Since the Cell is really powerfull, can it also do the functions of the RSX..or at least help? Maybe this is how we are going to get 1080p 60fps games...

I read that Sony was going to make the Cell do everything but decided in the end to put the RSX into the PS3 to handle graphics...but..what if they programmed the Cell to help out the RSX or to replace it? They got rid of the PS2 chips in the PS3...anything is possible...but a dedicated GPU is always better right?

but a dedicated GPU is always better right?
Usually yes. It's like having one person building a house all by them self. He may be better at mixing mortar and laying down brick, but another guy may be a master electrician. Then you got a guy doing the plumbing, etc...

A separate sound processor, CPU, and GPU is a logical way to relieve the burden or processing a hi-def game from each other.

Just because the f@h stats are in PS3's favor doesn't mean it's the ultimate computing machine. Stanford has already stated an ATi GPU will be faster than a CELL when it comes to what they need for raw number crunching. ;>

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070326-why-the-playstation-3-owns-the-pc-in-fh.html

The way I understand it, Cell already plays an integral role in graphics reproduction, not just standard floating point ops. IBM and Sony developed them to have a mutual relationship, of sorts. If Cell pre-processes a lot of the material destined for RSX, the throughput is streamlined and should increase performance exponentially.

Unfortunately, there aren't a any real concrete numbers that I've been able to find and the manufacturers have been tight-lipped about it. Once their new devkit is released, I think we'll start to see more games take advantage of this powerful combo.

Usually yes. It's like having one person building a house all by them self. He may be better at mixing mortar and laying down brick, but another guy may be a master electrician. Then you got a guy doing the plumbing, etc...

A separate sound processor, CPU, and GPU is a logical way to relieve the burden or processing a hi-def game from each other.

Just because the f@h stats are in PS3's favor doesn't mean it's the ultimate computing machine. Stanford has already stated an ATi GPU will be faster than a CELL when it comes to what they need for raw number crunching. ;>

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070326-why-the-playstation-3-owns-the-pc-in-fh.html

But what if they put in two Cell processors....in lets say the next Playstation...One main at 6.5 GHZ with 8 SPEs like in the current one and then one dedicated for graphics but with 8 full cores and a 6.5 GHZ speed and 2 GB of unified ram...

Hey i am just getting carried away...

What i wanted to know if the Cell could help out the RSX or vise versa.

The Cell isn't that powerful, as in, not powerful enough to not even need the RSX. However, the Cell is the most powerful processor on the market, and it's design makes it a very capable graphics processor. Actually the ps3 was originally designed to have two Cell chips ins it, one as the cpu, and one slightly modified as the gpu. However, this would've been far to expensive (let's make the ps3 $700, shall we?), so at the last minute they ran to nVidia, hence the RSX.

However, once devs begin using the Cell to help with graphics capabilites (which it is very good at) we will start to see some amazing games. The Cell's graphics capabilites have already been shown in Heavenly Sword. Sadly, the RSX is similar to older nVidia cards (all cards pre-8000 series, really) in that they cannot run AA and HDR at the same time. As such, Ninja Theory were forced to use one spe of the Cell to create a software version of HDR. More things like this will be done in the future, and when things like procedural textures start coming to fruition, and i can easily see the number-crunching SPEs handling that better than the gpu.

This is why i am mad that so many games are going multiplatform. They will use the same old cpu/gpu formula so that they will work on both the 360 and ps3. Just think about how amazing DMC4 could've been. :(


In regards to the last minute RSX, there have been some contending that the RSX may actually be weaker than the Xenos (the 360 gpu) due to its lack of unified shaders. Well, not so much less powerful, as less efficient, as the RSX's shaders may not always be used, where as the versatility of unified shaders means they can be all active at all times to speed up processes. The RSX's 550mhz clocked core, among other things, show it has plenty of power. Actually, this argument has gained so much credibility as of late simply because nVidia has yet to release actually specs for the RSX, and amidst rumors (released by none other than MS's Major Nelson) that the clocked speed was downgraded to 500 mhz just before launch, people began to assume, and bad things became of it. Most technical analysts stick with the orignal specs for the RSX and agree that it is the more powerful of the two, but that they are so close, it doesn't really matter. This is where the Cell comes in to give the ps3 its power boost.

However, where the Cell really comes in handy (thanks to those number-crunching SPEs) is physics. It can handle very complex physics calculations with ease, and when devs start really trying to push particle physics, the ps3's true capabilities will start to show. Supposedly, at least from what i have heard about the PlayStation Edge tech demo at gdc (that used KZ2), the new Killzone is going to be the flagship ps3 title in terms of physics. Remember the amazing smoke effects from the cgi trailer? Hopefully, those wil be a reality thanks to the Cell.

Hell, jsut look at Resistance. In the single-player, you'd have 20 chimera, in addition to many of your own guys, running around all at once, alond with tons of smoke and other particle effects. People flying al over the place. Explosions everywhere. The physics were absolutely amazing for a launch title. Hell, for any title. Just because there was SO much going on at once, you know?

As a testament to the Cell's number crunshing power (which is great for physics applications) check out the folding@home (http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats) stats. On average around 30,000 ps3s running f@h has over doubled the amount of Tflops. they are achieving. That's amazing!

Yes you do. Without it you don't have dynamic lighting, realistic shadows, real-time HD rendering
and all that type of stuff. Cell is used only for AI, complex computing, physics, and some rendering.

Here are some good links to see the Cell in action graphically.

RapidShare has some interesting stuff; make sure you scroll down to see the crowd control video. (http://www.rapidmind.net/case-studies.php)

This is an off-screen graphical video demo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O2YWumQNas) of Sony's new development toolkit called EDGE that's free to anyone (think independent or home brew games). The interesting thing is that right now it is ONLY using the Cell processor to put up the graphics in real-time. That's 768 people and 50 cars in 1 screen at 720P with AA turned on... no RSX graphic help was used at all. It was made with two programmers and one artist in two weeks.

http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u80/mohammadnb/1.jpg
http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u80/mohammadnb/2.jpg
http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u80/mohammadnb/4.jpg

Here are some good links to see the Cell in action graphically.

RapidShare has some interesting stuff; make sure you scroll down to see the crowd control video. (http://www.rapidmind.net/case-studies.php)

This is an off-screen graphical video demo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O2YWumQNas) of Sony's new development toolkit called EDGE that's free to anyone (think independent or home brew games). The interesting thing is that right now it is ONLY using the Cell processor to put up the graphics in real-time. That's 768 people and 50 cars in 1 screen at 720P with AA turned on... no RSX graphic help was used at all. It was made with two programmers and one artist in two weeks.

http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u80/mohammadnb/1.jpg
http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u80/mohammadnb/2.jpg
http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u80/mohammadnb/4.jpg


Damn i did not know that...so Playstation Edge is where its at....Now I know...The cell is once bad mother fo!!!

Here are some good links to see the Cell in action graphically.

RapidShare has some interesting stuff; make sure you scroll down to see the crowd control video. (http://www.rapidmind.net/case-studies.php)

This is an off-screen graphical video demo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O2YWumQNas) of Sony's new development toolkit called EDGE that's free to anyone (think independent or home brew games). The interesting thing is that right now it is ONLY using the Cell processor to put up the graphics in real-time. That's 768 people and 50 cars in 1 screen at 720P with AA turned on... no RSX graphic help was used at all. It was made with two programmers and one artist in two weeks. I don't think that was done only with the Cell. I can't make out the audio too clearly but he even mentions something about setting up triangles for the RSX.

Uh, yeah of course we need the RSX, cell is a CPU that will get spanked by pretty much any recent GPU when it comes to graphics.

Most technical analysts stick with the orignal specs for the RSX and agree that it is the more powerful of the two, but that they are so close, it doesn't really matter. This is where the Cell comes in to give the ps3 its power boost.

Hmmm

read up about the Xenos and the RSX here

"Now the 360’s GPU is one impressive piece of work and I’ll say from the get go it’s much more advanced than the PS3’s GPU so I’m not sure where to begin"

http://dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=7

I don't think that was done only with the Cell. I can't make out the audio too clearly but he even mentions something about setting up triangles for the RSX.

Hmmm, reports I've read say that it's all Cell right now and RSX support will be added later. Even the Linux OS on the PS3 can't access the RSX right now, so perhaps its an anti-piracy thing, I dunno. Of course I don't know anything for sure... just telling you what I've heard.

Hmmm

read up about the Xenos and the RSX here

"Now the 360’s GPU is one impressive piece of work and I’ll say from the get go it’s much more advanced than the PS3’s GPU so I’m not sure where to begin"

http://dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=7
Well, that takes into account the downgraded specs for the RSX, but i'm pretty sure they haven't been downgraded. I'll do some more research.

Edited: Ah, so apparenly it was confirmed at TGS '06. Now why the hell would they downgrade it?

That scene was not rendered with a single Cell processor. If I recall correctly, they used a cluster of 3-7 cells. Originally, Sony wanted the Cell processor to do all the CPU and GPU functions in the PS3. unfortunately , it didn't come out nearly as powerful as they expected so they turned to Nvidia for a GPU.

Power is a difficult thing to measure. If developers use both system's graphics card to the max, the Xbox 360 would probably come out on top. Using the eDRAM, it could gain 4AX practically free. Both GPUs have features which still haven't been exploited by developers. When you factor in the Cell processor, the graphical power differences between the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 will probably be non-existent.

That scene was not rendered with a single Cell processor. If I recall correctly, they used a cluster of 3-7 cells. That's a different tech demo you're thinking of:

http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.php/2007/03/07/cell-power-at-gdc-2007/

That's a different tech demo you're thinking of:

http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.php/2007/03/07/cell-power-at-gdc-2007/

Ah, you're right. My mistake.

I'm still reading through a technical document but from what I have read so far, certain tasks require the Cell and RSX to collaborate while the Xbox 360's GPU can handle such tasks by itself. So while the Cell processor may be more powerful, some of that power goes to help the GPU do things it doesn't do well. This is probably why some 360 ports had issues, the developers didn't know how to properly use Cell to offset the GPU. They are not saying RSX is bad, it just appears to be a bit less flexible.

Sony's new dev tool should fix this though. Can't wait to see the results :D

Thats nice.

Now just show me a game that makes use of that prettyness.

Thats nice.

Now just show me a game that makes use of that prettyness.

Although not an exact answer to your question.....Motorstorm is pretty amazing. I also read a great article about Unchartered waters: Drakes fortune in Game Informer mag. The game sounds like it should deliver some of that prettiness you speak of. In short, from what I read it seems that dedicated and top notch devs that are developing games for the PS3 from the ground up are starting to see some phenominal results.

We shall see in the coming 18 months, but it looks promising.

Well, that takes into account the downgraded specs for the RSX, but i'm pretty sure they haven't been downgraded. I'll do some more research.

Edited: Ah, so apparenly it was confirmed at TGS '06. Now why the hell would they downgrade it?
the downgrade was a mere 50mhz on each, which is not a significant downgrade by any means.

that gotfrag article is biased. ask any computer tech or dev, and they will all say that Xenos only has an edge on RSX, not "much more advanced". and where RSX lacks, it makes up for it with the ability to work with Cell. Xenos may be using a more advanced architecture (unified arch.) but it is not head and shoulders above RSX.

Official RSX specs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX_%27Reality_Synthesizer%27

The RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' graphics processing unit is a graphics chip design co-developed by NVIDIA and Sony for the PlayStation 3 computer console.


[edit] Technical Details
Core Clock at 500 MHz
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines
136 Shader operations per clock
Pixel Shader 3.0
8 Rendering Pipelines (ROP)
300 million transistors[1]
74.8 billion shader operations per second
33 billion dot products per second
1.2 billion Vertices per second
Over 275 million polygons per second (polygon count and vertice count differ)
128-bit pixel precision offers rendering of scenes with high dynamic range imaging
128-bit memory bus width to 256-MiB GDDR3 VRAM
20.8 GB/sec bandwidth bitrate
S3TC [1]


Central processing unit
Main article: Cell microprocessor
The PS3's 3.2 GHz Cell processor, developed jointly by Sony, Toshiba and IBM ("STI"), is an implementation to dynamically assign physical processor cores to do different types of work independently. It has a PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and six accessible 3.2 GHz Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). A seventh runs in a special mode and is dedicated to aspects of the OS and security, and an eighth is disabled to improve production yields. The PPE, SPEs and other elements ("units") are connected via an Element Interconnect Bus which serves to connect all of the units in a ring-style bus. The PPE has a 512-KiB level 2 cache and one VMX vector unit. Each SPE is a RISC processor with 128-bit SIMD GPRs and superscalar functions. Each SPE contains 256 KiB of non-cached memory (local storage, "LS") that is shared by program code and work data. SPEs may access more data in the main memory using DMA. The floating point performance of the whole system (CPU + GPU) is reported to be 2 TFLOPS.[104] PlayStation 3's Cell CPU achieves 204 GFLOPS single precision float and 15 GFLOPS double precision. The PS3 has 256 MiB of Rambus XDR DRAM, clocked at CPU die speed.

The Cell microprocessor allows programmers to assign SPEs different work by running individual programs on them. Programmers may also arrange data flow in different ways, for example using parallel, pipelined or streamed processing data flow models. As an example for parallel processing performance gains, one core could work on decoding and multiplexing audio, another core may perform computations on realistic projectiles ballistics, while another might govern the activities of the main character. The programmer still has three more cores not yet assigned but the only remaining tasks are to collect the work performed and display the results on the screen. Since the program code on each SPE core is executed from its local store memory, much more Element Interconnect Bus bandwidth is available to transfers of work data. An obvious downside to this is that there is a 256-KiB size restriction on SPE programs, which may present a challenge for certain programming tasks.


Graphics processing unit
Main article: RSX 'Reality Synthesizer'
The Graphics Processing Unit is based on the NVIDIA G70 (previously known as NV47) architecture, which focuses on maximizing per-pixel computation in favor of raw pixel output. The GPU will make use of 256 MiB GDDR3 VRAM clocked at 650 MHz with an effective transmission rate of 1.3 GHz and the XDR main memory via the CPU.

the downgrade was a mere 50mhz on each, which is not a significant downgrade by any means.

that gotfrag article is biased. ask any computer tech or dev, and they will all say that Xenos only has an edge on RSX, not "much more advanced". and where RSX lacks, it makes up for it with the ability to work with Cell. Xenos may be using a more advanced architecture (unified arch.) but it is not head and shoulders above RSX.
How is the article biased? Have you read it? It doesn't sound biased at all to me. He sounds like he knows what he is talking about, and not just relaying information. I'm sure the guy is not just pulling numbers out of nowhere. Do you have any information to discredit his information or findings?

How is the article biased? Have you read it? It doesn't sound biased at all to me. He sounds like he knows what he is talking about, and not just relaying information. I'm sure the guy is not just pulling numbers out of nowhere. Do you have any information to discredit his information or findings?
well, everyone is biased, even if they say they aren't. keep in mind that this is just one opinion. it does seem like he knows what hes talking about, and i'm not even going to attempt to disprove him myself, but the source of my info is from devs that regularly post in beyond3d message boards. there have been plenty of discussions of the hardware in the PS3 and 360 if you head to beyond3d.

A Cell processor will not beat a dedicated GPU.
The entire CELL processor is a big lump of co-processors, i am not even sure one could label this processor a multi-core cpu, all it has is one cpu with a bunch of math processing units.

A Cell processor will not beat a dedicated GPU.
The entire CELL processor is a big lump of co-processors, i am not even sure one could label this processor a multi-core cpu, all it has is one cpu with a bunch of math processing units.

LOL.... :rolleyes:

The cell is more powerful than people give it credit. In time I think the cell processor in the PS3 will be able to calculate the answer to the ultimate Question of Life, the universe, and everything. I quit using folding@home to dedicate more time to this.
When the answer is revealed to be 42, then PS4 should be able to figure out what the question was...

:)

The PS4 will be able to power the first version crude version of the Holodeck.

The PS9 will be able the calculations required in the first crude transporters.

As a testament to the Cell's number crunshing power (which is great for physics applications) check out the folding@home (http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats) stats. On average around 30,000 ps3s running f@h has over doubled the amount of Tflops. they are achieving. That's amazing!If you think the Cell is fast, you should see folding@home performance of ATI's GPUs. ATI's current graphics processors -- a mix of mid-range and high-end cards -- are achieving an average of 400% (4x) the folding@home performance of the PS3's Cell, and ATI's next-generation processors coming mid-year are expected to offer up to 12x the folding@home performance of the Cell.

It's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, because the GPU client doesn't support as many operations as the PS3 client, just as the PS3 client doesn't support all the operations of the PC client. More information on the Cell and its folding@home performance compared to other architectures can be found in this article (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070326-why-the-playstation-3-owns-the-pc-in-fh.html) at Ars.

LOL.... :rolleyes:


Why the Rolling Eyes and LOL? He is basically right.

If you think the Cell is fast, you should see folding@home performance of ATI's GPUs. ATI's current graphics processors -- a mix of mid-range and high-end cards -- are achieving an average of 400% (4x) the folding@home performance of the PS3's Cell, and ATI's next-generation processors coming mid-year are expected to offer up to 12x the folding@home performance of the Cell.

It's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, because the GPU client doesn't support as many operations as the PS3 client, just as the PS3 client doesn't support all the operations of the PC client. More information on the Cell and its folding@home performance compared to other architectures can be found in this article (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070326-why-the-playstation-3-owns-the-pc-in-fh.html) at Ars.

Yep the Ati GPU is one bad mother!

People need to realize that specialization and design is the critical component to the effectiveness of the outcome. There is no best choice for all purposes - such a unit would have to be superior by many magnitudes (think from the future by some margin) to beat all the current specialists at their own games (or tasks specifically suited to their architectures.

The better aligned the task is with the unit being tested, the better the results. That doesn't mean the unit will shine at another task of totally different nature.

We see this everywhere, sports cars are very poor utility vehicles. Long distance runners tend to be very poor at sprinting. Even in seemingly closely contested venues where one would expect to find a great deal of alignment there exists substantial chasms - most powerlifters (benchpress, squat, deadlift) make very mediocre Olympic weightlifters (clean & jerk and the snatch) - the difference here is raw force vs. power which holds a speed component to force generation (ironically it is the weightlifters who generate much more power than the powerlifters who's specialty to force).

This is specialization, the demands are different. Largely anyone with a human body can participate in most any sport but to compete at a high level let alone dominate that sport requires a very specific set of genetic predispositions as well as dedication, psychology, and training. This is a mirror of all things including processors and their architecture.