Meathands on 11 March 2007
Washimul, I don't expect you to actually understand this but I'm bored so what the hell. Maybe you should read the links you post:
Linked Article said:
Using IBM’s scalable iRT rendering technology, the PS3 is able to decompose each frame into manageable work regions and dynamically distribute them to blades or other PS3s for rendering.
This is not a single PS3 rendering to the screen. This is a Cell processor working as a job manager for a render farm which is handling the rendering.
Barry Minor (one of the three guys working on the renderer) said:
KapN, Each PS3 only has 6 SPEs available under Linux so at 1080p resolution it would take around 15 PS3s to render this scene at 30 fps.
Again this is assuming the PS3's are doing nothing but acting as a render farm. No game running just rendering a static scene and it would still take 15 of them.
Barry Minor said:
The 3dsMax ray-tracer is a very generalized renderer designed for image quality and while the output iRT and 3dsMax images were nearly identical in this test the 3dsMax renderer is capable of much higher image quality. Autodesk is paying a huge price for their processor agnostic coding style.
You are using this 68 minute Max render time without any understanding of the context of that number. Max's default scanline renderer is very slow. It isn't optimized to run on any specific hardware and has to be compatible with every possible shader structure that an artist throws at it. There are plug-in renderers for Max that can massively reduce render time if you are willing to give up image quality options and purchase specific CPU hardware, which is exactly what Barry's team are doing with the PS3.
Washinul said:
pc cores could do raycasting (to a slight extent)...........
In addition to not understanding the article it would be a good idea to understand the terms you are using. Raycasting isn't something to be boasting about. Wolf3D released back in '92 on the PC was a raycasting engine. Raycasting and Raytracing are not synonymous.
If you really are interesting in learning and not pimping a specific console then start by reading these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raycasting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing
