Even more good news:IBM shows of real-time Cell rendering (video)

[xone_4]

Even though the PS3’s RSX is inaccessible under Linux the smart little system will reach out across the network and leverage multiple IBM QS20 blades to render the complex model, in real-time, with software based ray-tracing. Using IBM’s scalable iRT rendering technology, the PS3 is able to decompose each frame into manageable work regions and dynamically distribute them to blades or other PS3s for rendering. These regions are then further decomposed into sub-regions by the blade’s Cell processors and dynamically dispatched to the heavy lifting SPEs for rendering and image compression. Finished encoded regions are then sent back to the PS3 for Cell accelerated decompression, compositing, and display.

original full article

http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.php/2007/03/07/cell-power-at-gdc-2007/

another link with youtube video

http://ps3.qj.net/GDC-2007-IBM-shows-of-real-time-Cell-rendering/pg/49/aid/85572

what is more amazing is these comment

To put this render job in perspective I just ran one frame of this scene through 3dsMax’s default ray-tracer an it took my Centrino Duo (dual core x86) machine one hour eight minutes to render what Cell and the iRT renders in less than one half of a second.


cooooooooool :)

[Smokey]

shes a beast

[cliffbo]

games just took one step closer to a TV channel (no hardware necessary, just a controller...) PS5 could well be a channel not a console

[jaxmkii]

Comment by Barry Minor — March 8, 2007 @ 11:01 am
To put this render job in perspective I just ran one frame of this scene through 3dsMax’s default ray-tracer an it took my Centrino Duo (dual core x86) machine one hour eight minutes to render what Cell and the iRT renders in less than one half of a second. :O

[cliffbo]

read through this small thread:

http://forums.e-mpire.com/showthread.php?t=59738

are we looking at an operating system that is automatically quarantined from the processors and that talks in some way via the internet to another similar devise?

just two KK quotes:

Quote:
“If processors of high performance and wide bandwidth like the Cell were linked together without sufficient security, a worldwide system crash could occur with one attack.”
Quote:
“The model image for the Cell-based network may be the Internet: servers around the world form one virtual 'computer,' and each PC accesses it. Application programs can no longer directly access the hardware; instead they will have to be written in high-level, object-oriented language. The Cell processor will completely change the concept of programming. I am sure that a technology revolution is about to occur, not only within Sony but throughout the digital consumer electronics industry.”


remember that Sony want the PS3 to be seen as a PC.

why call it cell? cells divide and multiply! single cell, multiple cell, life... LIVE? we are all made up of mutiple cells that accomplish far more than one cell alone can right!!!???? f**king right!!!!!

virtual life + time = 4D

a living, evolving, self perpetuating model that grows stronger with every cell included...

[Venat]

So, crazy Ken was right.... all the time.

[jaxmkii]

^ thouse who know dont call him crazy... we call him genius

[Domination]

I can see a hitman being hired to take Ken Kutaragi out.

[jaxmkii]

can someone with more tech knowlege ask thises guys for the 600MB 1080p file?

[amuront]

I just want to highlight something before someone goes nuts and says "ZOMG Cell pwnz Core Duo"

Even though the PS3’s RSX is inaccessible under Linux the smart little system will reach out across the network and leverage multiple IBM QS20 blades to render the complex model, in real-time, with software based ray-tracing. Using IBM’s scalable iRT rendering technology, the PS3 is able to decompose each frame into manageable work regions and dynamically distribute them to blades or other PS3s for rendering. These regions are then further decomposed into sub-regions by the blade’s Cell processors and dynamically dispatched to the heavy lifting SPEs for rendering and image compression. Finished encoded regions are then sent back to the PS3 for Cell accelerated decompression, compositing, and display.

To put this render job in perspective I just ran one frame of this scene through 3dsMax’s default ray-tracer an it took my Centrino Duo (dual core x86) machine one hour eight minutes to render what Cell and the iRT renders in less than one half of a second.

This is certainly not a direct comparison between Cell and Core Duo.
It is probably to show that PS3 under Linux is indeed a very capable farm renderer.

[Kabbage]

Cell kicks the shit out of Dual Core garbage LOL

PC apologist am cry.

[Grovestreet]

Cell kicks the shit out of Dual Core garbage LOL

PC apologist am cry.

"Bu bu bu teh Crysis!!1!11!"

:honor:

[game designer]

very impressive stuff there. I've been telling people for a long time that the PS3 graphics doesn't just = RSX. It's the RSX plus the Cell that will give the PS3 the potential edge in the future.

GD

[Nameless]

Once again only a small amount of the PS3's capabilities have been tapped with 1st gen titles and that's amazing when you look at the quality of Motorstorm... It will be interesting to see Insomniac's 2nd gen title to see if significant increases have occurred.

I'm sure with the huge network of Sony developers new techniques and information are discovered on a daily basis...

PS: When I say tapped the power I'm not implying that Evolution is not using the SPEs and the RSX, but the question is how efficiently are they being used to really push the best results from the hardware. A great example is the last generation PS2 titles like FFXII, GT4 & GOW 2 people would have thought titles like this were impossible on the PS2, but the developers used every optimization trick in the book to produce amazing results. I can't even imagine what the developers will pull off in 2011 & 2012 on the PS3...

[xone_4]

im dying to use these power (i work as compositor and 3d designer) if some open source tool can apply the cell power to rendering "^^they used 3dsmax here^^" i will get 5 or 6 PS3s my self and use it as a small yet powerful render farm

PS: i already got my self a PowerMac Worth 6000$ just for that soul purpose
i can sell it and use an iMac for the modeling and stuff and render on the "PS3farm"

[Kabbage]

One of the commenters said that saints row looked better :D

[Grovestreet]

One of the commenters said that saints row looked better :D

What the hell?

[GTShotoKen]

This looks very promising, but seems kind of deceptive when looking for true rendering on the cell.

This whole city scape was rendered across multiple cell processors.

What can one cell processor in one PS3 accomplish?

I really want to see!!! :)

[Insane Metal]

Just remember that its not the Cell on the PS3 that is rendering that... read again if you don´t understand.

[Lekko]

So how many in a farm? and Can I somehow hook my PS3 up to my PC to offload render work onto the cell? I'd love to play around with rendering and ray-tracing, but my PC isn't strong enough, and I don't run Linux on my PS3 (yet).

[xone_4]

@lekko i think it can be done just more demand and we well get it ;)

[LennyNero1972]

Let me see if I am getting this:huh: ! This image was rendered by a network of cell chips instead of the single cell and RSX? If that is the case why is the RSX even present if developers can't even access the damn thing? Also, are Sony's new EDGE development tools going to allow game makers to use the power of the RSX and Cell together? Lastly how many PS3's networked together will take to get that kind of image quality?

[curryking1]

Let me see if I am getting this:huh: ! This image was rendered by a network of cell chips instead of the single cell and RSX? If that is the case why is the RSX even present if developers can't even access the damn thing? Also, are Sony's new EDGE development tools going to allow game makers to use the power of the RSX and Cell together? Lastly how many PS3's networked together will take to get that kind of image quality?

What are you talking about????

????

????

Of course the devs have access to the RSX, where did you get that idea? Only we can't use it thru a guest OS.

And the whole idea of trying to make more software and middleware and more techniques for programming on the Cell and RSX is meant to make it better for devs. That's what ICE is for first party devs and why they started talking about EDGE.

[GodMachine_Iridius_Dio]

Let me see if I am getting this:huh: ! This image was rendered by a network of cell chips instead of the single cell and RSX? If that is the case why is the RSX even present if developers can't even access the damn thing? Also, are Sony's new EDGE development tools going to allow game makers to use the power of the RSX and Cell together? Lastly how many PS3's networked together will take to get that kind of image quality?

I think you may be getting confused with the level of access a commercial developer has with the level of access a semi-elite user has. Devs can access the RSX, while someone with Linux installed on their PS3, cannot. They can write programs for the CELL CPU in there, but the RSX may as well be invisible.

Now, as to how many CELLs it takes to produce this raytraced scene, that's up in the air. We don't know how deeply the light rays are calculated for their implementation, we don't know how many rays they're starting with or how many secondary rays will be produced, or even how well their code is optimised - There's just a lot we don't know about what they're doing with their specific implementation, and that could have a dramatic effect on how many processors it's requiring, and how the end result appears. (I've assumed throughout that paragraph that you know something about what raytracing is, but if you don't, just ask.)



Dio

[LennyNero1972]

Thank you for clearing things up. That demo looks promising. If its a hint at what the new GTA may look like count me in!! After a price drop and the addition of dual shock 3 of course.

[GTShotoKen]

Just remember that its not the Cell on the PS3 that is rendering that... read again if you don´t understand.

I know he was talking about blade servers, but he also mentioned this being doable across multiple PS3s (I also thought the cell processors in the blade servers were just better with calculations in double precision).

Anyways, I'm just saying that I would like to know what "one" cell processor in "one" PS3 can do for linux devs?

I just think it's weird how many major demonstrations showing the Cell's rendering capabilities always involved a whole team of them instead of just one processor.

[GodMachine_Iridius_Dio]

I know he was talking about blade servers, but he also mentioned this being doable across multiple PS3s (I also thought the cell processors in the blade servers were just better with calculations in double precision).

Anyways, I'm just saying that I would like to know what "one" cell processor in "one" PS3 can do for linux devs?

I just think it's weird how many major demonstrations showing the Cell's rendering capabilities always involved a whole team of them instead of just one processor.

I'll attempt to tackle these as they're placed.

The CELLs in the QS20s are pretty much the same ones as in the PS3, only no disabled SPEs, and they may be clocked differently, but same FP abilities - Rediculously fast at single precision and somewhat fast at double.

There's actually quite a bit of media on what a single CELL can do, both imagery and video, you just have to dig for a while. It used to be that almost all the media was from either SONY, IBM, or Mercury - It was almost always a close partner or a member of the STI clique that was showing something off, but now that PS3s are available to consumers and now that QS20s are actually shipping, geeks, gamers and accademics, alike, are getting in on it.

There were some early demonstrations, from around the time of the raytraced terrain demo - There was a facial recognition demo, an explorable heart simulation, a few that involved flocking behavior of fish (I think a QS20was driving that one, though I believe it was a single CELL processor handling it) and ofcourse the early PS3 demos. There are more, but I'll leave some for you to dig through. Mercury Computer systems had a demonstration of a CELL processor trudging through a data volume from a high-resolution MRI scan. There's also a video somewhere of a raytracer running on a single PS3, and one running on I think four QS20s (Which was stunning, I thought).

It's a mixed bag, but there are demos using single and multiple CELL setups - I just wanted to show you that.

On that note... Things like this follow me in my head... In another five years (Maybe six) PS4 will arrive, and the tech in there will have some similarities to what's in PS3 today - CELL2 will likely be quite familiar looking, though multiplied a few times, so you may very-well get to see what ten CELLs can do at once in a single chip in another five years, add to that a GPU around ten times faster than a Geforce 8800, and you're talking about something beautiful.


Dio

Edits Below...

Blue Steel - PS3 Raytracer.

http://cag.csail.mit.edu/ps3/blue-steel.shtml

Article of "Beating Heart Simulation" at Cebit2006.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx?NewsId=16543

There is more, but I'm having a hell of a time finding it.

[GTShotoKen]

Wow, thanks GodMachine!!!!

The blue steel raytracer video was awesome!!!

Thanks for all of the information gathering.

The cell processor definitely does look like a beast, even when processing such intensive simulations!!!

+rep

[Garfunkel]

wow, those vids were great!

[curryking1]

Man.. I didn't know people would be using the PS3 for stuff like this so soon...

That's some cool shit.

[Garfunkel]

it really shows what cell can do that mainstream processors can't hope to achieve as of yet.

[GTShotoKen]

Hmmm...I know the blue steel footage isn't all that new, but I thought CPI would jump all over it.

I know he's a big "connoisseur" of raytracing (if that's the right way to put it? ;)).

I wonder how raytracing and global illumination funtion across SPEs? Is the cell architecture the hardware needed to make global illumination one day possible in real-time (of course not now)?

[curryking1]

How about 'aficionado?' A la VG? That might be appropriate too lol.

[Shai-Hulud]

http://www.mc.com/cell/demo.cfm

any help?

[GodMachine_Iridius_Dio]

Something much newer - Something from GDC.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=17744&type=mov

Just a box demo, but still pretty impressive.

I forgot to add a downloadable link...

So here we go.

Hi-res Mov - 49.3MB

http://download.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ps3_gdc07_physicsdemo_gt_h264.mov

Hi-res WMV - 48.2MB

http://download.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ps3_gdc07_physicsdemo_gt_h264.wmv



Low-res Mov - 15.9MB

http://download.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ps3_gdc07_physicsdemo_gt.mov

Low-res WMV - 15.5MB

http://download.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ps3_gdc07_physicsdemo_gt.wmv

[curryking1]

Wow GodMachine, that was impressive. The boxes seemed a lot less rigid in the demo, seemed like they reacted a lot more realistically to each other. Or that could be simply that they were oriented to look like that.

Impressive none the less, any word on what it's working on? Number of SPUs or any other info?

[GodMachine_Iridius_Dio]

Apparently that's running within the confines of the PS3's CELL, but as to how much they're using in that particular demo, there's no word.

[cpiasminc]

I wonder how raytracing and global illumination funtion across SPEs? Is the cell architecture the hardware needed to make global illumination one day possible in real-time (of course not now)?
What they're doing as far as GI is concerned according to a scan over a different paper seems to be pretty brute force, but it is limited to very few extra samples, and points get static dependent samples which are predetermined by object. While the result is low-noise compared to truly stochastic sampling, the results are too narrow and biased. They had to do it that way, though, and it's acceptable for that small open scene -- definitely not acceptable in a generic raytracer, though. I happen to think if they just had a dense set of irradiance volume samples, they could have gotten away without using any extra samples and it would have been a whole lot faster.

IBM's demo was very... hmmm... it seemed to be more about just the ability to scale up parallelism absurdly. The demo didn't really have the content or recurse deeply enough to show anything specific to raytracing. I don't expect IBM to be loaded with content creators, of course, but I would have liked to see some characteristically "raytracing" features like distortion-free cameras or reflection/refraction to at least show that it can handle those things. In terms of the scaling, it was indeed impressive -- computationally, I'd expect no less of a raytracer, but the fact that it did that even with a large dataset is interesting.

[GTShotoKen]

Cool, so will you delve into any ray-tracing projects on the Cell with your free time CPI?

[Zer0-Sum]

Not to sound like a HUGE fanboy, but this proves even more that PS3 is going to Pimp Slap 360 like a dirty little Ho in the long run. In two years when the devs get a handle on the Cell the divide will be even more than can be imagined. The Cell rules because IBM was on board to help KK get it made correctly. No other company could have done it, period.

[GodMachine_Iridius_Dio]

Behold!!! heh...

The car!!! No... Not that... Scroll down...

Slightly more interresting one (raytracer), in case you haven't seen it. It isn't running on a PS3 CELL - What it is running on, is four QS20 blades (Each has two CELLs and a gigabyte of XDR). Ogle...

Oooold-ass news link. v

http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.php/category/cell/

Download link. v

http://www.gametomorrow.com/minor/barry/lambo_loop_576p.mov

Sorry guys, this time, QT is all there is.

Dio

[Zer0-Sum]

BTW, great vids GodMachine. More proof of the bad assed hardware indeed. Four Cells? That is awesomeness.

[GodMachine_Iridius_Dio]

Totally welcome.

Oh, and it's -

Eight CELLs :) - Four blades with two CELL processors each and 512MB XDR dedicated to each processor. :drool: :yum: Even more drool-worthy... Eight CELLs, with no disabled SPEs, plus four gigabytes of XDR.

[curryking1]

That's droolworthy for sure lol, especially that tech spec hahahah. That's crazy raytracing!

[cpiasminc]

Cool, so will you delve into any ray-tracing projects on the Cell with your free time CPI?
Already have, actually (though to be accurate, it's more raycasting). I can't do much in that direction lately because the devkit I was using has been moved (company moving to a new building in a few weeks), and trying to run things through a simulator is really slow, and I'm more than a little busy with other work.

What I've been doing isn't a very interesting thing from a performance standpoint. For my purposes I'm less interested in speed and more in numerically accurate results. It happens to be one of those cases that's small on data and big on number crunching... runs on average about 6x faster on my PS3 kit (which is an old 2.4 GHz kit, btw) than on a PC (3.2 GHz single-core), and that's using the same code (single-threaded, PPE only, fair use of vector ops on all 3 platforms). Closer to 11x faster than PC on a full-clock-speed X360 kit. Since it is basically a single-threaded test, I'd expect the 360 to still have an advantage over a 3.2 GHz Cell since it has twice the cache, and the Cell PPE isn't really tuned for single-threaded performance as much as the XeCPU cores are (not that the XeCPU cores are all that magnificent). Start multithreading/using SPEs, and things get very different.

[Zer0-Sum]

Totally welcome.

Oh, and it's -

Eight CELLs :) - Four blades with two CELL processors each and 512MB XDR dedicated to each processor. :drool: :yum: Even more drool-worthy... Eight CELLs, with no disabled SPEs, plus four gigabytes of XDR.

:wank: I think I just got a Nerd Hard On!!:wank:

[GodMachine_Iridius_Dio]

Slight bump...

There's more - The car is now running on three PS3s with zero changes to the code being run (It was originally being run on IBM QS20s).

News Link...

http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.php/category/cell/

Video Link...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8

Unfortunately right now, all there is, is a youtube link.

[xone_4]

now my dream render farm is getting even closer to be on hand :)

[VonGak]

Gametomorrow has always had some interesting articles on CELL rendering.

Too bad this won't be an option for real time dependant applications like games.

But these CELL blade servers should open for more physics in online games thoug I recon that other consoles also should be able to take advantage of CELL Blade servers.

[VonGak]

now my dream render farm is getting even closer to be on hand :)

Folding@Home / Rendering@HomeBrew (around Sony through Linux as home-brew), I wonder if somthing like that would work (with some fair share restrictions).

[section]

To my knowledge PS3 clusters are run in various places with pretty good results, because of the Linux support you can do amazing calculations with relatively small amount of monetary investion.

As ridiculous as it may have sounded some 5 years back you can really use a gaming console cluster to create something scholarly impressive :)

[VonGak]

^I seem to remember that some Uni professor used PS2s in a cluster for vector heavy calculations.

[section]

Ah so there is some history to the PS used in some scientific tasks, ok :)

[GodMachine_Iridius_Dio]

now my dream render farm is getting even closer to be on hand :)

Terra Soft is already building them - You can get them in six, and thirty-two node configurations for between $18.3k US, and $44k US. I know it sounds pretty hefty to some, but for what you get in there it's rediculously cheap, AND if you don't need everything they have in there (I.E. if you already have proper hubs, cables, displays, etcetera) you can build the cluster yourself, and shave off a few grand.

You can get them here... Under the "solutions" tab.

http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/store/

[Fillibuster]

^So you can have killer LAN parties while your on break!:thumbr:

[xone_4]

Terra Soft is already building them - You can get them in six, and thirty-two node configurations for between $18.3k US, and $44k US. I know it sounds pretty hefty to some, but for what you get in there it's rediculously cheap, AND if you don't need everything they have in there (I.E. if you already have proper hubs, cables, displays, etcetera) you can build the cluster yourself, and shave off a few grand.

You can get them here... Under the "solutions" tab.

http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/store/

Thank you very much
but i was talking about the software that can handle any 3d application renderer ( V-ray, Finalrender, Mental ray, Maxwell) because if you build it your self it will cost you no more than 7000$ to 8000$ for 6 Node Cluster (including hub, cables and large HDCP monitor) and i will use my MacPro as the head node (quad Xeon, 8Gb ram, 2Tb storage) which is more powerful than Terra soft head node configuration, and this is what i can pay without braking the bank you know.

[CrumCon]

nice article.. but what about the games?

[Domination]

nice article.. but what about the games?

This thead is not about games and neither is everything in the console. I think it'll be easier if you tried a games thread.

[GodMachine_Iridius_Dio]

nice article.. but what about the games?

Well, not that it has much to do with games *right now*, but we're seeing a preview of the kind of processing power that will be available to us in consoles in a few years - Think of this in particular as something of a possible preview of your next Ridge Racer or GT experience.