PS3 smoothing beyond that of high-end PC graphics card

[Reasonable]

phxprovost said:

Now that i have reread the article im going to ask for this thread to be deleted. Honestly the entire article is biased and completely made up by the author. and heres why

Interesting, the PS3 was initially designed NOT to have any graphics chip, everything was to be done on the cells.

True

Now, developers are getting around to doing just that, using the cells for all of the graphics work and getting better results...

False

"The PS3 is truly an amazing piece of hardware that is surprising everyone as time passes. Digital Foundry recently conducted an interesting analysis on the tech used in the game Saboteur, which revealed that the PS3 is capable of producing something even a high-end PC graphics card has difficulty with."

The reason PC's have "difficulty" doing this is because the gpu is doing everything from drawing the frame to post production and then pushing it to the screen. In the case of the ps3, you have the RSX drawing the image and then a dedicated SPE doing post production....2 processors working on one frame in sequence. The pc could do it 100 times better if nvidia or ati would release a driver for a dedicated post production processor.

"The Cell in conjunction with the GPU is capable of squeezing out 2.0 trillion floating point operations per second on the fly, which is super-computer worthy and out performs the Xbox 360’s 355 billion floating operation points/second.

No its not, they are maximum theatrical numbers that will never be achieved within a ps3, they are the numbers that could be achieved in a perfect world/perfect test bed environment....IE never going to happen

This is the type of tech running on the latest IBM Blades residing in our maximum security data centers near DC."

Umm no its not. Ibm blades with the I8 Cells are in super computers, not government data centers. Nice try fanboy

"Digital Foundry recently did an analysis showing that the post-processing tech, once thought to be MSAA, on the PS3 apparently is far more advanced than anything seen. Anti-aliasing or edge smoothing has always been a challenge even on the PC front.'

Let me break this down for you. AA on pc is hard because like i said, the GPU is doing everything from start to finish. On the Xbox 360 the gpu has a daughter package that allows for 4xAA to be preformed without any impact to performance...IE native AA on anything you want with no cost. On the ps3, the gpu lacks unified shaders and has no daughter packege...so all it can do is draw an image...thats it, any attempt at anything else comes at a massive performance loss, and that is where the SPE comes in. Devs are just figuring out that an SPE can be used for post processing, but it comes at the cost of an SPE...which means less cpu power for your game....but a prettier game overall.

"The Xbox 360 can do up to 4x MSAA via the built in graphics card. However, the PS3 has an NVIDIA card which really doesn’t do much in the post-processing department as it was initially intended to be left off the console.

True

The Cell processor was originally supposed to handle all graphics processing, but due to concerns that it would be difficult for the developers to program on, a decision was made to incorporate a limited graphics card. "

Sort of True, they didn't want a "limited" gpu, it was the only thing available without crawling to ati and joining the ranks of the xbox

"Sony’s intent was for the developers to utilize the Cell processors eventually leaning off the graphics card crutch. We have seen developers like Naughty Dog who have mostly moved off the graphics card in the PS3 and are now utilizing the SPUs fully in the Cell processor as seen in Uncharted 2. According to DF, the developers for Saboteur also utilized one of the SPUs to do the post-processing work resulting in edge-smoothing beyond the capabilities of a 16x MSAA found on high-end PC graphics card."

you have any proof for that buddy? cause i think its another story

"The PS3 rendition of Pandemic’s The Saboteur is different though. It’s special. It’s trying something new that’s never been seen before on console, or indeed PC, and its results are terrific.

Very True, a dedicated post production processor is a very good idea

In a best-case scenario you get edge-smoothing

True

that is beyond the effect of 16x multi-sampling anti-aliasing, effectively delivering an effect better than the capabilities of high-end GPUs

False

without crippling performance.

True

Compare and contrast with Xbox 360 hardware, which tops out at 4x MSAA.

Yet again, the xbox gets 4x for free, the ps3 has to pay for it with a spe


/end rant

One thing, it's not false about developers using SPUs instead of GPU for graphics on PS3.  The problem is it seems to be mainly first party ones.  Uncharted 2 makes extensive use of the SPUs for graphics, as clearly stated in 'making of' videos and articles directly from the developer.  While the OP is indeed overly optimistic about what this means, there seems no doubt that the best scenario on the PS3 is to use and mix of SPU/GPU for the graphics.  This is foreign to many developers, particularly third party developers, so they tend to stick to CPU/GPU paridigam for 360/PS3 which hampers getting best results on the PS3.

So he's not being inaccurate when talking about this capability - I'd just argue that I don't see a huge amount of evidence most developers are getting up to speed with using the SPUs properly, although in theory the latest SDKs and Sony support is now getting this type of capability better visibility.