SPU usage in games

[MBDF]

OT but how does the 360 handle sound?

 

[AlNom]

There's a CPU thread dedicated to audio processing. No dedicated hardware in the sense of Soundstorm or something from Creative.

 

[phat]

Dedicated sound hardware is so 90's...

Audio is just not that bandwidth or compute intensive for the most commonly used stuff, and the really compute intensive stuff, like physically modeled instruments, probably require pretty general purpose processing.

 

[Arwin]

Nevertheless, I seem to remember reading that the RSX also has some dedicated sound bits. Do I remember this correctly?

 

[archangelmorph]

If you were at DevStation, you (or your company) are likely subject to the NDAs in force for Playstation developers, which would cover the subjects and materials disclosed at DevStation (as well as any materials available on PS3 DevNet).

Or that would be my (non-Sony-hat-wearing.. see my signature) take on it.. your mileage may vary. I am not a lawyer. Warranty void where prohibited by law etc etc..

Cheers,
Dean

Hey DeanA!

Thanks for the heads up! I kinda thought as much to be fair, especially since there's alot of information from the Devstation presentations which I would assume was taken directly from the SDK docs, although I haven't had the liberty of looking at them myself since i'm not yet a licensed PS3 developer..

Although technically because my contract with Zoe Mode expires tomorrow (I start work at my new company on tuesday) I'm not sure if any NDA would still remain valid beyond that date.. However i'm not likely gonna risk it.. (Sorry guys...)

But thanks anyway for the information DeanA, I'm never really sure what information regarding my work or things i've picked up/read/heard about at work I'm aloud to discuss publicly so I tend not to say anything really in order to avoid crossing the line.. At least now I have a little bit of a better understanding of exactly where that line is..

Cheers!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Nevertheless, I seem to remember reading that the RSX also has some dedicated sound bits. Do I remember this correctly?

There was something about sound on RSX, but I thought it was just for handling the output, seeing as video goes out through RSX too. We know actual audio processing is on Cell, so what would RSX offer?

 

[Mr. Domino]

Insomniac now has a techpage at their site: http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/techpage.php

Maybe there will be interesting info on that page in the near future.

 

[Arwin]

Looking good! Of course Mike's around here also.

 

[DeanoC]

Think I've mentioned it before but we dedicate an SPU for Audio, its get used for MP3 decompression, mixing, dsp like effects, 3D Audio etc.

 

[standing ovation]

This might fit into the "SPU usage in games" category.

"Next week in the IBM booth at Siggraph 2007 we will be showing a head to head comparison of our QS20 Cell blades and a Linux Playstation3 running the iRT ray-tracer. On head one a Playstation3 will be using its six available SPEs, the RSX will be sleeping comfortably, to ray-trace a 450K triangle scene directly into its 1080p resolution virtual framebuffer. On head two the IBM blade center will deploy 14 Cell processors or 112 SPEs to ray-trace, compress, and deliver frames to a second Playstation3 for display. I won't keep you in suspense, the blade center wins by a large margin. The point of this exercise is not to show that a blade center can outperform a game console but instead how a computational intensive algorithm can scale linearly in performance across many Cell processors and hundreds of SPEs. When the problem is broken down to exploit both data parallelism and Cell's on chip local store bandwidth, performance scale very well across many blades. This exercise also shows the versatility of code bases created with the Cell SDK, the same executable targeted for the QS20 blade can be executed on the PS3 without modification." — GameTomorrow​

 

[D3B]

Sorry if this has been said already.

What PS3 games that are out now use those new edge tools?

 

[one]

Sorry if this has been said already.

What PS3 games that are out now use those new edge tools?

I suspect none yet.

 

[Konrad]

Edge driven games

What PS3 games that are out now use those new edge tools?

My guess is that Uncharted will be the first one. Does anyone know any other game?

 

[psorcerer]

My guess is that Uncharted will be the first one. Does anyone know any other game?

It's under NDA, as long as I remember. I can only say: lots.

 

[wowfactor]

Lair is the first one that uses edge tools.

 

[nAo]

Lair is the first one that uses edge tools.

how do you know that?

 

[ninzel]

Oh ya well I think the best method of programming for the SPU's is the ss.el eulc method. Very under rated if you ask me.

 

[Nesh]

Isnt Killzone2 using EDGE?

 

[patsu]

I thought Codemaster's Dirt is confirmed to use EDGE (or some part thereof) ?

 

[Cheezdoodles]

It's under NDA, as long as I remember. I can only say: lots.

you are not under any NDA.