stencil rejection.

Yep, those features are there but it seems early rejection granularity it's not very good