| MikeB said: @ KruzeS hey, all we researchers have to boost our stuff, even if we don't have a money stance in it, so why not Sony?) Who do you prefer to do the research, Microsoft or Nintendo? Of course it's parties like Sony, IBM, universities and PS3 game engine developers who lead the way! |
I knew as soon as I posted that, that there would be some research paper where someone has experimented with running pixel shaders on the Cell. So let me revise my statement. The Cell can run pixel shaders, but it would probably not be wise to ask it to do so.
I read the white paper, and what's striking about it to me is that instead of comparing the full pixel shader on RSX to their hybrid implementation on PS3, they compared it to a GPU implementation on a PC. It seems strange to me that when the purpose of your paper (and indeed, your conclusion) is to show that the Cell can speed up shader work on a PS3, that you would fail to show that the Cell can speed up shader work on a PS3!
Furthermore, the test has the CPU and GPU running nothing but the specific shader they have in mind. The CPU isn't running a game engine! It's not doing AI for hundreds of entities, it's not running physics, it's not doing anything except running this shader. The GPU isn't being asked to render a game world with lots of other shaders involved, plus a few shadows, it's rendering one dandelion or one tree with monochromatic color. Kruse pretty much already said this, in any real application, you're going to be allocating resources for more than one task, and consuming 5 SPEs and tons of memory bus bandwidth to pass all this data around is not going to be the best use of your resources.
