Use Vector Unit Zero ... It's... a miracle of technology!

joe75

Banned
http://eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=61021


spartan-total-warrior-20050812065147819.jpg


Eurogamer: On the technical side, Spartan's impressive. Hundreds of people on screen, in a total - er - war. What's intriguing to use is that how that games, even this late in the software cycle, are visually impressive. Last time, PS1 games were looking distinctly shoddy. But not the PS2 Spartan: Total Warrior...

Clive Gratton: It's interesting - and Sony is going to love me for this. I'm not even being facetious. Stop me if I'm going too techno, but there's a number of sub-processors in Sony's PS2. And there's one which no-one uses ever: Vector-unit Zero. Sony engineers, they'll continually say "Use Vector Unit Zero. The secret to speed is User Vector Unit Zero". And no-one does, as no-one can find a decent use for it. And the secret is, I have.

I'd written the framework for the game, the display engine and the AI. All of that during pre-production. And then we got the rest of the team on board, who didn't really know what they were getting into. I'm constantly, throughout the entire project, cracking the whip to make thing works faster, better, smaller, faster, FASTER! Any bits of code which were taking too long, I'd first sit down and look at them algorithmically. If it was doing too much work, I'd write a load of hand coded assembly language. A large chunk of this game is written in hand coded assembly language on the vector units. It's... a miracle of technology!

.
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For example, everyone's talking about High Dynamic Range for next generation platforms, and we've got it running on PS2.


... expect BIG thingy from incoming God of War2 etc.,ehh.
 
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I can't say that was the easiest article to read! They need to fire their editor...'teh spelling errors'!:LOL:

Oh yeah...
joe75 said:
expect BIG thingy from incoming God of War2
Are these guys working on GOW2?
 
therealskywolf said:
Where does i says it is using HDR? Are you crazy? Not to mention Xbox is running this game with ease, and it doesn't have HDR.

"For example, everyone's talking about High Dynamic Range for next generation platforms, and we've got it running on PS2"

I'd wonder about the implementation, of course..
 
Wow they're trying to do HDR on the PS2 now?The PS2 sure has lots of tricks behind its sleeves.
 
HDR doesn't need floating point representation. Most HDR pictures (photos) are made of 2 separate photos of the same scene taken at different exposures. Using this method you can combine 2 8bit per channel images and assemble them into an HDR image.
 
Someone want to remind me what the VU0 does, please?


london-boy said:
Right.
The day i see 20M polygons, HDR, subsurface scattering, harmonic lighting, all that jazz u said on a game, it will be the day i cut my balls off.

...





1 out of 4 isn't so bad. :LOL:
 
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I guess this Vector Unit Zero doesn't help with keeping actors from floating...

The article was a good read. Btw, despite all the "HDR" mentions, the actual practical cases he mentions seem to amount to bloom as pp.
 
Alstrong said:
Someone want to remind me what the VU0 does, please?
Everything. It can realtime raytrace in 64 bit float precision with DOF, GI, AA, RAC, IMHO, AFAIK, and run complex AI on 65535 enemy entities too. At least, that's what some people would have us believe :mrgreen:
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Everything. It can realtime raytrace in 64 bit float precision with DOF, GI, AA, RAC, IMHO, AFAIK, and run complex AI on 65535 enemy entities too. At least, that's what some people would have us believe :mrgreen:
You forgot donuts.
 
I love it when Devs make it look like they have this amazing looking game running with all the the bells and wistles on the PS2....then we look at it and it's like "Ok...". The game doesn't look anything special, they sound like the guys that did Area 51, all they talked was how great their tech was on the PS2....then i played the Xbox and PS2 versions, and despite the Xbox version looking better, they both didn't look anything special, they looked alright, just that.

I allways laugh when these guys rave so much.
 
therealskywolf said:
I love it when Devs make it look like they have this amazing looking game running with all the the bells and wistles on the PS2....then we look at it and it's like "Ok...". The game doesn't look anything special, they sound like the guys that did Area 51, all they talked was how great their tech was on the PS2....then i played the Xbox and PS2 versions, and despite the Xbox version looking better, they both didn't look anything special, they looked alright, just that.

I allways laugh when these guys rave so much.

I take it you haven't played this game?
 
"Seem to remember the last splinter cell on the ps2 wasn't too shabby..."
I seem to remember the GFX stunk compared to the XBOX version. Got a 7 at gamespot, vs a 9 for the XBOX version.
I just hope it doesn't take dev's this long to figure out CELL, it's like 6 years since launch and dev's are barely figuring out how to use the 2nd VU?

When's this game due out? The proof is in the tasting...
 
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