PSP NEWS!

[notAFanB]

the XBOY ? oh my God, i hope if MS releases a handheld, they really should choose another name .. muha xboy
XTEEN, XXXtool, handy-X, PXP

and where did you get this 'xboy' that you speak of?

 

[Fafalada]

Looking at that, there Core (1) & Core (2), That's just a Power Point slide presentation number isn't ? Its not 2 seperate cores.

Diagram clearly show it's only one GPU no matter what Deadmeat fictionized
The slide separation is akin to how Flipper is also split into 3 processors (Command processor, Geometry processor, and rasterizer).

And yes bone count would refer to number of influences (where in spec was that, I didn't see it?).

From that spec, it doesn't look like its going to have vertex or fragment shader. So those stuff have to be done on the FPU ?

Using DirectX(tm) names in Sony spec would be a little odd wouldn't it? Anyway you have a VU right there on the first R4000 for all your vertex shading needs and more.

As for pixel operations, we'll have to wait longer for info, although I really don't know where people get off expecting complicated combiners or even running full blown fragment programs. :?

 

[hey69]

the XBOY ? oh my God, i hope if MS releases a handheld, they really should choose another name .. muha xboy
XTEEN, XXXtool, handy-X, PXP

and where did you get this 'xboy' that you speak of?

chaphacks post from a page ago.

it was brought up as a Joke

 

[hey69]

the XBOY ? oh my God, i hope if MS releases a handheld, they really should choose another name .. muha xboy
XTEEN, XXXtool, handy-X, PXP

and where did you get this 'xboy' that you speak of?

chaphacks post from a page ago.

it was brought up as a Joke

 

[V3]

Diagram clearly show it's only one GPU no matter what Deadmeat fictionized

The slide separation is akin to how Flipper is also split into 3 processors (Command processor, Geometry processor, and rasterizer).

ic ic, I thought it was just because it doesn't fit on one slide.

And yes bone count would refer to number of influences (where in spec was that, I didn't see it?).

On the slide here

Using DirectX(tm) names in Sony spec would be a little odd wouldn't it?

Well vertex and fragment, is the name going to be used for OpenGL as well. Though Sony probably not going to use it.

Anyway you have a VU right there on the first R4000 for all your vertex shading needs and more.

That's what I thought too.

As for pixel operations, we'll have to wait longer for info, although I really don't know where people get off expecting complicated combiners or even running full blown fragment programs.

Yeah, considering this chip might sit around 150 million transistors.

 

[Fafalada]

"ic ic, I thought it was just because it doesn't fit on one slide."
Oops
Now that I look at it again, you're right. The text version had me completely fooled though

 

[Deepak]

Faf you also use , atleast there is one thing common between you and Chap..

 

[Phil]

Xboy... uahahahahahaah!!!

 

[McFly]

Found this great review of the infos available:

The complete spec for the forthcoming PSP has been announced, revealing a versatile multimedia system much closer to the PS2 in power than expected, and even outperforming its home console sibling in certain areas.

The PSP architecture is powered by a MIPS R4000 CPU core - two of them in fact, with one being designated as the CPU core and another as the "Media Engine". It's not clear whether these cores will both be accessible by game applications, but if so, the system actually has more raw processing power than the PS2 - which is based on a single modified R5900 CPU, the Emotion Engine.

The main PSP CPU will feature floating point and vector floating point co-processors, as well as 3D-CG extended instructions - both of which are absent from the Media Engine, which in effect means that the Media Engine (assuming its usable in-game) will have limited use to gaming applications, but could be used to make certain processor-intensive tasks work.

Graphics in the PSP are driven by a combination of two graphics cores. Graphics Core 2 is similar to the Graphics Synthesizer in the PlayStation 2, but it runs at around half the clock speed of its PS2 counterpart (166Mhz compared with 300Mhz) and as such, has about half of the theoretical polygon throughput (a decent measure of raw graphical power) of the PS2.

Perhaps more interesting is Graphics Core 1, which offers a range of 3D curved surface and other hardware 3D functionality. How useful the more advanced functions in this core will be to development remains to be seen - Sony is likely to make a lot of noise about the NURBS and curved surface abilities of the PSP, but in the real world, developing games to use these tools is extremely difficult and most developers are likely to fall back on good old polygons. However, there's no doubt that other functions of Core 1 - such as compressed texture handling and proper hardware clipping - will speed up graphics on the PSP significantly, and developers who do decide to use the curved surface abilities may well turn out some very impressive games.

In terms of audio, the PSP is also ahead of its home console brethren - with reconfigurable DSPs and full multi-channel 3D sound in hardware, both of which are missing from the PS2. It also features a high quality digital video decoder for playing back movies from the UMD discs.

Oh, speaking of the UMD discs - they apparently have a data throughput of 11mbit, which is enough to watch DVD quality movies, and should make up for the lack of memory on the system. The PSP only has 12Mb of memory in total, with 8Mb on the main CPU core, 2Mb on the Media Engine and 2Mb on Graphics Core 2.

So what else comes in the little box of tricks? Well, as we already knew, it comes equipped with USB 2.0 and Memory Stick slots, and as reported yesterday it comes with 802.11 Wireless LAN and Infra-Red (IrDA) wireless communication abilities.

The system also has a stereo headphone socket (unsurprisingly) and an extension port, which may in future play host to such devices as GPS navigation systems, digital television tuners or even mobile phone data network connections.

One interesting factor which arises from this is the fact that porting games from the PSone to the PSP is not going to be even remotely as trivial as many people had assumed - even getting a PSone game running on PSP without any modifications is going to be a task which will take months rather than days.

However, the system is almost custom-built for running first generation PS2 titles, and it certainly wouldn't be that difficult to get early games like TimeSplitters, Tekken Tag Tournament or Ridge Racer 5 running on the machine. Although the device can't quite rival the PS2 in terms of raw graphics power or memory size, as a portable system it doesn't have to - and it should prove quite capable of producing better graphical quality then the PS2 in a number of surprising places.

What does all this tell us about the price of the PSP? Not a lot, sadly. It's likely that Sony will continue the "razors and razorblades" approach, for a start - so the full price of manufacturing the unit will never be passed on to the consumer.

However, it's also worth noting that although the technology in the device is certainly powerful, it's not got any really cutting edge technology in it, and many of the components (like the MIPS processors) are basically cheap off the shelf units. Sony's promise of competitive pricing with other handheld gaming platforms may not be hollow after all.

http://www.gamepaused.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2517

Very good PSP will be.

Fredi

 

[chaphack]

Well the PVR MBX has some form of programmeable fragment shader. Runs at 120mhz at 6mm2. Could have been a good gpu to go with PSP?

Scene Managerâ„¢ - seamless scene complexity management to support arbitrarily complex scenes in limited memory footprint applications
FSAA4Freeâ„¢ - full screen anti aliasing with no performance loss delivers a significant improvement in visual quality by using high resolution rendering and filtered scaling. The result is smoother, more realistic graphics at mobile resolutions
ITCâ„¢ - Internal True Colour operations performed on chip at 32 bpp for superior colour precision
PVR-TCâ„¢ - PowerVR Texture Compression
AHB Interface for ARM bus architectures
Optimisation for UMA (Unified Memory Architectures

 

[Panajev2001a]

Fafalada, Grall...

N64 had a more then respectable combiner ( by admission of the own Art-X guys who had worked on the N64's RCP ), TNT1 and TNT2 had "respectable" combiners...

But my point is not about long and complex pixel programs, my point is about dot3 support in the rasterizer...

I know the users do not know what DOT3 is, but I bet they do not know much about NURBS and Hardware Tessellation units, but guess what they are there... because they help save lots of memory in a system who is not exactly having too much memory ( you never have enough ).

Normal Mapping, if we want to get to the basic thing, allows you to fake 3D geometry nicely enough and you will get the gamer fooled into thinking the scene has quite more geometry than it really has ( look at ATI's Normal Mapping demos, with the nice sports car ).

That is geometry compression, in a sense and would improove system performance in the PSP and this would benefit the programmers greatly.

Do not tell me that 2 small ALUs in the GPU to do dot3 operations are THAT expensive to add in the PSP ( in terms of total die area )...

The benefit would outweight the costs: if enough geometry can be faked through Normal mapping, there is more RAM left for other things the programmers might need to do and there is more polygon budget that can be spent on more important things.

Plus I would not mind dot3 support for per-pixel lighting, but that is just me...

Sony seems to have listened to developers' complaints over the years and I do not think that they would design a Rasterizer destined to ship in Q4 2004 with the same limited blending modes and arithmetic ability of a 1999-2000 design ( and its features got locked earlier than that ).

 

[Panajev2001a]

Graphics in the PSP are driven by a combination of two graphics cores. Graphics Core 2 is similar to the Graphics Synthesizer in the PlayStation 2, but it runs at around half the clock speed of its PS2 counterpart (166Mhz compared with 300Mhz)

BEEEP!

The GS runs at 150 MHz.

 

[Panajev2001a]

hardware clipping

Interesting as on PlayStation 2 clipping must be done on the VUs IIRC...

Also, about the "off-the shelf" comment that is not exactly proper as SCE seems to have customized things enough and there are more units than the two R4000 MPUs... this is like saying that the EE was an off-the shelf part...

 

[DeadmeatGA]

...

the system actually has more raw processing power than the PS2 - which is based on a single modified R5900 CPU, the Emotion Engine.

Not so sure, R5900 is a dual-issue superscalar design, whereas R4000 is a single issue design scrapped from old SGI workstations. It is better than R4300 of N64, but not much more.

which in effect means that the Media Engine (assuming its usable in-game) will have limited use to gaming applications, but could be used to make certain processor-intensive tasks work.

Yap, running TCP/IP stack and data streaming, stuffs like that.

Graphics Core 2 is similar to the Graphics Synthesizer in the PlayStation 2, but it runs at around half the clock speed of its PS2 counterpart (166Mhz compared with 300Mhz)

So the author is a clueless dude.

most developers are likely to fall back on good old polygons.

Agreed, time of polygon has not passed yet and will continue to serve us for a very long time.

One interesting factor which arises from this is the fact that porting games from the PSone to the PSP is not going to be even remotely as trivial as many people had assumed - even getting a PSone game running on PSP without any modifications is going to be a task which will take months rather than days.

Refer to my the other thread about Sony's lack of platform policy.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Not so sure, R5900 is a dual-issue superscalar design, whereas R4000 is a single issue design scrapped from old SGI workstations. It is better than R4300 of N64, but not much more.

Considering the PSP CPU runs 33 MHz faster than the EE, considering that in a lot of code, thanks to the not ultra optimal caching+not exactly low latency main memory sub-system the amount of tiem the RISC core spends in dual issue mode is not exactly something easy to achieve for PlayStation 2 programmers ( I am talking Integer wise ).

 

[Panajev2001a]

Refer to my the other thread about Sony's lack of platform policy.

No, the author is a clueless dude, remember ?

 

[MfA]

Well, it would be nice, no doubt, but come on now, do you not see what kinds of handheld do we have today and what does this thing bring to the table? It's a small powerhouse that I think could produce graphics that would look almost as good as PS2 games. I would be floored to see just multitexturing in games, to the level PS2 can do, everything else is just *huge* bonus that I don't even want to dream about...

You dont even want to dream about them making a balanced design? AA and elementary pixel shading are not things which they can add on already good design ... if they are missing them they wasted area on things with lower cost/benefit ratio IMO.

Do you guys have such low faith in Sony that you are already being apologists for them now? (Excepting Panajev.) MBX shows what is possible ... these kind of features are neither huge area nor huge power eaters, not even for a non-tiler thanks to the huge amounts of relatively low power embedded memory, in a device with specs on the whole higher than the dreamcast having a PS2 feature set for the rasterizer would be a crying shame.

It wouldnt make it a failure ... if you can execute well and have process superiority you can afford a lot of fuck ups. A fuck up is a fuck up wether it is critical or not though.

 

[cthellis42]

and i have one word for u.... TRAIN!! and another... PLANE!!! (oh hold on u're not supposed to use electronic equipment on a plane, but i do.. usually....)

Then, as I said, you'll merely bump into the same problems you have with laptops now--which didn't stop them from outselling desktops for the first time. A cross-country train trip I could see one having the most problems with, but I also think you have access to power outlets somewhere or another in them. Local transit isn't going to take long--even fairly long distance. Plane trips also don't take that long unless you're flying across GREAT distances, at which point you should really be trying to sleep anyway to get a head on your jet lag.

But seriously, if you do these often enough that it would be a huge inconvenience, you do the same things other people do--buy extra batteries or larger ones to keep an ample supply. (Heck, most will go for at least two batteries anyway to charge one while they use the other.) That, or buy a device which satisfies and you don't have to worry about batterly life.

In the meanwhile, 4-6 hours in a charge should be good for the vast majority. Trade-off? Sure. Platform-dooming facet? Not if it delivers that much. (TWO hours and we'll have a LOT of unhappy campers. )

 

[PC-Engine]

They dont know what they are doing; poor engineers are overworking to materialize the dream of a madman who got carried away with his first success. Developers are already running...scared of what kind of beast it will turn out to be. Imagine the shock and awe among developers when they are handed over a crude machine that barely boots and told..."We are done, now you make it sing and dance."

 

[chaphack]

Oh yeay, multitexturing...how does much kewl this PSP doeth it? IIRC, PS2 was pretty crude with it, 1 texture 1 pass ya? That chewed up alot of its available bandwidth wastefully...

A fuck up is a fuck up wether it is critical or not though.

Yeay man, but i think it is KK ideals, polygon!polygons!polygons!vertices!vertices!whatever-you-call-it!