What rendering method, engine, trick, or process would you like to try on the PS3?

[babcat]

Developers and other interested people,

Lets imagine that a publishing house came up to your door, offered you a boat load of money to develope a game, and gave you total control over the title both technically and creatively. Now, lets take that one step further by saying you agreed to make such a game, but the deal was that they wanted you do something unique and creative with the hardware of the PS3. The purpose of this thread is for you to talk about what engine you would want to build, tricks you would want to pull off, rendering method you would try, effects you would want to create, or anything you would want to do with the PS3 hardware.

Many developers have said that lots of things are possible on the PS3 because the RSX is a powerful GPU to be in a closed console, the CELL has tremendously flexible, and the Flex IO offers a fast connection between the GPU and the CPU. If this is the case, if you had all the resources you needed at your disposal what would YOU like to try to pull off with this hardware?

It doesn't have to be something you know would work. But what would you like to TRY!

I'm interested in hearing what all of you have to say.

 

[flick556]

real-time texture decompression on cell feeding RSX. Something like real-time 30 to 1 texture compression would take games to a new level visually. You could saturate most of the cell-RSX link with GBs of textures.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

real-time texture decompression on cell feeding RSX. Something like real-time 30 to 1 texture compression would take games to a new level visually. You could saturate most of the cell-RSX link with GBs of textures.

Very hard, as the Cell would need to fetch and decompress texels on demand. You'd end up BW bound I'm sure.

I'd go for procedural-ness. Create an unconventional game that creates objects on the fly. CSGs (constructive solid geometry) can be processed quickly in all things, ray tracing, physics, etc., and fit easily into SPEs LS. Combine that with some GI solution I think a very high quality visual result with very simple geometry (think a manikin made of cylinders and boxes for a character) would be obtainable. In other words, I'd pick an art style designed to aid the graphics engine. Think trees being a green cone on a brown cylinder trunk.

 

[flick556]

Very hard, as the Cell would need to fetch and decompress texels on demand. You'd end up BW bound I'm sure.

I'd go for procedural-ness. Create an unconventional game that creates objects on the fly. CSGs (constructive solid geometry) can be processed quickly in all things, ray tracing, physics, etc., and fit easily into SPEs LS. Combine that with some GI solution I think a very high quality visual result with very simple geometry (think a manikin made of cylinders and boxes for a character) would be obtainable. In other words, I'd pick an art style designed to aid the graphics engine. Think trees being a green cone on a brown cylinder trunk.

nice one

I was thinking instead of on demand you have a 64-128mb cache in xdr. each object RSX renders cannot access more than this much data. Then cell need only know the order in which objects will be rendered. It could be as simple as a decompress done before each draw call. This would make for a lot of texture data per object.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I was thinking instead of on demand you have a 64-128mb cache in xdr. each object RSX renders cannot access more than this much data. Then cell need only know the order in which objects will be rendered. It could be as simple as a decompress done before each draw call. This would make for a lot of texture data per object.

You've still got bandwidth as your limting factor though. If a texture can be stored as JPEG2000 in 32 kb and expanded to a 1:4 DXTC compressed 256 kb texture, as well as the 256 kb texture needing to be read by RSX, you also have 32 kb being read by Cell and 256 kb written by Cell, more than doubling BW consumption. If you could feed texture data over the FlexIO that'd not be an issue, but I don't think that's plausible. If RSX can read straight from SPEs LS, you could manage that.

 

[flick556]

you are right about the bandwith.

As a nice tech demo you could dedicate all xdr and flex I/O bandwith to this and get crazy rez textures.

I guess you could trade compression rate and overall texture detail for bandwith while still going past the physical memory limit(after decompression is considered).

 

[Fafalada]

You've still got bandwidth as your limting factor though

That's still under assumption that you're doing on-demand stuff (deferred through some buffer, but on-demand nonetheless).
The question here is really what are you trying to achieve in the first place (you seem to be suggesting that bruteforce decompress entire maps at a time, every time, is the only viable solution).

If your objective is to expand memory capacity, same rules apply as to streaming from external devices - temporal coherency is your friend, and so long as your temp buffers are the right size, you will have very little to decompress on per-frame basis (IIRC PGR3 on 360 already used streaming decompression of textures - as a real world example).
And even in an on-demand scheme that can't rely on factors above, there's an upper limit as to how many texels per frame are actually used. Eg. - contrary to popular belief - PS2 hw is perfectly capable of rendering scenes with 40+MB worth of texture data(@60hz) - because most of those texels don't actually have to hit the bus (granted, retail machines don't have enough memory to do this anyway, so it's kinda moot, but just pointing out the misconception about bandwith 'limitations').

 

[LunchBox]

high res animated/morphing textures.

 

[rabidrabbit]

I would like to make a game that didin't look like traditonal shiny 3D or cellshaded.
I'd like to make a fantasy adventure game that looked like a detailed oil painting or watercolor painting, like those John Howe LOTR paintings and drawings.

 

[The_Standard]

I'd like to see a puzzle game or simple shooter, (thinking about a Rez, Every Extend Extra, or Lumines-type game) using IBM's ray tracing engine for Cell. That would look cool.

 

[mrboo]

Id do like a Red Faction "GeoMod" engine and take it the EXTREME

Imagine GeoMod v3.0 on the Next Gen's