What rendering tricks might RSX employ?

[nAo]

Also, don't count on seeing 64bit HDR on Xbox 360 often. From what I've read, it's technically possible, but much slower than it's 32bit solution.

It halves fillrate, but with very heavy shaders I doubt u would notice some difference

 

[marconelly!]

Though i'm sure devs will want to focus on 1080i/720p since the gain in performance might be more appealing than a bump in resolution.

I certainly hope so. I hope they'd even go for 480p (if they are even allowed to) if they want to do some really crazy looking graphics.

It halves fillrate, but with very heavy shaders I doubt u would notice some difference

Nice to know a bit more detail of what exactly happens. I remember the Ruby demo demoed on R500 at E3 ran with the 32bit HDR mode, and I've heard it would be the default mode to use.

I'm curious as anyone, what exactly Nvidia has in store for 128bit HDR that they put so much emphasis at E3. Considering that 64bit seems to be good enough for almost all the cases, and 128bit is bound to be slower. It's also interesting that G70 apparently still renders 64bit at most, so we won't know how that feature pans out yet.

 

[ERP]

Also, don't count on seeing 64bit HDR on Xbox 360 often. From what I've read, it's technically possible, but much slower than it's 32bit solution.

It halves fillrate, but with very heavy shaders I doubt u would notice some difference

It also breaks color compression on some NV parts.

 

[nAo]

It also breaks color compression on some NV parts.

Which parts? I was talking about Xenos anyway..

 

[ERP]

It also breaks color compression on some NV parts.

Which parts? I was talking about Xenos anyway..

Just igore the post I was thinking of FP Z for some reason... Obviously not enough coffee yet.

 

[passby]

Ii is suposed that XB can do 720@60FPS (~same amount of pixels/s), with 64bit HDR and 4x AA. But in the case of XB with they SmartMemory (edram) you will have plenty of BW, in PS3 you will not.I wonder if in the end we will ever see better qualitity in it.

Not saying that this is incorrect but to me what this post says and some others in this thread post the PS3 has already lost in the graphics department. Is this the case of truth or is it the case of not enough information? If the 360 can do what pc999 says yet the PS3 can't do what blakjedi said then its already over. Too sad.

Actually If we want to follow those thoughts Xenos > R520 too ... If it is so awesome R520 may as well mirror Xenos design, no? The design has its gains, but also its sacrifices. We'll just wait for the results.

 

[wco81]

Remember how we thought all games would be 60fps this gen?

Yeah it seems they consistently opt for more details than higher frame rate.

Only a handful of games at 60 fps that I can think of off the top of my head.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Not saying that this is incorrect but to me what this post says and some others in this thread post the PS3 has already lost in the graphics department. Is this the case of truth or is it the case of not enough information? If the 360 can do what pc999 says yet the PS3 can't do what blakjedi said then its already over. Too sad.

From what we know, Xenos will handle high-res AA'd scenes thanks to the eDRAM design. Without that, PS3 might be at a disadvantage. As we have no info on it, we can't say, which is why I was asking. Are there any new compression techniques, perhaps optimised for 128bit HDR? Or some buffering system to a small local RAM that'll enable fast AA? The only bandwidth figures I remember regarding requirements for highres HDR images were those from Major Nelson's site, which I don't trust (strangely )

 

[mckmas8808]

Yeah don't trust isn't the word. I think June21 can enlighten us a bit more about your questions. I just don't understand why Sony and Nvidia would talk so so much about 128bit HDR if they knew it wasn't going to be practical in games. Again maybe June21 can help us on this.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As has been mentioned before - marketting. They can brag about the possibility of 128 bit HDR (bigger number = better) without practically being able to use it. That might be the only reason, especially seeing as 128 bit seems overkill.

 

[AlNom]

also, if a game runs fine at 1080p even at 60fps, they'll go for that. Not sure there will be that many games like that but hey at least there's the option if the devs feel like going for it.

Tetris

 

[Megadrive1988]

it is clear to me that there will be situations where one of the GPUs and one of the consoles will outperform the other. sometimes PS3 and RSX will come out on top, sometimes Xbox 360 and Xenos will come out on time.

It seems RSX will win in situations needing very high fillrate, and it seems Xenos will win in situations needing very high bandwidth.

neither console or GPU totally blows the other out of the water.

think about if Gamecube had as much memory as Xbox1, then compare the two. the Xbox would still have some advantages over Gamecube, but Gamecube would still have its advantages over Xbox.

PS3 and Xbox 360 have almost equal amounts of memory. PS3 has a CPU with more floating point performance, but not as much of an advantage over
Xenon/Waternoose (Xbox 360's CPU) that PS2 Emotion Engine had over Dreamcast's SH4 (6.2 Gflops vs 1.4 Gflops. this time the CPU fp difference is only 2x. plus the Xbox 360 CPU has some advantages over CELL. even though Cell has more advantages over Xbox 360 CPU then the other way around.

on the GPU side, both have advantages over the other


sorry, i am rambling.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes, you are. Go away and don't come back until you've got some juicy RSX insight

 

[Squeak]

With early z-test, improved z and framebuffer compression, HOS, extra power in Cell to perform coarse culling, and maybe better texture compression, RSX shouldn't be bandwidth limited at all.

 

[Titanio]

We also know from KK's recent interview that eDRAM was out of the question because too much would be needed for a frame buffer, which also means no tile rendering.

Your conclusion is a little hop and skip away from what Kutaragi was saying. Even with tile rendering, if you wanted to support 2 frames at 1080p, you'd need more eDram than, say, one 720p frame would require. Furthermore, he thinks transistors are better spent on more shading power.

In all my time here, in all the times I have asked this question, I have NEVER got a straight answer:

Assuming a certain amount of overdraw, assuming a 720p frame, assuming 30 or 60 frames per second, how much bandwidth is required? With 2xAA? For 4xAA? For, say, 5x overdraw and 60fps, my calculation gets as far as 1.1GB/s. How does 2xAA affect that? 4xAA?

I also don't think it's fair to compare what Xenos is doing at 720p and 32 or 64-bit HDR with what PS3 might do at 1080p with 128-bit HDR. You gotta compare them on an even field.

 

[zidane1strife]

As has been mentioned before - marketting. They can brag about the possibility of 128 bit HDR (bigger number = better) without practically being able to use it. That might be the only reason, especially seeing as 128 bit seems overkill.

But why keep it if it's useless(or does it affect transistor budget negligibly?), they've about a year+ or no?

PS

About x360 500M vertex rate, what's the info on that? Peak, in-game feasible, lowest rate possible or?(haven't been keeping up lately, been reading/seeing some mangas/animes that had piled-up a bit...) Also how does it compare to ps3 possible vertex rate?(I'm asking cause it's the one thing that I think some next-gen titles could really use, and it could make a very significant difference, IMHO, especially if paired with supah physics.)

 

[jvd]

I don't think we will see any titles using a fp32 hdr anytime soon. I believe that it will cause a massive bandwidth hit .



As for the xenos i believe it does fp10 hdr . Which is less than the fp16 of the nv40s . So it should be possible on the xenos . I highly doubt we will see any xenos titles with more than fp 10 and if the rsx supports fp10 hdr then we will see that , if not we will see fp16 hrd

 

[blakjedi]

Is there any way PS3 could output 1080i 60 fps + HDR + 2x AA?

Keep in mind that 1080i is 1980x540 resolution. I think the answer is yes for sure for 1080i and 720p (simillar number of pixels), because you can output 60FPS under those conditions on a PCs today, with 6800 or simillar video card.

Ii is suposed that XB can do 720@60FPS (~same amount of pixels/s), with 64bit HDR and 4x AA.

1080p has approx 2.3x as many pixels as 720p. Also, don't count on seeing 64bit HDR on Xbox 360 often. From what I've read, it's technically possible, but much slower than it's 32bit solution.

I also don't know if RSX is bandwidth limited as some people keep saying. Isn't it supposed to have something like 57GB/s total bandwidth to both memory pools?

Right on the money marco!

 

[jvd]

Quote:
Is there any way PS3 could output 1080i 60 fps + HDR + 2x AA?

Keep in mind that 1080i is 1980x540 resolution. I think the answer is yes for sure for 1080i and 720p (simillar number of pixels), because you can output 60FPS under those conditions on a PCs today, with 6800 or simillar video card.

Your wrong , the 6800s can't do this . They can do hdr or fsaa but not at the same time

 

[Thegameman]

it is clear to me that there will be situations where one of the GPUs and one of the consoles will outperform the other. sometimes PS3 and RSX will come out on top, sometimes Xbox 360 and Xenos will come out on time.

It seems RSX will win in situations needing very high fillrate, and it seems Xenos will win in situations needing very high bandwidth.

neither console or GPU totally blows the other out of the water.

think about if Gamecube had as much memory as Xbox1, then compare the two. the Xbox would still have some advantages over Gamecube, but Gamecube would still have its advantages over Xbox.

PS3 and Xbox 360 have almost equal amounts of memory. PS3 has a CPU with more floating point performance, but not as much of an advantage over
Xenon/Waternoose (Xbox 360's CPU) that PS2 Emotion Engine had over Dreamcast's SH4 (6.2 Gflops vs 1.4 Gflops. this time the CPU fp difference is only 2x. plus the Xbox 360 CPU has some advantages over CELL. even though Cell has more advantages over Xbox 360 CPU then the other way around.

on the GPU side, both have advantages over the other


sorry, i am rambling.

In fact you can see that Tech talk from this companys,can't be trusted the gamecube is a 12 million polygon console by nintendo's word,yet graphical games like RE4 look on par with the best looking xbox games,and better than almost all PS2 games,only GT4,SH4 and GOW look realy on par...

Even that the xbox has a faster GPU and CPU and more memory graphical intesive games don't look so far from other console graphical games.

I think is safe to say that all consoles will look equal,hell even the revolution,is not a surprice that Nintendo is not playing the spec game,but they din't play it with the gamecube either and it turn out fine.