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PlayStation (Games)

NVIDIA Interview on the PS3 69

Posted by Zonk from the new-consoles-equate-to-teh-shiny dept.
Hack Jandy writes "NVIDIA will be the graphics provider for the next generation Sony Playstation 3. Xbitlabs got an interview with the corporate marketing director at NVIDIA to grab a few more tidbits concerning the next generation console. Some particular highlights; the PS3 will have a graphics engine an echelon higher than the GeForce 6xxx cards today ("most powerful GPU that we've ever created actually") and took NVIDIA over 2 years to design."
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NVIDIA Interview on the PS3 More

NVIDIA Interview on the PS3

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  • Most powerful... whoopie. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by keiferb ( 267153 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @03:19PM (#11434649) Homepage
    Of -course- it's the most powerful one they've created to date.... it's the one they haven't yet released. How often do you hear a company trumpeting their latest non-groundbreaking technology?

    • And no doubt, by the time the PS3 ships, PCs will have Bigger, Faster, Better GPUs in them by then...

      • Why do you need a GPU in the graphics card, if it has 4 cell processors?

        • Re:Most powerful... whoopie. (Score:4, Informative)

          by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @04:14PM (#11435237) Journal
          That's right, buy the hype....

          General purpose processors can't be as good at graphics as graphics cards, the optimizations are mutually exclusive in a lot of ways, especially in the physical world. If they are, virtually by definition they aren't very good CPUs.

          This isn't going to change. Searching a string for the next occurance of "</bleh>" isn't going to be well done by a GPU, but CPUs have to do that all the time and you can parallelize to your hearts content, but that need in the real world isn't going away.

          Despite the centralization trends towards CPUs, I expect we'll always have some form of GPU, right up to the day it's specialized to generate direct neural input to our simulated minds. We'll always want the extra performance and it is likely to always consist of highly specialized computations that have mutually exclusive optimizations to general purpose CPUs.

          • I guess you haven't heard of the wheel of reincarnation [retrologic.com]. GPUs and CPUs have diverged and re-merged many times before.

            • But never with a consumer market for the devices. You need realtime graphics of maximal quality and speed, you need a GPU. I am fully aware of that wheel, but it isn't a law of nature, not even on par with Moore's law, it has to be analysed on a case-by-case basis [slashdot.org]. (See, told you I knew about it. :-) )

              GPUs win big by being years ahead of what the CPU could do. People aren't going to stop wanting realtime maximal-quality graphics, and GPUs aren't going to stop being ahead of what your CPU could do by years
          • My question -- will ps3 have a powerful enough CPU to do the kind of AI/physics/pixel shaders/whatever else we throw at it that is not directly related to turning polys into pixels? Because we don't want another PS2 -- like running Linux on a video card...
            • Actually, another ps2 is exactly what they (and 99.9% of their customers) want. Who fuckin cares if it runs linux? Nobody wants to actually use linux on their ps3, it's just a "because it's there" sorta thing - and if it's easy, what's the point?
          • Lets just assume for a second that the hype in the previously posted article on cell processors is not as much hype as it is fact. I understand custom hardware will usually perform more quickly than a software only combo. But to the speeds that these Cell processors can attain (remember it all breaks down to the same muladds, dot3s, matrix multiplies, that both of these types of hardware specialize in), about all they would need would be a video buffer and a texel/pixel filler. Keep the rest simple. If
            • Additionally, I would love to get rid of the friggin' annoying graphics card with GPU on it design. Where you can't even get any kind of standard interface to it without going through their stupid drivers. I would love to have a regular video card (that only lays out pixels on my screen, you know what video cards used to do), just get a computer with a cell processor, and run a nice open source OpenGL implementation on top of that. This idea would scale up as far as they want to take it. Upgrading chips
        • http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.htm l

          Very good read.
          • That article is why I asked the question. Since, theoretically, this would be all we needed.
            • Obviously you didn't read it all. Basically, it has to do with the type of processing that the APUs and GPU do.

              While both are primarily concerned with vector processing, the Cell is suited more for general purpose computing than a GPU is, hence the GPU will be better at doing what GPU's do best: rendering media/graphics.

              Below is copied directly from the part of the whole article that deals with "Cell vs GPU":

              The PC Retaliates: Cell V's GPU

              The PC does have a weapon with which to respond, the GPU (Gra

              • Are you kidding me? The little chunk of text you just posted just proves my point. Here I will quote your quote.

                GPUs will provide the only viable competition to the Cell but even then for a number of reasons I don't think they will be able to catch the Cell.
                • You're taking everything out of context you stupid fuck.

                  They will provide the "only viable competition". I never said they were going to be completely better, just better suited to GPU specific stuff than GENERAL PURPOSE stuiff.

                  That does not mean that it will beat a Cell at all, it simply means it may be more effective at operations geared towards what GPUs do, though that does not mean it will win in a head to head competition of brute force, in fact it can't.

                  Have a nice day retard, go memorize your ti
              • Additionally, those APUs do the exact same work as a GPU. They both specialize in number crunching, matrix operation, sin, cos, etc. And they both do it in a pipelined highly scaleable way. So whats the difference.
                • the SAME.

                  APUs are geared more toward GENERAL PURPOSE processing.

                  • Those APUs are not geared towards general purpose processing, they are vector processors. Just like those perty GPUs:

                    Each Cell contains 8 APUs. An APU is a self contained vector processor which acts independently from the others. They contain 128 X 128 bit registers, there are also 4 floating point units capable of 32 GigaFlops and 4 Integer units capable of 32 GOPS (Billions of Operations per Second). The APUs also include a small 128 Kilobyte local memory instead of a cache, there is also no virtual me

                    • Apparently you're not interested in learning anything here, so go fucking kill yourself please.
                    • Apparently you do not have an argument to bring so you're claiming nobody understands you.
                      The point was that yes, a GPU is specuialized but an APU is specialized towards pretty much the same thing. There might be minor differences left but if the Cell is as powerful as claimed to be it'll make up for those minor differences by vastly superior processing power at lower cost. The difference between an APU and a GPU is much smaller than the difference between an x86 CPU and a GPU.

                      But all you're going to say i
                    • and that is the entire point of what I was saying to him, he was trying to say there was NONE.

                      Does not matter WHAT the difference is.

                      I see you like to argue just to make yourself feel more "right" too.
    • heheh, you've heard of the iPod Shuffle right?

      HAHAH, I kill me.

      Yes I do own an iPod.
  • Not mentioned in the article is that Sony and NVidia have entered into a strategic partnership with Hammacher Schlemmer [hammacher.com]

  • PS1/PS2 compatibility? (Score:3, Informative)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @03:47PM (#11434916) Homepage
    I'm presuming PS2 software compatibility is there. There was _no_ mention of how this is achieved technically or licencing.

    I don't know what GPU is in the PS2, but I thought that GPU emulation is an order of magnitude harder than CPU emulation. The primatives are different, particularly around vector operations.

    • Re:PS1/PS2 compatibility? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by crow ( 16139 )
      Just a guess, but if they never exposed the internals of the graphics hardware to the developers, and instead had them use libraries, then the libraries can be re-writen to use the new hardware. In other words, it's just like switching graphics cards on a PC--you replace the driver, and your software doesn't really care (expect for a change in performance).
    • With as much power as they're bragging about in these 4 Cell processors the PS3 is supposed to have, it sounds like they could just run a PS2 emulator to run the games without a performance loss.
    • Here you go... http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell1.htm l [blachford.info]

      A seemingly intelligent take on cellular processing.
      • That explaination scares me. Massive parallel processing with no abstraction? Yes, sure, less abstraction is faster but there's a reason all of these abstraction layers were developed in first place, some of which include faster and more bug-free programming and easier porting. Sounds like all of these layers will have to be reimplemented from scratch and multiplatform games will be almost impossible on the PS3. With MS having so much momentum the devs might decide the PS3 isn't worth the hassle and they'll
    • I don't think that GPU emulation is as complex as CPU emulation. We are still using textured triangles as the most common primitive by far. The PS2 GPU (The Graphics Synthesizer) also has a fixed function pipeline which simplifies things a lot.

      Examples of GPU emulation:

      The PS2 emulates the PS1 GPU by including hardware which translates the old drawing commands to the GS.

      Several N64 emulators implement the texture operations of the N64 GPU as pixel shaders.

      The hardest thing to emulate on the PS2 is proba
    • No need to emulate; they'll probably accomplish backwards compatability by putting a PS2 in there.

      The original PS1 chips were eventually consolidated onto a single processor, which ultimately became the processor used to control I/O for the controllers and Memory cards in the PS2. When a PS1 game is inserted, the I/O controller simply takes over and starts doing the work, and I presume I/O duties are handled by the main PS2 CPU.

      The PS2 CPU and EE have since been combined into a single, lower-power versio

  • ..times infinity. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The more press releases I read, the more they sound like playground arguments:

    NvidI0t: I've got the fastest hardware evar!
    atiR0x0r: Nuh-uh, mine's two times faster!
    NvidI0t: Mine's times two plus one!
    atiR0x0r: ..times two plus two!
    NvidI0t: ..times infinity!
    atiR0x0r: ..times infinity plus one! ..etc, etc, etc.

    They almost need two types of press releases - one for the other marketdroids, one for the technical folk. Unfortunately:

    (1) They've not shipped yet.
    (2) Consumer versions of new high-end hardware is *
  • This person can use so many words to say so little.
    Summary:

    NVIDIA is working on the Playstation 3 graphics chip

    It will be based on the next generation NVIDIA GPU (the one after the 6800 series)

    Sony and NVIDIA save money in the development since the next gen GPU was already in the pipeline and is already a year and a half into development

    NVIDIA thinks it will see increased growth in non PC markets such as consoles and PDAs

    The marketing director is really excited about all the hot new technologies and wh

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