@Trezzer

Quote:

Hmmm? There shouldn't be anything missing - the PS2 hardware is in there.

Correct.

@ Jorge

Go to my Display Settings and swap the PS3 back onto the 480i channel, reload the PS2 game, that should fix the problem (pixel flipping). Sadly over HDMI this doesn't work yet.

@minator

Quote:

minator wrote: @AMiGR Quote: To be honest, I do not doubt that the Cell *architecture* is interesting or that it has potential, I just doubt that the version used in the PS3 can do all they claim it can do in *games*. Why? It was primarily designed for games...

Actually, it wasn't, AFAIK. IBM is/was pushing Cell effectively as 'distributed computing' for the most part, where you can form Cell 'networks' of devices, from PDAs to consoles or full computers, as well as other devices. it _was_ certainly designed with an eye towards media handling, as many consumer devices can benefit from this...

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@MikeB

Quote:

IMO some PS3/Cell developers are the equivalents of Amiga developers back in the good old days, when someone says something is impossible, they are even more motivated to prove the naysayers wrong.

I'm not seeing this at this point, not by a long shot. The launch titles, where PS3 exclusive (very few are, out of launch titles), aren't showing that to me. part may be Sony's SDK, which many game companies have stated is inferior to the 360s dev environment...which was also the case for the initial PS2 SDK/tools as well, while currently Linux on PS3 doesn't expose the full hardware, either.

Maybe this will change over time, but right now, this certainly doesn't appear to be true.

BTW, a significant number of games are developed with 'middleware' or cross-platform libraries. A friend of mine was a CEO of a gaming company, and made some decent $ selling off his cross-platform libraries code, believe it was for PS2/XBox and PC at the time.

As someone (maybe it was you, dunno) mentioned, some smaller companies do exclusive games, may manage to extract 'more' for a specific system...but over time, toolsets even cross-platform ones, generally catch up to a high percentage of 'custom' code..

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@wegster

Quote:

it's about determining what they can be used for to best effect, whether handling physics, enhancing effects, tracking certain data elements in the game

The Cell is very useful for lots of things, there are 7 SPEs for usage by game developers on the PS3, some examples from someone working for Vivendi's High Moon Studios regarding graphics:

"PSINext: Mike I wanted to end on this particular question, because I think it’s no secret the level of speculation there has been on message boards around the Web as to the potential for Cell to assist with the graphical output of the Playstation 3. The ray-cast clouds in 'Warhawk' seem to represent at least one example of Cell-assisted exotic rendering… and geometry and image post-processing effects seem to be what jump to mind most readily for ways in which Cell might normally assist. In what other ways do you think Cell might be utilized on the graphics side?

Mike Acton: Well, each developer is going to have their own tricks and ideas, and it's hard to speculate on what sort of amazing things we'll see over the lifetime of the Playstation 3. There are a few that seem like obvious choices:

o Compression; both image and geometry data. For the amount of content I expect to see over the course of this generation of games, real time decompression of just about everything that is pumped to the GPU will be a must-have. With the right techniques, at times working with compressed data will actually be faster than uncompressed data on the SPUs!

o Improved 2D graphics. Not just user interface elements, which in my opinion don't get nearly enough attention in games, but in any 2D image used in the game. I expect to see animated image, normal and depth maps - not the wasteful and uninspired flip-book style we see occasionally now, but fully skeletal, curved animations. It could, for example, be a tattoo with dozens of different animations depending on the mood of the character, or maybe leeches that attack and crawl under the skin of the character. And fonts. Real fonts. I want to see beautifully rendered, perfectly set fonts at any scale.

o More complex character skeletons. Transforming a character's skeleton animation data on the GPU generally means limiting the number of influences each vertex can have. I'd like to see some complex characters with a thousand bones or more, where the skeleton can be re-arranged depending on the circumstance, and some amazing animation (for which you'd need the above compression) to go along with it. For instance, fantasy games have a lot of opportunity to explore character complexity on the Cell. While it's not impossible to achieve that character complexity using the GPU, it is a task well suited for the SPUs.

o Lighting - I hope that we'll finally see the death of baked-in lighting. I don't mean to say that lighting influences, light and shadow maps, and combined lights won't be cached. But there will always will be some freedom for those values to be changed by the artists at runtime, even if they can't change every frame.

o Particle systems and effects. And I don't mean a shower of points or sparks! Effects are especially well suited to offloading to the SPUs, so I expect this is the first place we'll see the complexity of animation, physics and graphics really come together.

o Vertex animation. There's almost certainly going to be a mountain of water effects, plasma-type effects, velocity field effects, etc. that will make their way into the games simply because these are excellent entry points into Cell programming.

o Terrain generation. IBM has already put together a ray-cast terrain generator, but I expect to see something a little more GPU friendly. With broadband built into the Playstation 3, who knows? We might even see an earth based game that generates its backgrounds on the fly using Google Earth!

And of course continued work on procedural images and geometry, and maybe offloading some Cg onto the SPUs.

At the end of the day, I don't know all the ways developers are going to take advantage of the Cell for graphics over the lifetime of the Playstation 3."

Last edited by MikeB on 21-Jan-2007 at 10:20 PM.

@wegster

Quote:

I'm not seeing this at this point, not by a long shot. The launch titles, where PS3 exclusive (very few are, out of launch titles), aren't showing that to me. part may be Sony's SDK, which many game companies have stated is inferior to the 360s dev environment...

Lion Heart for the Amiga wasn't a launch title, nor did the game benefit from super easy development tools. Thalion put a lot of time and effort into Lion Heart, I was more referring to people such as the Dutch dudes working on Killzone.

@MikeB

Quote:

The Cell is very useful for lots of things, there are 7 SPEs for usage by game developers on the PS3, some examples from someone working for Vivendi's High Moon Studios regarding graphics:

No there aren't. 1 is *always* reserved for the OS and another one is used by the OS on demand, meaning that you can rely on 5 SPEs.

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@MikeB

Lion Heart didn't impress me that much back in the day, I preferred the GFX of Shadow of the Beast 3.

Edit: It certainly was colourful, but maybe it was a bit *too* colourful for me, dunno. Gotta play these games again some time

Last edited by AMiGR on 21-Jan-2007 at 10:36 PM.

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@AMiGR

You will have 6 SPEs available under Linux. If you assume having the OS to use one SPE as being a waste of CPU power rather than being a benefit then saying 6 would be more accurate (Does the XBox 360 OS run on anything. I think so....).

Last edited by MikeB on 21-Jan-2007 at 10:54 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 21-Jan-2007 at 10:46 PM.

@MikeB

Er, it's a console. All technical achievements in consoles and console-like systems come from having a very specific hardware setup and being able write code to use that to the max. From that point of view, have the OS use an SPE *is* a waste of CPU power. Worse still, the fact that the OS must be able to reserve the 6th SPE for security as well at any time, means that a game cannot fully rely on all 6 remaining SPEs.

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@MikeB

Quote:

Go to my Display Settings and swap the PS3 back onto the 480i channel, reload the PS2 game, that should fix the problem (pixel flipping). Sadly over HDMI this doesn't work yet.

Hm, I run it at 480i. I don't say that the effect is bad or what. Its almost not visible. But the PS2 image is a bit more smooth (maybe more blury would describe it better). Its still an emulator after all. There might be some explanations. The EE and Graphics syntisizer is there, but I am not sure if the CPU is, too (is that emulated thru SW ?).

But, still, it replaced the PS2 faster then I thought. I was thinking that we could still use the PS2 to play the old games. But nobody cares any more

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@AMiGR

Can someone confirm, that the OS is running on the SPE ? I doubt that. Simply because the SPE cannot initiate any mem transfer without the PPU setting up the DMA controller.

What I guess is, that the GameOS reserves one (like allocating a resource) to have one available for specific tasks.

Linux (e.g. the Yellow Dog Install Guide) mentions, that 6 are available under Linux. What's more interessting is, that it shows 2 cores. The init screen is kind a cute. Two big Penguins (or Yellow Dogs for YDL) and 6 little ones below, indicating the two cores and 6 spes (I guess the "cores" are more likely the HW threads, but not separate cores). Other then that, a standard ppc64 linux distro.

Err, btw, for 'beeing a console' I like the fact, that the PS3 supports a keyboard and a mouse right out of the box. The x-bar menu can be navigated thru the controller, the DVD remote or a standard USB keyboard. The browser supports a standard USB mouse (use my wireless Logitech keyboard/mouse combo). All text/numeric inputs (thru the GameOS) support the keyboard as well.

Last edited by Jorge on 21-Jan-2007 at 11:50 PM.

_________________
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µA1-MK2/G3/933/R200/CMI8738
XE/G4 (broken 7450/800)

@AMiGR

Quote:

the fact that the OS must be able to reserve the 6th SPE for security as well at any time, means that a game cannot fully rely on all 6 remaining SPEs.

One SPE is reserved for OS + security and functions like:

- Multi-User Voice Chat across all games, even outside of the games own UI
- Multi-User Video Chat across all games, even outside of the games own UI
- Notifications and messaging to be sent between users regardless of the games they are playing

@wegster

Quote:

which was also the case for the initial PS2 SDK/tools as well, while currently Linux on PS3 doesn't expose the full hardware, either.

Did you try out Linux yet ? I had Debian installed and trying YDL right now. I managed to set a resolution to something what my monitor couldn't handle. Need an HDTV ASAP. A pitty is, that the wireless doesn't work under Linux which means I have a cable running thru the house. I'd tend to prefer Debian (or Ubuntu later) because I can install online whatever I need.

I'm pretty exited about beeing able to do more then just playing games. It feels like a renewed home computer experience from back then (well, to me at least). I'm pretty sure, this might result into a nice ps3/linux scene (I look forward to see an AmigaOS distro running on it, but this will be tough, IMO).

_________________
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@Jorge

It runs on the PPE and requires an SPE as well.

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@MikeB

Quote:

- Multi-User Voice Chat across all games, even outside of the games own UI - Multi-User Video Chat across all games, even outside of the games own UI - Notifications and messaging to be sent between users regardless of the games they are playing

You seriously sound like a member of the Sony PR department. It does not matter *what* the SPE is used for, it all comes down to it being used by the OS, not being available for game use, which is what I've been saying.

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@AMiGR

Quote:

You seriously sound like a member of the Sony PR department.

Grow up, that's not the way to discuss anything and could degrade into a flamewar if I did not have a thick skin.

To me it matters a lot how the OS interacts with the game / the hosted OS I might be running or in what ways game developers and users can take advantage of OS functionalites. Some people find my input within this thread interesting, so don't act as if you are the only one reading.

@Jorge

Quote:

Did you try out Linux yet ? I had Debian installed and trying YDL right now. I managed to set a resolution to something what my monitor couldn't handle. Need an HDTV ASAP. A pitty is, that the wireless doesn't work under Linux which means I have a cable running thru the house. I'd tend to prefer Debian (or Ubuntu later) because I can install online whatever I need.

Naah, not yet, going to try for next weekend. What else is available besides gentoo, YDL and Debian? Is Ubuntu or Kubuntu? As much as I like gentoo, there's something to be said now and then for 'low maintenance,' which the PS3 I'd like to be at this point...but looking forward to bringing it online when I don't have the laptop handy in the living room/home theatre, or if my girlfriend or a friend wants to 'borrow a system for some googling' etc.

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@MikeB

Quote:

MikeB wrote: @wegster Quote: I'm not seeing this at this point, not by a long shot. The launch titles, where PS3 exclusive (very few are, out of launch titles), aren't showing that to me. part may be Sony's SDK, which many game companies have stated is inferior to the 360s dev environment... Lion Heart for the Amiga wasn't a launch title, nor did the game benefit from super easy development tools. Thalion put a lot of time and effort into Lion Heart, I was more referring to people such as the Dutch dudes working on Killzone.

Heh, your comment of 'super easy development tools' is referring to what, exactly?

But, the point remains, _at this point in time_, I see nothing that indicates the PS3 is likened to the Amiga developers of old. I'll have to wait and see if (when?) killzone is released to see if that changes my mind on that, or it's simply 'a good game.'

I AM kinda looking forward to Assassins Creed, though, whenever that's slated for release.

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@wegster

Quote:

Ubuntu

http://www.louiscandell.com/ps3/

@wegster

Quote:

What else is available besides gentoo, YDL and Debian? Is Ubuntu or Kubuntu?

Fedora Core (but that is kind of YDL).

At least Linux renders the PS3s internal Browser useless, because Firefox is better and can use swap space.

I just find, its a pain, if you don't have a HD TV. YDL boots into 720p on default, and the fbset wants to set it to some 576x384 non laced mode (in the low res 480i), means I have yet to figure out, how X config sets it to 480i (Debian Live does that, so I'll sneak in there to find that out - just a pitty, that every distro configures the X server differently...)

_________________
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G3SE/600/Voodoo3/Sil680/RTL8139/SBLive! (noiseless!)
µA1-MK2/G3/933/R200/CMI8738
XE/G4 (broken 7450/800)