Angelcurio
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So, will Sony finally talk about RSX?
SONY to present the PLAYSTATION 3 platform
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So, will Sony finally talk about RSX?
What's there to talk about? the information is already out there -- the meaningful differences between G70/G71 and RSX have been stated on this forum and you can find out the info about G70/G71 from various reviews. Sony and Nvidia will likely never straight up give us exact information about RSX -- there isn't any reason for them to. We might hear some quirks here and there from devs (since there are bound to be some neat things about RSX/G7x that aren't necessarily exposed the same way in a PC environment), but I wouldn't expect Sony/Nvidia to come out and give us the detailed tech docs. In reality, we know about as much about RSX as we do Xenos (likely even more).
Also, the wording "overview" generally implies just briefly talking about it. I wouldn't expect anything indepth. They'll restate what's already been said -- "Cell has 7 SPEs enabled, RSX has 24 pipelines, we got 256xdr, 256gddr3, there's a fat pipe between RSX and Cell, FlexIO is cool, etc."
I am curious how big this Digital Scarborough thing is though. Never heard of it (although I don't exactly keep up on all the EU tradeshows/festivals/etc.)
Angelcurio
Regular
Thanks for all the points, i guess your right.
Isn't there still the transistor count discrepency though? The same number of trannies as G70 but an assumed removal of things like PureVideo? They probably won't touch upon technical details, but I'd like to hear if there's any hardware PS2-ness in there, and what the few differences are between RSX and G70.
There is a good bit that needs to be discussed.
First of all, there are the larger cache sizes. This is not some amazing miracle or anything, but is important. Additionally, the PS3 is said to have it's own unique shader paths. I doubt that they are very different from the 7800, but it would be interesting to be told the differences. Also, I'm almost certain there would be other minor tweaks that would be interesting to hear about. All these small things do add up to better performace than the PC part (from what I have been told) so I would love to be at that conference if the information is to be revealed.
First of all, there are the larger cache sizes. This is not some amazing miracle or anything, but is important. Additionally, the PS3 is said to have it's own unique shader paths. I doubt that they are very different from the 7800, but it would be interesting to be told the differences. Also, I'm almost certain there would be other minor tweaks that would be interesting to hear about. All these small things do add up to better performace than the PC part (from what I have been told) so I would love to be at that conference if the information is to be revealed.
Why remove PureVideo? It could be useful. Afterall, it is a Blu-Ray player...
Yeah, that has sort of been left unresolved...
I am curious as to whether RSX is G71 derived or G70 derived -- I'm wondering if it even has the tweaks G71 did (losing those transistors) at all, making it ~300m instead of ~271m no including the known changes done to make it an RSX (cache size changes and mem controller stuff). Purevideo I'm wondering about too... we've no confirmation about if it was removed or not (it would make a lot of sense to remove it, if you ask me). Saying it is G71 derived and Purevideo-less unit that'd be 50+m transistors to burn up to get the stated 300m (which was from e3'05, so who knows if it was actually valid or just a guess at that point?). There is also the possibility of PS2 hardware being in there... etc.
Those things are more or less moot in terms of performance concerning specifications of RSX -- those are physical architectural issues, not really features of RSX. Whether or not Purevideo or PS2 hardware is there doesn't really change what things it can do in games, you know? And Sony/Nvidia are definitely less likely to give us the "phantom transistor" information than actual RSX rendering information.
You have got a fully progammable streaming media CPU in there too... PureVideo is adding transistors (cost) to perform a limited role that could be as well if not better handled on the other components. Unless they are intending to use PureVideo a lot (video conferencing while you play?), it doesn't make economic sense to leave it in.
The idea is... why waste transistors for it specifically when you have something like Cell which has to be there regardless and can do the job. It's a fixed hardware cost (for sony) that could be replaced by a (more or less) one time software cost.
How big... This is Scarborough man, practically the most important town in the world... the list of visionarys to come from Scarborough is well endless.. but you need to know no more than our very own DeanA is one of them...
Ask him bout the library go on...
For the humor impaired, "Digital Scarborough" was funny enough an idea to be all staffed as a joke at NT... then we realised it was real... Next i'll find out the framley examiner is real paper...
By the same token, it may not make economic sense to spend the engineering resources to remove it.
A developer recently said that the RSX was designed after NVIDIA had finished with the 7800 and 7900. I would at least hope they would utilize the more efficent 7900 architecture (fewer transistors same or better performance). However, even if the RSX does indeed have a more efficent architecture similiar to the 7900 (with fewer transistors) taking our pure video and 8 rops would indeed leave them some extra transistors.
I think we know that some of that was used to add extra cache (we are still left hanging on that one since now it's being reported Barbarian gave us incorrect information) both for post_transform and for textures. Additionally, the extra texture lookup logic may have cost some transistors too.
Now, since those of you under NDA cannot comment what do those of you who are NOT under NDA think these extra transistors could have been used for? Any guesses?
I really hope that the truth about the RSX comes out soon. I've been facinated for a long time about it, and I'm getting exhausted from searching daily for information but finding little or none.
I think we know that some of that was used to add extra cache (we are still left hanging on that one since now it's being reported Barbarian gave us incorrect information) both for post_transform and for textures. Additionally, the extra texture lookup logic may have cost some transistors too.
Now, since those of you under NDA cannot comment what do those of you who are NOT under NDA think these extra transistors could have been used for? Any guesses?
I really hope that the truth about the RSX comes out soon. I've been facinated for a long time about it, and I'm getting exhausted from searching daily for information but finding little or none.
You might think that, but sony's aiming to make a hundred million plus of these things. To corporations who revise hardware to cost-reduce away a couple screws, 20+ million transistors could be more than enough worth the (one-time) effort.
On the other hand, those transistors will become cheaper over time as they shrink the die.
As I said above, my best guess is some BC hardware. It has been mentioned PS3 includes hardware support for BC, and short of bunging an EE+GS or somesuch in there, the other solution would be adaptations to the GPU to fit in some GS emulation. I thought the logic of the GS was 15 million transistors. That'd mean you could fit the GS pipeline and some logic to use compression with DDR to get the required BW for GS, I think.
The cost of a chip increases exponentially with size, right? So reducing the transistor count by 10% will have a greater than 10% drop in cost. If RSX is costing $100 each at the moment, that'd be upwards of $10 saved per console. For the first 5 million consoles that'd be $50 million saved. That sound like a large percentage of the supposed investment in RSX. If they left PureVideo in to save engineering costs, the cost of removing a part of your GPU design must be astronomical!
Except we've been told there's no eDRAM...
Could the final secret of the RSX be that whatever is included to help with backwards compatibility is also able to be used by the PS3's graphical rendering system for PS3 games as well?
I'm not an engineer or a scientist. But I suspect there must be some way to put in the hardware needed that cannot be emulated and keep it usuable by the PS3 and RSX.
For example, I read that the PS2 had 4 megabytes of EDRAM. What if that was on the die of the RSX and could be used not only for backwards compatibility, but as a quick "cache" or storage unit for texture data or other data?
So many developers have said that the RSX is impressive. Also, many have said it's nothing more than a pretty common 7800 with a few modifications such as extra cache, a few more shader instructions, a little more texture lookup logic, etc. What if the truth is that the PS2's hardware was *smartly* incorporated into the PS3 in such a way that it could be used for PS3 games?
This is something that has bugged me for a while. In my opinion, if they have to literally put the PS2 hardware into the PS3 (even for a short period of time) however are not going to be able to use it for PS3 games that is a waste.
I'm not an engineer or a scientist. But I suspect there must be some way to put in the hardware needed that cannot be emulated and keep it usuable by the PS3 and RSX.
For example, I read that the PS2 had 4 megabytes of EDRAM. What if that was on the die of the RSX and could be used not only for backwards compatibility, but as a quick "cache" or storage unit for texture data or other data?
So many developers have said that the RSX is impressive. Also, many have said it's nothing more than a pretty common 7800 with a few modifications such as extra cache, a few more shader instructions, a little more texture lookup logic, etc. What if the truth is that the PS2's hardware was *smartly* incorporated into the PS3 in such a way that it could be used for PS3 games?
This is something that has bugged me for a while. In my opinion, if they have to literally put the PS2 hardware into the PS3 (even for a short period of time) however are not going to be able to use it for PS3 games that is a waste.
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