PS3 Visualizer

[megadrive0088]

Hopefully both units will be clocked much faster, I still want 4xxx X 2xxxp rez at 120fps support, like the original future canned gs3 idea.

zidane1strife,
you must have read my mind. I was going to make a new thread, along the lines of: l "PS3 will do 4,000 x 2,000p resolution at 120FPS?" because of the original GS3 concept going back to 1999.

to me, a GS3 would have been 128-256 relatively simple parallel pipelines (DX8.1 class) with fully CPU-like flexable VUs/APUs attached at the front end for T&L instead of limited DX8.1 Vertex Shader. the 128-256 pixel pipes would be PS 1.1- class capable also, but more limited than DX9. but the VUs/APUs would help with that. GS3 would be capable of 4,000 x 2,000 @120fps but the resolution would be downsampled to
1024p or 1920x1280 or 1600x1200 (something like that) and down to 60fps as to not waste processing power with such high res and unnecessary framerate.

but again, that is the old mentality.

 

[Vince]

under the old way of rendering (more is better type thinking) I would agree with Vince and V3 that 4 gpixels/gtexels is not enough even at 640x480.

This isn't what I'm saying. I just don't believe the Pixel Engines will be single DX8-9 style processing pipelines. There is no need for them, people (much like yourself) like to inject the traditional PC paradigm into PS3 and it's not necessary. Aswell as the ominpresent attitude that bigger nomenclature = better.

People here are so willing and quick to judge based on the status quo as defined by the PC. This can be seen in the rasterizer borne AA people expect, to the mentality that a TFLOP is nothing but a number and that 2TFlop is just so much better than 1, since 1 is so 2001 speculation.

 

[Panajev2001a]

I think each pixel engine might be writing a single pixel ( single textured if you are using textures ) to the frame-buffer and with a 2.8 GHz clock for the Broadband Engine and 2.8 GHz for the Visualizer ( I do not expect the e-DRAM to reach more than 1 GHz ) we get the 1 TFLOPS gtarget for the whole PlayStation 3 and we get ~11.2 GPixels/s... which is not bad IMHO...

If we are talking about using a REYES like rendering ( 1 pixel or half a pixel size micro-polygons whcih could be at the most single-textured ) approach or if we just have high polygon counts and smaller and smaller triangles this will be the efficient way to do it IMHO... it will leave the least ammount of resources idle...

We do not need ultra complex Pixel Engines... high color precision, Z-buffer and silicon support for texture filtering... I do not think we need much more than that...

Also, I think that it would be neat having each pixel pipeline working on a different triangle ( independent pipelines... )...

This would remind me of a GScube on a a chip in some ways...

Each PE in the Visualizer could work independently from the others and could work on a different triangle... It is "~like" we had 4 parallel GS chips with 1 pixel pipeline each and we could, if we wanted, split the screen in tiles and have each PE work on a tile working on all triangles included in that tile...

 

[Josiah]

This isn't what I'm saying. I just don't believe the Pixel Engines will be single DX8-9 style processing pipelines. There is no need for them, people (much like yourself) like to inject the traditional PC paradigm into PS3 and it's not necessary. Aswell as the ominpresent attitude that bigger nomenclature = better.

this isn't the PC paradigm, but rather the SGI paradigm...there is no "PC paradigm" as a PC is just a collection of existing technologies.

 

[Vince]

this isn't the PC paradigm, but rather the SGI paradigm...there is no "PC paradigm" as a PC is just a collection of existing technologies.

When all the major PC IHV's of our time (eg. nVidia, ATI, former-3dfx/GP, Matrox) basically began as groups of Ex-SGI employees - I tend to consider the traditional SGI paradigm the PC paradigm. And if not for the visable trends in the PC 3D scene that have trailed, but yet paralled those of SGI; I think we can establish atleast a de facto relationship/influence.

 

[qwerty2000]

ok i have serval questions to ask

1. will the ps3 will be close to rendering ff:st grpahics
2. will ps3 able to render the movie antz
3. the ps3 will be able to do 4-7 g polys in real time.

 

[Deepak]

ok i have serval questions to ask

1. will the ps3 will be close to rendering ff:st grpahics
2. will ps3 able to render the movie antz
3. the ps3 will be able to do 4-7 g polys in real time.

1. Yes..."close"
2. Definitely
3. No idea!

 

[London Geezer]

ok i have serval questions to ask

1. will the ps3 will be close to rendering ff:st grpahics
2. will ps3 able to render the movie antz
3. the ps3 will be able to do 4-7 g polys in real time.

and we would know becasue................... :?

not like u're gonna get much more than wild speculation out of us....

personally i would be very happy to see Antz quality graphics... FF:TSW is a bit too far off, even though i think that PS3 might produce graphics that can be confused to be on par with FF:TSW, given the right shortcuts here and there....
look at how SH3 looks on an old 1999 piece of hardware... PS3 will be very powerful AND there will be new ways to make our eyes believe that the graphics it will produce will look like FFTSW...

... and we'll still gonna be here saying *how that is not REAL -put name of the effect here-* and counter attacking with *but it looks exactly like the REAL -put name of the effect here- so who cares if it's REAL or not*

a bit like today's discussions on how PS2 and XBOX never gave us the promised "toy story graphics"... and we will have endless threads on how someone thinks that MGS6 looks like crap, or how amazing Halo4 looks....

 

[megadrive0088]

]ok i have serval questions to ask

1. will the ps3 will be close to rendering ff:st grpahics
2. will ps3 able to render the movie antz
3. the ps3 will be able to do 4-7 g polys in real time.

1. Nope. no way, no how. even PS4 probably wont be able to do FF:TSW graphics as they are. aim lower. think FFX CGI cut-scenes instead. CGI films of FF Movie calibur have years of render time on thousands of CPUs. new graphics hardware will cut that time down, but there are hundreds of layers of FX going on in that movie, with ray tracing. if you are only talking polygon count, then yes, PS3 could do that but FF movie was not about polys. also, the sheer amounts of FSAA and filters, and especially raytracing, put that quality out of reach of PS3 or even XB2.

2. perhaps something close enough to Antz to make you think it is as good, if PS3's achitechure lives up to what its ment to do. but we have not even reached Toy Story 1 graphics yet, so lets not aim even higher than TS until that is done.

3. probably 4-7 billion vertices/polys second, yes. in terms of raw polys, definitally. (still, just speculation though) maybe even that much with things (effects, textures, shading) on, depending on how powerful PS3 is in the real world.

 

[qwerty2000]

<quote>. probably 4-7 billion vertices/polys second, yes. in terms of raw polys, definitally. (still, just speculation though) maybe even that much with things (effects, textures, shading) on, depending on how powerful PS3 is in the real world.</quote>

ps3 will do much more than 4-7 billion raw maybe 15-27g poly raw

in real time it should be able to go over 5g in real time

 

[zurich]

Wow you guys don't let up with the speculation eh?

 

[qwerty2000]

Wow you guys don't let up with the speculation eh?

well what dou expect from a 1.5 tflops system only 1 billion polygons raw or 20 billion polygons raw

 

[V3]

well what dou expect from a 1.5 tflops system only 1 billion polygons raw or 20 billion polygons raw

Depend, if fill rate is the limit, With a filrate of 4GPixels/s like what is being speculated, you would get max of 4 billion poly/s. You probably used the rest of performance for shading those pixels.

 

[qwerty2000]

in real time or raw if its raw that would be very sad because the next gen systems are suppose to surpass 4g polys raw maybe in real time or more

 

[London Geezer]

in real time or raw if its raw that would be very sad because the next gen systems are suppose to surpass 4g polys raw maybe in real time or more

someone's smoking something....


i mean, whether raw or not, anything with the words *4 Gpolys per second* on it would be mighty impressive in the next generation....

SAD???

what i find sad is people with 199th-floor-level expectations who will be disappointed with EVERYTHING in the next generation, whatever strength the next gen consoles have.

 

[megadrive0088]

in real time or raw if its raw that would be very sad because the next gen systems are suppose to surpass 4g polys raw maybe in real time or more

who says next gen systems are supposed to surpass 4 billion polys, raw or not raw?

maybe they will only do 1 billion raw, and 200~300 million with textures, shaders, lighting, FSAA, etc. there is no performance level given by Sony, MS or Nintendo, for next gen systems yet.


I personally expect 5-10 billion raw and 1-2 billion with stuff. AT MOST. but it WILL depend on the limits of the architecture of all the next gen systems. T&L rate, fillrate, bus bandwidth, memory size, latency, compression.

any bottlenecks will limit what next gen systems can push onto the screen to be displayed, in-game play (or realtime cut-scene) just like current systems have limits.

even if next-gen console A can do 100 billion polys raw, if there is a bottleneck in any part of the architecture that limits you to 500 million, that is what you're going to get.

 

[zidane1strife]

Nope. no way, no how. even PS4 probably wont be able to do FF:TSW graphics as they are.

Don't underestimate the power... of the petaflop

 

[archie4oz]

Well Sony used to have media servers called 'PetaServers' (of course that was 'PetaByte' storage not PetaFlop processing)...

BTW, I'm surprise nobody's linked up this little bit of speculation... (granted it's all been discussed before)...

 

[psurge]

I'm not sure how this talk of 1 pixel engine processing 1 polygon at a time is relevant to a Reyes style rendering approach.

If you have say 16 "pipes", I don't see any reason why each one couldn't work on a separate micro-polygon, presupposing they have the same shader and associated state (textures) associated with them. After all, with the Reyes approach, you aren't rasterizing (lerping parameters across triangles in screenspace) anymore, you are dicing geometry into micro polygons... no?

 

[zurich]

BTW, I'm surprise nobody's linked up this little bit of speculation... (granted it's all been discussed before)...

Because its in Japanese??