| MikeB said: @ nightsurge The PS3's only real advantage is the Cell and the extra storage capacity. The Cell is not exactly the best processor for gaming tasks, though, and the blu-ray drive/disc has it's disadvantages as well, as described in the article. Although everything has its stronger and weaker points, the Cell is most excellent for gaming (just looking at what kind of systems are running on the SPUs for various games already makes this pretty evident). Blu-Ray disc is far more modern technology and compared to DVD provides mainly advantages in this regard. Of course it's new and different, thus requiring different care than was implemented for many legacy game engines. The Wii for example has the advantage of being very similar to the GameCube, it does not make the Wii a high spec console, but it allows developers to move over and enhance GameCube optimised game engines fairly easily. If there was no GameCube before the Wii launched, this would require far more effort from such developers. |
To back that point up, here are some examples from a GDC 2009 dev slide on PS3 performance.
Large blur w.r.t. depth
- RSX alone: 15 ms+
- 1.5-2ms on SPU + 3 ms on GPU = 4.5ms to 5ms (3x speed up)
------------------------------------
SSAO:
GPU: 10+ms
2 SPUs: 6ms
---------------------------
Deferred Lighting on SPUs:
- 3 shadow casting lights, 100 point lights
2x MSAA, 720p
- Lighting performed per sample
- Apply tone mapping on SPU
Virtually free
- Performance: > 60 fps, 3 SPUs for 11ms each
- No MSAA: 2 SPUs for 11ms
-----------------------------
Volumetric Lighting:
- Effect is a bit too slow to be practical on GPU: ~5ms
- Do it on SPU instead
- Parallelises with GPU easily
- Takes ~11 ms on 1 SPU
--------------------------
Conclusion:
- New additions to your toolbox:
- Tile-based classification techniques on SPU
- Deferred lighting on SPU
- Texture sampling on SPU
- Rendering is no longer just a GPU problem
- Use general purpose nature of the SPU to your advantage
Here is the link to the developers' GDC PyreEngine (Deferred Lighting and Post Processing) presentation. The PhyreEngine is available to ALL developers.
Nightsurge needs to start researching. I wonder if he thinks that presentation is just "Sony lies", as if developers could make games on false numbers.
