By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Kynes on 29 November 2009
Edit Thread
MikeB said:
Kynes said:

Do you know what I confirm thanks to that thread? That you don't understand what they are talking there. Please read it again and tell me where they say a SPU is better than dedicated hardware doing AA resolve.

Flexibility doesn't equals to high performance. One of the limitations of RSX is that nVidia (unlike ATI since DX9 cards) had fixed AA resolve patterns in it's chips, so you can't create new AA methods/patterns. Doing AA resolve in a SPU is slower than doing it in the dedicated hardware of RSX. The only advantage is that you can chose better patterns, higher number of samples... in non performance critical situations. But AA in SPU is much slower.

Where did I say it is faster per se than having the RSX do anti-aliasing using a different method, the best method to use depends upon the specific game in question anyhow.

I am just saying doing anti-aliasing on the XBox 360 is costly performance-wise rendering in 720p or beyond due to tiling issues. That's why many 360 games don't do full anti-aliasing including top exclusives (despite Microsoft in the past claiming the 360 can do anti-aliasing for "free").

 

You said "To Clarify, the Cell's SPUs can act as very powerful and flexible stream processors. This due to very high internal bandwidth and very high speed dedicated memory available to each SPU.

For example when anti-aliasing is done on the SPU or when processing 7.1 surround audio, small chunks of data is processed at very high speed, just a small part at a time."

That's false, at least regarding AA resolve. You could use Cell to do AA resolve if you're using SPUs to do some other full screen shader filter, as SSAO, you already have the buffer in XDR RAM, as AA resolve, in this scenario, is several times faster than this type of filtering (when you are forced to stream the graphics data to the SPU, doing AA resolve is cheap) The problem is that you won't find this scenario in almost any game, because doing these full screen shader filtering is very costly in a SPU, due to bandwidth limitations.


It seems that you like to quote Beyond3D threads. You can take a look at the resolution and AA method in games thread, you'll find that there are much more games using 720p and AA in X360 than in PS3, exclusives or not, and a lot of PS3 games use quincunx AA, that blurs the entire image with a notable loss in quality:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241