The question of the X360 System!

[gamepower]

Hi,i have hear some rumors about the possibilities of the X360 System.
There are interesting functions,like unfied shader,multithreading,the Gpu
can adress an use the L2-cache of the CPU and from other side the
Cpu with around 100Gflops with his VMX-Unit can calculate vertexshader
operations.If this true,i have a nice idea,that the CPU and VMX-Units's
are calculate in an example 25 million polygons/s(i dont know how much
Gflops i need),an then we have more room for pixel and shader functions,
it means that i use the full power of the ATI gpu for graphiceffects,not for
geometry.Is that possible??

 

[Acert93]

I believe either the leak or a patent explicitly mentions how one of the CPU cores can be allocated to assist the GPU. What it will exactly do and how I am not sure. If you do a search in the Console forum you may be able to find it. The discussion was from before Feb., and the core issue being discussed was how many cores the xCPU would have (would it ibe tricore, 3 dual cores, etc).

 

[London Geezer]

We know for sure that the shader units are unified on the ATI GPU, so the ALUs can be used for either pixel or vertex shading, according to the needs. So in theory, yes, the CPU could do the vertex work and the GPU only pixels, but to be honest i'm not sure it would work very well on X360 for bandwidth reasons. Unless i'm missing something.

I do believe this could be an approach taken on PS3 though. Just a feeling. I'm not sure why the CPU was made into such a FP monster if not for vertex processing (together with all the rest it needs to do). Also, from what i've heard on here, the SPEs would do a better job than vertex units, apart from being damn FAST.