So is the cell spe's "downgrade" confirmed ?

[Npl]

Which means either PS3 gaming on the old SD set, or watching the HD movie on the SD set (which would you choose), and also having two TVs in the living room occupying that much more the space of the one TV, which makes a mockery of wanting a flat panel to save on the space of the CRT in the first place, plus having the distraction of the sounds and sights of the game alongside the sounds and sights of the film.

PS3 on HDTV, Movie on SDTV - just because I dont care much for movies

I seriously doubt anyone is going to be in a postion to, and want to, have BRD movies playing on PS3 alongside PS3 games being played on the same console at the same time. I mean, who here is keen on the idea of having a computer game on one screen blaring away on the speakers and a movie right next to it on the 5.1 sound system?

Agree fully. The only sane thing would be to for ex browse the web on HDTV
and play a movie at the same time, or debugging on one and runnin on the other. Or having a secondary screen for whatever in games, or...

 

[Titanio]

Which means either PS3 gaming on the old SD set, or watching the HD movie on the SD set (which would you choose), and also having two TVs in the living room occupying that much more the space of the one TV, which makes a mockery of wanting a flat panel to save on the space of the CRT in the first place, plus having the distraction of the sounds and sights of the game alongside the sounds and sights of the film.

I seriously doubt anyone is going to be in a postion to, and want to, have BRD movies playing on PS3 alongside PS3 games being played on the same console at the same time. I mean, who here is keen on the idea of having a computer game on one screen blaring away on the speakers and a movie right next to it on the 5.1 sound system?

All depends on cable lengths Or your liking for headphones

There are any number of other things that SPU could be doing while playing your game, anyway, that wouldn't necessarily depend on a second TV for their usefulness either. Like taking that 1080p movie on your HDD and squishing it down to serve to your PSP, locally or even remotely, for example. I can't imagine that would go easy on the SPU, computationally speaking.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There are any number of other things that SPU could be doing while playing your game, anyway, that wouldn't necessarily depend on a second TV for their usefulness either. Like taking that 1080p movie on your HDD and squishing it down to serve to your PSP, locally or even remotely, for example. I can't imagine that would go easy on the SPU, computationally speaking.

Which I don't disagree with. But the notion that people will watch movies on one screen connected to a PS3 HMDI out while playing PS3 games on another screen on the other HDMI, is the notion I'm really not buying into!

 

[Platon]

Which I don't disagree with. But the notion that people will watch movies on one screen connected to a PS3 HMDI out while playing PS3 games on another screen on the other HDMI, is the notion I'm really not buying into!

Well, it might happen, and I guess there are those that will use it, the question is if they will be more than 0.0000000001% of the user base...

 

[Titanio]

Which I don't disagree with. But the notion that people will watch movies on one screen connected to a PS3 HMDI out while playing PS3 games on another screen on the other HDMI, is the notion I'm really not buying into!

Two different people, even?

The point about how many would use it in such a manner is a good one, of course, but it'd be very sweet for those who did

 

[dubyateeeff]

Two different people, even?

The point about how many would use it in such a manner is a good one, of course, but it'd be very sweet for those who did

Except we only have 1 audio-port?

Or just one BD-drive?

 

[dukmahsik]

how is this a downgrade? it's using that spe for a good purpose

 

[mckmas8808]

Except we only have 1 audio-port?

Or just one BD-drive?

Playing games off the HDD, while watching a movie. Of course it doesn't have two drives.

 

[supervegeta]

how is this a downgrade? it's using that spe for a good purpose

It's clear that if you care more about the games and having 7 spe all used for the games instead of 6 can make a quality difference like better graphic, better audio, better physic this is absolutly a dowgrade.

 

[Titanio]

Except we only have 1 audio-port?

Or just one BD-drive?

You'll be able to copy some movies, at least, to HDDs of players. And you'll be able to download media, including video, off the web, or perhaps transfer your own from other storage also (via mem stick or whatever).

Also, there are technically 4 possible audio-outs on PS3. 2 HDMI, 1 digital audio-out, and 1 multi-av out. All of these can carry audio.

 

[supervegeta]

Playing games off the HDD, while watching a movie. Of course it doesn't have two drives.

humm...you can watch a movie with an eye and play a game with the other eye...this is very useful.

 

[dukmahsik]

It's clear that if you care more about the games and having 7 spe all used for the games instead of 6 can make a quality difference like better graphic, better audio, better physic this is absolutly a dowgrade.

well that's true but i wonder which devs are actually using 4 spes let alone 6

 

[Megadrive1988]

off-topic, it seems the PPE in PS3's version of CELL has been upgraded with 2x the amount of cache. 64k instead of 32k.


someone find a link to back that up, im too sleepy.

 

[scificube]

Is there any news as to what the OS could provide to games via the SPE allocated to it?

HDD transfers, audio, in game video chat windows for multiplayer games is all I've seen suggested so far. Anything esle?

I was messing around with FFDSHOW again and I was thinking that if my Athlon64 can decode/encode a 640x480 video at around 10-15fps with some pretty decent filters then how much horsepower would it take for an SPE to handle a video window that's proabably going to be smaller than 320x240 in a gaming situation and probably won't be using filters near as demanding as what I do. I would think an SPE would be much more capable than my A64 given all I have is SSE2 etc and an SPE is a SIMD junkie.

Am I wrong for thinking there would be a good amount of usable horpower left over? I wouldn't think more than 1 window would be used at a time by an intelligent developer or if more there are ways to keep demands on the processing power for doing that.

 

[mckmas8808]

humm...you can watch a movie with an eye and play a game with the other eye...this is very useful.

I like sharing, so my sister or mother can watch the movie while I play the game on my HDD at the same time. Think outside the box.

 

[flick556]

What I'm hoping for is that this spu is reserved for OS functions that would normally be performed by the game threads, in addition to things external to the game. For example all harddrive access could be schedialed by the OS to avoid thrashing. So games using the hd would be able to offload the workload of accessing the harddrive to this OS owned proccesor. Thier are many other things that can be deemed OS functions and executed by this reserved SPU. These functions can be highly optimized by sony to provide the best possable performance, sence so many games will rely on them. If the basic system library utilizes this SPU and part of the PPU this may give devs a nice codebase to start out with.

The OS may handle all disk access for both bd-rom and the hd in a configurable way, it can handle some of the spu synchronization tasks, maybe some sound stuff, video decoding, network stuff, and various other generic library stuff. The benefit is when the OS and the game are both trying to access the hd or decode video the workloads can be pooled and properly scheduled by allowing the OS to mange these tasks. For example you would not want two separate programs accessing the hardrive without knowledge of each other. Likewise if your game is decoding video and the OS is displaying video their should be a significant performance win in allowing the same program to decode both videos as opposed to having two separate programs do it.

The amount of resources consumed by the OS should be dynamic. The more you rely on "the library" the more resources it will consume, likewise the less your code needs to perform. So maybe if you allow the OS to handle all your sound proccesing it requires a additional spu, alternatively you may choose to use your own sound processing api.

To avoid having to update the OS you could allow the OS to execute sined code loaded from the cd . This should allow Sony to control what can and can't be integrated into the OS, on a per game basis.

If access to resources must be authorized through this OS this may also be a good place for DRM stuff to go. Having an entire core locked away in this fashion may provide for some pretty tough security.

 

[mckmas8808]

Hey flick that sounds pretty smart. I hope you are right.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The amount of resources consumed by the OS should be dynamic. The more you rely on "the library" the more resources it will consume, likewise the less your code needs to perform. So maybe if you allow the OS to handle all your sound proccesing it requires a additional spu, alternatively you may choose to use your own sound processing api.

That won't work if the OS allows multitasking, as a game relying on low OS resources may find it has to run alongside a video streamer to PSP and suddenyl it's a lot more RAM or SPE cycles short. That's why OS resources are reserved. That gives a finite, predictable set of resources to use. Flexible resource distribution means PC like glitches in your game as some background task gobbles up resources the game was using. No thanks!

 

[Platon]

The amount of resources consumed by the OS should be dynamic. The more you rely on "the library" the more resources it will consume, likewise the less your code needs to perform. So maybe if you allow the OS to handle all your sound proccesing it requires a additional spu, alternatively you may choose to use your own sound processing api.

Only to a certain point. For example the minimum should always be that the OS will take one SPE and take more resources if your game heavily relies on it, but still one SPE will always be at the disposal of the OS, otherwise you might have problems that Shifty is saying, were backround applications will interfere with the performance of game...

 

[DuckThor Evil]

I like sharing, so my sister or mother can watch the movie while I play the game on my HDD at the same time. Think outside the box.

Where does it say that you can install the whole game into HDD?, I doubt it, some of those games might be quite big. Now I could believe, that you could play some small downloadable game, or watch some movie clip from the HDD. Only speculation on my part though.