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Forums - Sony - GOW III devs: SPUs are faster than you think

monlosez on 19 May 2009

GOW III devs: SPUs are faster than you think

God of War III

Tuesday, 07 Apr 2009 17:22
The team behind God of War III, Sony Santa Monica, explain that the PlayStation 3's SPU processors are much faster than many developers think they are. In their GDC '09 keynote, titled Practical SPU Programming in God of War III, Jim Tilander and Vassily Filippov of Sony Santa Monica detailed their use of the PlayStation 3's SPUs.
The Cell processor features one main processor, PPU, and 8 specialist processors, SPUs, one of which is turned off for optimisation reasons, with another used for the PlayStation 3's OS.
In their keynote, Sony Santa Monica explained that the SPUs aren't actually coprocessors but are full general purpose processors that can handle code directly lifted from the PPU. Moreover, they aren't just fast, but they are super fast and with a little bit of help they can run code at unbelievable speeds.
In fact, the God of War III team rely on the SPUs to accelerate both the PlayStation 3's GPU (RSX) and the PPU. They then detailed the systems running on the SPUs, which include animation, cloth, collision, procedural textures, culling, shadows, push buffer generation, meta tasks, geometry conditioning, and sound. Indeed, most (if not all) of the heavy lifting is left to the SPUs.

The team concluded their talk by reiterating that developers must use the parallel nature of the PlayStation 3 and not treat SPUs as a special case, since they are much faster than you think they are.

http://www.gamezine.co.uk/news/game-types/action/gow-iii-devs-spus-are-faster-than-you-think-$1286294.htm



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sunil247 on 19 May 2009

Cool... GoW gonna run at a constant 60 fsp?




Xen on 19 May 2009

1 SPU/1 task?

Is that it?

whoa.



twingo on 19 May 2009
kowenicki said:
here we go again....

"much faster than you think" lol. how vague is that statement!?

 

whats that, do i sense fear.

Sony Santa Monica are the top team in the industry as far as pushing hardware, maybe you are just scared that their game will crap all over games from your fav console.

 

 



SleepWaking on 19 May 2009
twingo said:
kowenicki said:
here we go again....

"much faster than you think" lol. how vague is that statement!?

 

whats that, do i sense fear.

Sony Santa Monica are the top team in the industry as far as pushing hardware, maybe you are just scared that their game will crap all over games from your fav console.

 

 

What the hell does that mean?? I'm sure if the Ps3 get better games then the 360 from now on it will be his  fav console, he has both anyway why would he be afraid of something??

 



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largedarryl on 19 May 2009
twingo said:
kowenicki said:
here we go again....

"much faster than you think" lol. how vague is that statement!?

 

whats that, do i sense fear.

Sony Santa Monica are the top team in the industry as far as pushing hardware, maybe you are just scared that their game will crap all over games from your fav console.

 

 

Mayb GOW3 may be able too, but if the game releases with as much bloom as I've seen recently, Sony Santa Monica will lose tons of my respect.



PullusPardus on 19 May 2009

kratos can travel through space confirmed.



hunter_alien on 19 May 2009
twingo said:
kowenicki said:
here we go again....

"much faster than you think" lol. how vague is that statement!?

 

whats that, do i sense fear.

Sony Santa Monica are the top team in the industry as far as pushing hardware, maybe you are just scared that their game will crap all over games from your fav console.

 

 

 

Agreed... if anyone, they can trully show what the PS3 is capable off... GoW3 will probably look amazing when released, and if they make a fourth one at the end of this generation Im expecting it to be the game that will use the system at its fullest ;)



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NJ5 on 19 May 2009

I read that PDF file. They're pipelining the rendering through the SPUs, which adds one more frame of lag.

It's a sort of a cheap way of exploiting multicore programming. Not necessarily a method that can be scaled to more cores.

Here is what this means:

1- Ages ago, when GPUs weren't used, a game frame went from the CPU to screen in one step.

2- With GPUs, usually frames go through the CPU to the GPU, while the CPU starts calculating the next frame. Then when the GPU finishes processing the frame, it sends it to the screen. Compared to step 1, this introduces one more frame of lag, without making programming more complicated since the GPU and CPU are working on separate frames. This is called pipelining

3- With multicore, you can go the hard way (using several cores simultaneously to calculate one frame), or you can go the easy way, which is to pipeline things further. So there are actually three stages for each frame (CPU->SPUs->GPU), which adds one more frame of lag.



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BMaker11 on 19 May 2009

enter: "I'm sick of devs talking about stuff they know about because my lack of knowledge on the topic strikes fear in my fanboy side"