PS3 specs, facts, speculations and rumours !

I\'m no programmer but this seems pretty impressive :

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has published a comparison paper on

Cell versus Opteron, Itanium & Cray X1 in scientific applications.

In it\'s current form Cell scores about 5x better than Itanium & Opteron and about on par with the Cray X1.

That is not to say that it does not need some minor modifications. Most scientific applications need 64 bit chips and the Cell is better at 32-bit work. However with some modifications, the Cell managed to wipe the flaw (sic) with the AMD Opteron, Intel Itanium2 and Cray X1 chips.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~samw/projects/cell/CF06.pdf

http://theinquirer.net/?article=32006

[BizioEE]

Really interesting Knotter8

and here we have interesting thoughts about the power of PS3, from Untold Legends...and listen what the producer Andy Sites said in the middle of the interview...

We finally reached a point where are PC\'s are no longer faster than our ps3... the ps3 is actually trouncing our 3,500 dollar PC\'s in our offices...and we were really excited by that..

http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/814/814614/vids_1.html

Great

Only problem is that Untold legends is the least impressive PS3 game. They should exploite that power

[clips]

will they stop tryin to compare this thing to pc\'s?...at it\'s core this thing is a console,...i could care less how fast this thing is, i only thing i care about is how the games the look and perform, and at this stage anyway the games are lookin just as good as the xbox games...sheeit if you\'re so obsessed with pc\'s, break off and start another division and start makin\' pc\'s...sony and microsoft pour millions into their systems tryin to be the all in one and for what? 5 - 7 yrs down the road they will already begin to implement the specs for their new console...i don\'t mind the dvd,blu-ray playback, but all that other s**t i have a pc for....nintendo at least in this aspect are the only ones that\'s got it right as fas as creating consoles strickly for games...

They are comparing Cell to PC processors. And you should know by now that Cell isnt a console only processor

[BizioEE]

HDMI Upgraded To Support \'Deep Color\' !

...Under the new HDMI 1.3 specification, the clock speed will be increased from 165 MHz to over 225 MHz, said HDMI president of licensing Leslie Chard. The increased bandwidth will allow support for 1080 x 60 Hz displays with 36-bit RGB color, or a 1080p display with a 90 Hz refresh rate. Technically, the specification leaves room for clock rates of up to 450 MHz, Chard said.

Sony\'s upcoming PlayStation 3 will support deep color, Chard said, and PC graphics companies like ATI and Nvidia can bake the technology fairly easily into its cards, he said. Although the "deep color" provision was added with the next-generation Blu-Ray and HD-DVD specifications in mind, no formal announcement of support has been made by either camp.

"We don\'t have a public announcement, but it\'s natural to assume as standards get big and are accepted that they may be used," Chard said.
"Anybody going to have an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive needs to have an HDMI output," Chard added. "Anyone who\'s claiming to have a media notebook needs to have this."

The new color depths will be consistent with the new "xvYCC" color scheme which was adopted as a standard by the International Electrotechnical Commission in January. Sony showed off a xvYCC-compliant 82-inch LCD at this year\'s CES.

The standard will also add support for Dolby HD and DTS-HD audio. The audio will be combined with a lip-sync compensation feature to synchronize the audio and visual channels -- not actively, but through the use of latency information which will will be actively communicated to the other components, Chard said. Finally, support for an HDMI mini-connector has been added, to allow digital video to be streamed from a compliant camcorder directly to a display...

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1975596,00.asp

[BizioEE]

Cell Shrinks in 2007 !
Sony to switch to cheaper manufacturing process next year...

June 13, 2006 - Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi revealed today in an interview with Japan\'s Impress Watch that the PS3\'s Cell processor will make the switch to a 65nm manufacturing process in 2007. Shipments of the more efficient chip will make it out later that year.
 
The Cell is in production at IBM\'s Fishkill and Sony\'s Nagasaki fabrication facilities. Currently, the chip is being produced using a 90nm process. Switching to a 65nm process will reduce costs, potentially leading to a price reduction of components that use the chip...

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/712/712522p1.html

[Titan]

Will the chip be just as fast?

[BizioEE]

Will the chip be just as fast?

Yep !

[BizioEE]

Developer Interview: Ninja Theory\'s Marco Salvi Discusses Heavenly Sword\'s High Dynamic Range Lighting
Ninja Theory\'s exotic NAO32 rendering method gets explained by one of the minds that developed it.
By Carl Bender - June 21, 2006

PSINext: As previously discussed, beyond it\'s high quality one of the primary reasons for the use of NAO32 is that it saves bandwidth in a bandwidth-hungry environment.  In the future do you feel RSX will be at a disadvantage to Xenos when it comes to framebuffer effects due to the 128-bit bus and lack of eDRAM?

Marco: Not at all; in fact for many framebuffer effects I believe RSX will have an edge over Xenos.  Don\'t want to go into details, but let me just point out that RSX is connected to two seperate buses, not just one.

PSINext:  After speaking with your Ninja colleagues Dean and Mike on the floor of E3, I\'ve been told that Ninja Theory is presently using SPEs for tasks such as sound, physics, animation, and more.  Since you\'re working on the engine, going forward what sort of performance headroom do you feel is present on Cell?

Marco:  I can\'t give any numbers that would make much sense, but I\'m certain at this time most developers are barely using Cell\'s power.  

We all have to learn how this machine works and how to get the best out of it.  It will take time, but gamers are going to experience some truly amazing stuff.

it\'s very interesting !

http://psinext.e-mpire.com/index.php?categoryid=3&m_articles_articleid=599&PHPSESSID=784800d1964413bf17a3fe11f1c80bc2

I heard that they are aiming for 30 FPS? I prefer 60FPS with less effects, i want to see crispy physics animation.

[BizioEE]

Interesting opinions/speculations about the RSX...

At the following site it is revealed at at least some developers at E3 were powering their PS3 demos with PC hardware utilizing NVIDIA 7900 cards in SLI. The RSX is not officially supposed to be much more than an ordinary *singular* 7800/7900 so I find this very interesting. Basically, the only reason I would think this to be the case is if developers were told the FINAL DevKit which was NOT available at the time of E3 was going to be far more powerful than what they had at the time. If so, developers would have scrambled to get whatever hardware they can to try and make their demos look as good as possible.

An individual on the Metal Gear Solid Forums stated that a friend of his who was a newspaper reporter who attended E3 discovered some of the PS3 developers were utilizing two7950 cards in SLI and one gigabyte of total RAM. To me if this is confirmed then we have another clue that the final RSX was to be something much more than an ordinary slightly modified SINGULAR 7800/7900.

http://www.ninjatheory.com/forums/showthread.php?t=250

AGEIA said something interesting about the PS3 a while ago.

They called the RSX GPU a "GeForce 7900+"
http://www.techzonept.com/showthread.php?t=89459

"If you look at the very high level they are very alike. Both of them are huge parallel engines, have floating point processing units, and control each internal memory. But the difference is also big. For example, Cell does internal data transfer by a ring bus (so it has limited bandwidth). On the other hand, our architecture has far higher (internal data) bandwidth.

But it\'s also true that Cell is relatively suitable architecture for physics processing. In PS3, the GPU is "GeForce 7900+" architecture, but it has Cell. So in PS3 it can do physics in a PPU-like architecture (Cell), not in GPU."

Btw, I just preordered the 60GB model. The price for now sits at 5999SEK thats ~830 USD (with 25% VAT included), you also get a free Blu-Ray movie with the console, The Da Vinci Code.
The price is OUCH but I\'m quite happy otherwise. :shy:

[BizioEE]

Exclusive: PS3Land interviews Fantasy Lab (Now with HD trailers!)

PS3Land: Global Illumination, what is it?

Global Illumination is a method of lighting geometry in computer graphics in which the light that reaches a surface is calculated using both direct light from light sources and indirect reflecting off other surfaces. The result is more realistic and natural looking images. Global illumination complex to compute since light can come from any surface in the virtual world, and any surface can occlude (block) light.

PS3Land: What makes Global Illumination any better than the shading techniques developers are using for todays games? Are there any noticable differences?

The most noticeable difference between global illumination renders and typical lighting techniques used for games is the diffuse inter-reflections. It allows for soft, natural-looking lighting that makes images look realistic and objects really “pop” no matter what materials are rendered.

As I see it there are three alternatives to global illumination.
One approach is to use point and directional lights only and ignore inter-reflections. The result is harsh, unnatural lighting as in the Doom 3 engine.

Another approach is to use lots of area lights. This is the approach taken by Pixar in many of there earlier films and Dreamworks in the movie Shrek. The results can look very good as long as the area lights are properly shadowed. However, it requires placing a lot of lights, and area lights take a lot more computation power to use than point lights, so this technique is not used for real-time applications. Dreamworks added a bounce of indirect lighting in Shrek 2 so they did not need to place so many lights. New films, like Monster House, are using full global illumination.

A third approach is environment lighting, using environment maps or spherical harmonic lighting. Environment lighting is a natural choice for real-time rendering since its predecessor, environment mapping, has been used for years to render shiny materials in real-time. However, diffuse materials need self-shadowing or they look flat and seem to glow in all the wrong places (like in the Jimmy Neutron TV show). Calculating the shadowing (and ideally, diffuse inter-reflections) requires basically the same amount of work as global illumination and is often computed using the same techniques. Therefore, environment lighting is typically only used for real-time applications if radiance transfer information is pre-computed, which is only practical for static scenes.

Another problem with environment lighting is that it is only correct at a single point. It takes a lot of environment maps rendered at different locations (or groups of spherical harmonic coefficients computed from different locations) to properly render objects in a complex scene or game level. Note that all the environment lighting information needs to be re-computed each frame for dynamic environments.

PS3Land: How will the PS3 be able to handle something like GI?

We are well aware that conventional methods for computing global illumination can take hours for typical scenes, even on hardware as powerful as the PS3. However, our technique is extremely efficient and ideal for running on parallel computing hardware. The PS3 is plenty powerful enough to render complex scenes in real-time with global illumination using our technique.

PS3Land: Any personal comments about the Cell processor or RSX graphics Card?

I love the Cell processor. The SPUs are ideal for running our global illumination code, which can also run on the RSX. Having both Cell and RSX gives us a lot of power and flexibility.

PS3Land: Will Fantasy Lab license the Fantasy Engine or Global illumination technology to other game studios or perhaps Sony to use as a middleware program in their line up of dev tools?

We would love to offer our global illumination technology as middleware on the PS3. We are actively looking into that.

PS3Land: In relation to #8, to what extent will the global illumination go on the PS3 hardware? Would something like a high end PC or perhaps the Xbox 360 run GI?

I can say that the PS3 is the very attractive to us, because it is the most powerful hardware that the target audience for our game is likely to own.

PS3Land: Any other words you would like to add whether its about your company or the Fantasy Engine or GI or PS3?

We are very excited about the combination of the PlayStation 3 and our rendering technology. Our artists are able to create game characters and environments that match, and even exceed, their vision of what the character should look like. What we have shown so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Just wait until you see our game!

http://www.ps3land.com/article-529.php

hot...

i even like the lighting they have been doing with madden 07 for xbox360... and if it gets better than that... wow weee