Sephiroth_VII
01-27-2006, 11:48 PM
"All of this is already available and won't be a massive leap from what you're seeing on PCs with high-end graphics cards. But obviously on PS3, you've got eight chips to spread the processing cost over - the main PowerPC chip and seven SPE chips. In a PC, there's just one CPU, two in a dual processor machine. Having an eight CPU multi-processor system in your living room is pretty flash.
"At the end of the day it's just a multi-processor architecture. If you can get something running on eight threads of a PC CPU, you can get it running on eight processors on a PS3 - it's not massively different. There is a small 'gotcha' in there though. The main processor can access all the machine's video memory, but each of the seven SPE chips has access only to its own 256k of onboard memory - so if you have, say, a big mesh to process, it'll be necessary to stream it through a small amount of memory - you'd have to DMA it up to your cell chip and then process a little chunk, then DMA the next chunk, so you won't be able to jump around the memory as easily, which I guess you will be able to do on the Xbox 360.
"The graphics capabilities of PS3 will, I think, be slightly above the absolutely top-end graphics cards on the PC, but you've got much more processing power in the box so you're going to see a lot more physics, a lot more generated geometry. With water ripples, for example - they're pretty much algorithms, you have a flat plane of triangles and you run some sort of mathematical algorithm over it to generate a surface rippling effect - well, you will have the processing power to do these sorts of generated geometry effects On PS3. You could actually put one chip aside just to do that..."
source (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2006/01/27/possession_and_the_art_of_ps3_programming.html)
It's a pretty good read, and you should check it out. It's a rather long article about PS3 game development in general, and what i've posted is just a small extract.
"At the end of the day it's just a multi-processor architecture. If you can get something running on eight threads of a PC CPU, you can get it running on eight processors on a PS3 - it's not massively different. There is a small 'gotcha' in there though. The main processor can access all the machine's video memory, but each of the seven SPE chips has access only to its own 256k of onboard memory - so if you have, say, a big mesh to process, it'll be necessary to stream it through a small amount of memory - you'd have to DMA it up to your cell chip and then process a little chunk, then DMA the next chunk, so you won't be able to jump around the memory as easily, which I guess you will be able to do on the Xbox 360.
"The graphics capabilities of PS3 will, I think, be slightly above the absolutely top-end graphics cards on the PC, but you've got much more processing power in the box so you're going to see a lot more physics, a lot more generated geometry. With water ripples, for example - they're pretty much algorithms, you have a flat plane of triangles and you run some sort of mathematical algorithm over it to generate a surface rippling effect - well, you will have the processing power to do these sorts of generated geometry effects On PS3. You could actually put one chip aside just to do that..."
source (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2006/01/27/possession_and_the_art_of_ps3_programming.html)
It's a pretty good read, and you should check it out. It's a rather long article about PS3 game development in general, and what i've posted is just a small extract.