Sony's Next Generation Portable unveiling - PSP2 in disguise

[Simon F]

Am I right to assume the SGX would be 100% compatible with all the CLX2 functions (and maybe adding higher-res and MSAA))

Actually, though they are both TBDRs, they are considerably different in terms of what features are supported.

Apart from the obvious one that SGX is shader-based and CLX2, fixed function (though with some interesting functions), some major rendering differences include:

• texture compression formats. CLX2 had VQ (2 and 1bpp) and Palette (8 & 4bpp), which are (pretty much) no longer supported by any graphics hardware due to the double memory look up.
• translucency sorting
• modifier volumes (though these can be emulated, albeit much less efficiently with stencils)
• CLX2's normal map (though rarely used) was polar-based rather than Cartesian

..and probably quite a number of others that I simply have forgotten.

 

[onQ]

I could see Sega doing this for NGP, but if they were interested in Dreamcast emulation I kind of wonder why they haven't tried it for Wii. I don't think it'll be that much easier on NGP.

from what I'm seeing NPG will be at lest 3 or 4 times more powerful than the Wii with over 5 times more memory,

I don't think Wii is anything to go by


_________________


Side Note: you don't think Sony can emulate PS2 on NGP but you think it would be just as easy for the Wii to emulate the Dreamcast as it would be for the NGP to emulate the Dreamcast?

 

[Exophase]

from what I'm seeing NPG will be at lest 3 or 4 times more powerful than the Wii with over 5 times more memory,

I don't think Wii is anything to go by

The single threaded performance won't be that much higher, and that's what will mostly drive Dreamcast emulation.

The improved GPU doesn't matter that much if you hit a baseline for compatibility, although the more flexible fragment pipeline on SGX will allow more fixed-function fragment effects to be properly emulated. But Dreamcast emulation has been done "good enough" without shaders on PCs, IIRC.

Side Note: you don't think Sony can emulate PS2 on NGP but you think it would be just as easy for the Wii to emulate the Dreamcast as it would be for the NGP to emulate the Dreamcast?

I said "I don't think it'll be that much easier", not "I think it'd be no easier." But what are you getting at exactly? Dreamcast emulation, at least to some level of compatibility, has been a lot less demanding than PS2 emulation on PCs too.

 

[onQ]

The single threaded performance won't be that much higher, and that's what will mostly drive Dreamcast emulation.

The improved GPU doesn't matter that much if you hit a baseline for compatibility, although the more flexible fragment pipeline on SGX will allow more fixed-function fragment effects to be properly emulated. But Dreamcast emulation has been done "good enough" without shaders on PCs, IIRC.

but I thought the good thing about ARM Cortex A9 was how scalable it was across it's cores for peak performance?

I said "I don't think it'll be that much easier", not "I think it'd be no easier." But what are you getting at exactly? Dreamcast emulation, at least to some level of compatibility, has been a lot less demanding than PS2 emulation on PCs too.

how is me saying " you think it would be just as easy for the Wii to emulate the Dreamcast as it would be for the NGP to emulate the Dreamcast?"

any different from you saying "I don't think it'll be that much easier on NGP" ?

 

[Exophase]

but I thought the good thing about ARM Cortex A9 was how scalable it was across it's cores for peak performance?

I don't think you understand that you will always have some tasks that will NEVER scale well or at all with multiple cores. The peak performance of an architecture doesn't determine how good it is at every task, in fact it really just determines how good it is in at least one task (which might not even be useful).

Emulation is one of those tasks that usually doesn't have a well balanced parallel workload, and doesn't scale beyond a certain point. You can't emulate a single CPU core with multiple cores, and you often can't even reliably emulate multiple CPU cores or other independent hardware elements with multiple cores.

how is me saying " you think it would be just as easy for the Wii to emulate the Dreamcast as it would be for the NGP to emulate the Dreamcast?"

any different from you saying "I don't think it'll be that much easier on NGP" ?

You don't understand the difference between "not much" and "nothing"? Do you only identify with extremes?

 

[onQ]

I don't think you understand that you will always have some tasks that will NEVER scale well or at all with multiple cores. The peak performance of an architecture doesn't determine how good it is at every task, in fact it really just determines how good it is in at least one task (which might not even be useful).

Emulation is one of those tasks that usually doesn't have a well balanced parallel workload, and doesn't scale beyond a certain point. You can't emulate a single CPU core with multiple cores, and you often can't even reliably emulate multiple CPU cores or other independent hardware elements with multiple cores.



You don't understand the difference between "not much" and "nothing"? Do you only identify with extremes?

that's funny because you just threw the word 'nothing' in here from out of nowhere

where did you get it from?




but back on topic by that logic I should be able to Emulate a PS2 better on a Pentium duel-core t4200 @ 2.00GHz than someone with a i7 @ 1.60Ghz

 

[Exophase]

that's funny because you just threw the word 'nothing' in here from out of nowhere

where did you get it from?

Because you said "just as easy", meaning that the difference in ease is nothing...

but back on topic by that logic I should be able to Emulate a PS2 better on a Pentium duel-core t4200 @ 2.00GHz than someone with a i7 @ 1.60Ghz

For one thing, Pentium and Core i7 are product lines, not particular processors. But your analogy is otherwise flawed because you're comparing processors with different single-threaded performance. A better example would be that in some tasks a processor with 4 cores at 1.6GHz will perform worse than the same processor at 2GHz but with 2 of the cores disabled (so as to keep everything else equal). I don't know if this would be the case for current PS2 emulators, but it really doesn't matter since my comment was only directed at Dreamcast emulation.

 

[onQ]

Because you said "just as easy", meaning that the difference in ease is nothing...

you're kidding me right? when you say something is 'just as' big as something else that doesn't mean you're saying it's the exact same size

For one thing, Pentium and Core i7 are product lines, not particular processors. But your analogy is otherwise flawed because you're comparing processors with different single-threaded performance. A better example would be that in some tasks a processor with 4 cores at 1.6GHz will perform worse than the same processor at 2GHz but with 2 of the cores disabled (so as to keep everything else equal). I don't know if this would be the case for current PS2 emulators, but it really doesn't matter since my comment was only directed at Dreamcast emulation.

did you miss the t4200 part? because I wasn't saying Pentium vs i7 as product lines, (maybe I should have pointed out a certain i7 @ 1.6GHz)


you was saying that you didn't think Dreamcast emulation would be that much easier on NGP than on Wii because "The single threaded performance won't be that much higher" & "The improved GPU doesn't matter that much if you hit a baseline for compatibility"


I was just saying going by that logic my laptop with a Pentium duel-core t4200 @ 2.00GHz should be better at emulating a PS2 than someone with a i7 @ 1.60Ghz

how is my analogy anymore flawed than you comparing the Broadway CPU in the Wii to the quad-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU in the NGP for Emulation & saying that the better GPU donsn't matter?

 

[onQ]

Crazy thought:

but isn't the SGX543MP+ a programmable GPU that can do some General Purpose Computing that support OpenCL?

could Sony use the CPU to emulate the PS2's CPU & use the GPU to help emulate the PS2's GPU?

just wondering. & if I'm thinking of this I'm pretty sure someone else has thought of this, it seem like a smart thing to do if it's possible to take some of the emulation work off of the CPU

& if not good enough for PS2 emulation what about Dreamcast emulation with the help of the GPU?

 

[Lazy8s]

Actual PS2 processor performance, despite the uniqueness and compared with NGP, just doesn't strike me as an insurmountable emulation challenge in practice. The potential for PSP emulation was always obvious to me, and I won't be surprised if some substantial level of it for PS2 gets accomplished.

 

[Laurent06]

Actual PS2 processor performance, despite the uniqueness and compared with NGP, just doesn't strike me as an insurmountable emulation challenge in practice.

The R5900 in the PS2 is a 2-way superscalar 64-bit processor running at 300 MHz with some instructions operating on 128-bit data. That'll be extremely challenging to emulate close to real-time on a 1 GHz 32-bit CPU.

 

[Ailuros]

What's with all the emulation craze all of the sudden?

 

[Deleted member 13524]

What's with all the emulation craze all of the sudden?

Name one console from the 7th generation (mobile or not) that didn't have (at launch) backwards compatibility with their correspondent previous gen.
Even the PSP runs PS1 through emulation. The Wii's Virtual Console service surely started a trend.

It's only natural to expect the PSP2 to be backwards-compatible with PSP games, at least the ones that are available through the PSN Store. And since I doubt Sony will put the PSP's hardware inside the NGP, that would be achieved through emulation.

 

[onQ]

The R5900 in the PS2 is a 2-way superscalar 64-bit processor running at 300 MHz with some instructions operating on 128-bit data. That'll be extremely challenging to emulate close to real-time on a 1 GHz 32-bit CPU.

I think this is a good explanation of why it's been hard before & could be something that Sony could be working to fix in hardware.



moving on:

how big of a advantage do you guys think NGP will get from having a GP-GPU with 128MB of dedicated VRAM

I think devs can do some neat tricks using the GPU for things like augmented reality & adding things to the graphics like MLAA & other things that they was doing using the Cell on PS3 because there is a lot of things that the GPU is better at doing than the CPU so we might see NGP doing things better then PS3/Xbox360

 

[Ailuros]

Name one console from the 7th generation (mobile or not) that didn't have (at launch) backwards compatibility with their correspondent previous gen.
Even the PSP runs PS1 through emulation. The Wii's Virtual Console service surely started a trend.

It's only natural to expect the PSP2 to be backwards-compatible with PSP games, at least the ones that are available through the PSN Store. And since I doubt Sony will put the PSP's hardware inside the NGP, that would be achieved through emulation.

SONY will find a way to achieve some sort of BC. I still can't understand the agony behind it and the bulk of rather awkward questions here.

how big of a advantage do you guys think NGP will get from having a GP-GPU with 128MB of dedicated VRAM

SoCs (especially those with UMA) should benefit from any sort of heterogeneous processing. The question is if you really need an API like OpenCL for a handheld console and its low level API or if its resource handling is already as heterogeneous as it can be. My money goes on the latter but it also stands open to correction.

I think devs can do some neat tricks using the GPU for things like augmented reality & adding things to the graphics like MLAA & other things that they was doing using the Cell on PS3 because there is a lot of things that the GPU is better at doing than the GPU so we might see NGP doing things better then PS3/Xbox360

MSAA should be nearly for free on the GPU block of NGP; why would you want some half-baked wannabe full scene antialiasing like MLAA is beyond me.

 

[onQ]

SONY will find a way to achieve some sort of BC. I still can't understand the agony behind it and the bulk of rather awkward questions here.



SoCs (especially those with UMA) should benefit from any sort of heterogeneous processing. The question is if you really need an API like OpenCL for a handheld console and its low level API or if its resource handling is already as heterogeneous as it can be. My money goes on the latter but it also stands open to correction.



MSAA should be nearly for free on the GPU block of NGP; why would you want some half-baked wannabe full scene antialiasing like MLAA is beyond me.

I was just using MLAA being done with the Cell as a example of things that can be done with the GPGPU instead of the CPU

 

[Ailuros]

I was just using MLAA being done with the Cell as a example of things that can be done with the GPGPU instead of the CPU

You can use morphological anti-aliasing either through the CPU or GPU afaik. It has nothing to do with GPGPU per se.

If you're looking for cases where general purpose computing would make sense on a GPU, you'd still need a case with a decent amount of parallel threads in order for it to make more sense on a GPU than a CPU. How about physics for example?

 

[onQ]

You can use morphological anti-aliasing either through the CPU or GPU afaik. It has nothing to do with GPGPU per se.

If you're looking for cases where general purpose computing would make sense on a GPU, you'd still need a case with a decent amount of parallel threads in order for it to make more sense on a GPU than a CPU. How about physics for example?

ok I'll say physics , but I was just trying to paint a picture of it being use to make games look better & doing different things


so what's your thought's could we see devs taking advantage of this to give us games that look better / do special effects better than PS3/360 in some areas or being able to make up for not having a Cell like CPU by doing the somethings that Cell is good at with it's GPGPU.


also I would like to see what type of things they can do with the Cameras since that's one of the things that Cell / GPGPUs are good at, augmented reality , face/head/eye tracking & magic mirror type stuff where they can change your face in real time.

 

[ltcommander.data]

Crazy thought:

but isn't the SGX543MP+ a programmable GPU that can do some General Purpose Computing that support OpenCL?

could Sony use the CPU to emulate the PS2's CPU & use the GPU to help emulate the PS2's GPU?

just wondering. & if I'm thinking of this I'm pretty sure someone else has thought of this, it seem like a smart thing to do if it's possible to take some of the emulation work off of the CPU

& if not good enough for PS2 emulation what about Dreamcast emulation with the help of the GPU?

Bringing up OpenCL does beg the question of what type of APIs are Sony likely to support on the NGP? The major advantage of consoles is the ability to program close to metal and Carmack has said that is what will allow the NGP to stay a generation ahead of smartphones when they eventually arrive with comparable hardware. As such will higher level APIs like OpenCL be supported? Otherwise is bare metal GPGPU inconvenient for developers do to things like memory management, co-ordinating with the CPU, and perhaps having to manually control context switches by yourself between the GPU doing graphics tasks and GPGPU tasks? Certainly with Sony reserving an entire Cortex A9 core for the OS, it seems possible the OS could be quite heavy weight after-all. It would make sense for them to offer the option of using higher level APIs like OpenGL ES and OpenCL for easier porting between platforms as well as lower level interfaces.

 

[Exophase]

GPGPU means taking away ops for shading. I doubt a lot of games will find this to be a very attractive compromise. And even if you traded the entire GPU over you'd still have a small fraction of the throughput PS3 has with Cell.

I'm assuming the Cortex-A9 cores will have NEON, so it'll only be worth looking at GPGPU after you've exhausted SIMD on the CPUs.