The theory about the Cell and the RSX.

THis is my little theory about the Cell/RSX integration.

THe cell can work in unisen with the RSX, thus making the Cell a second GPU. For instance, if you have to create skin textures, but the RSX is too busy doing other stuff, then one of the cells 7SPUs can take care of those calculations. and so on and so forth. THat way we can get better character models and better enviorments and textures. However, this data sometimes tends to get bottle neck withing the PS3, thus creating visuals not up to par to what the PS3 can really do. So it is now up to devs. to figure out how to crack th enut that is the cell processor. Thats all in theory, of course.

Is that basically how it goes?

Who cares about your theory? Hey your "theory"!? How ridiculous is that!?!?!? Just DELETE this topic for the love of God.Vojkan80001

someone forgot to take there happy pills this morning. 8)

if you have nothing interesting to say, dont say anything at all.

Who cares about your theory? Hey your "theory"!? How ridiculous is that!?!?!? Just DELETE this topic for the love of God.Vojkan80001

Who cares about your theory? Hey your "theory"!? How ridiculous is that!?!?!? Just DELETE this topic for the love of God.Vojkan80001

Ive seen people get flamed before for typing something either stupid or unpopular, but he was just trying to reason out hardware for the console. Calm down, there was no need to jump down his throat like that.

THis is my little theory about the Cell/RSX integration.

THe cell can work in unisen with the RSX, thus making the Cell a second GPU. For instance, if you have to create skin textures, but the RSX is too busy doing other stuff, then one of the cells 7SPUs can take care of those calculations. and so on and so forth. THat way we can get better character models and better enviorments and textures. However, this data sometimes tends to get bottle neck withing the PS3, thus creating visuals not up to par to what the PS3 can really do. So it is now up to devs. to figure out how to crack th enut that is the cell processor. Thats all in theory, of course.

Is that basically how it goes?

black_awpN1

Not exactly...actually the Cell, or well, one of its SPU's acts as a primary GPU, while the RSX just....applies the finishing touches....This Linkshows a vid of a 3D enviroment rendered usingJUST the CELL as a GPU...enjoy..XP

[QUOTE="black_awpN1"]

THis is my little theory about the Cell/RSX integration.

THe cell can work in unisen with the RSX, thus making the Cell a second GPU. For instance, if you have to create skin textures, but the RSX is too busy doing other stuff, then one of the cells 7SPUs can take care of those calculations. and so on and so forth. THat way we can get better character models and better enviorments and textures. However, this data sometimes tends to get bottle neck withing the PS3, thus creating visuals not up to par to what the PS3 can really do. So it is now up to devs. to figure out how to crack th enut that is the cell processor. Thats all in theory, of course.

Is that basically how it goes?

Lilith_n_Belial

Not exactly...actually the Cell, or well, one of its SPU's acts as a primary GPU, while the RSX just....applies the finishing touches....This Linkshows a vid of a 3D enviroment rendered usingJUST the CELL as a GPU...enjoy..XP

That's Terain engine which we need 35 P4 3GHz to render in realtime. However, Cell won't be primary GPU in PS3. By pass to Cell all tasks which Cell can perform many time faster than RSX. The power is incredible.

Has any games yet took full advantage of the cell? if not, then wich upcoming games will?5FingersOfDeath

Don't expect to see any games take FULL advantage of the Cell anytime soon. Have you seen the amazing game, Uncharted. The lighting, animations, graphics, character models, etc all look amazing. The devs have claimed that they have only tapped into around 30% of the Cell and the final product will have tapped about 40-50% of the total power of the Cell.

THis is my little theory about the Cell/RSX integration.

THe cell can work in unisen with the RSX, thus making the Cell a second GPU. For instance, if you have to create skin textures, but the RSX is too busy doing other stuff, then one of the cells 7SPUs can take care of those calculations. and so on and so forth. THat way we can get better character models and better enviorments and textures. However, this data sometimes tends to get bottle neck withing the PS3, thus creating visuals not up to par to what the PS3 can really do. So it is now up to devs. to figure out how to crack th enut that is the cell processor. Thats all in theory, of course.

Is that basically how it goes?

black_awpN1

In theory a game developer could use the Cell to perform shader processing and "help out" the RSX. The SPE's are ideal for shader calculations, especially geometry shading. One ofthe problem with this, as you kind of state, is that this can create a bottleneck in many situations. Communication between RSX and the Cell's SPEs will take up memory bandwidth, and RSX already has only 22.4 GB/s of bandwidth, which really is less than optimal to start with. With games that have detailed textures, and especially games that support 1080p, this will end up being a major bottleneck. Anandtech, a hardware review site, actually speculated on this when they first wrote an article on the hardware of the PS3/360:

The downside to the RSX using the Cell for all vertex processing is pretty significant. Remember that the RSX only has a 22.4GB/s link to its local memory bandwidth, which is less than 60% of the memory bandwidth of the GeForce 7800 GTX. In other words, it needs that additional memory bandwidth from the Cell's memory controller to be able to handle more texture-bound games. If a good portion of the 15GB/s downstream link from the Cell processor is used for bandwidth between the Cell's SPEs and the RSX, the GPU will be texture bandwidth limited in some situations, especially at resolutions as high as 1080p.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2453&p=9

The other, more obvious problem with utilizing the SPEs for graphics is that you take away a lot of the Cell's power to do traditional processor work, like physics. If you're utilizing most of the SPE's to augment the shading power of the RSX, then you are going to leave the Cell with far less power than the 360's processor to execute CPU code. Cell has 1 PPE and 6 (usable) SPEs. Xenon has 3 main cores which are each equivalent to a PPE. When you take away all the SPE's, you leave Cell with, in theory, 1/3 of the power of Xenon. So, while you may improve graphics, you're killing things like physics and AI.

Has any games yet took full advantage of the cell? if not, then wich upcoming games will?5FingersOfDeath

Nope.. not any time in the future, but many games seem to look amazing even wwithout doing so. check out Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, nd keep in minds its onli usin 30% of da Cells power. by the time its done iits gonna be using about 50%. while it doesnt sound lke alot, the game styll looks amazing even without utilizing the Cell to its full potential. wut does that say about the future of PS3 owners..well..its pretty BRIGHT. nd check LAIR out, not sure how much power dats using, but the recent posts with the lair Screenshots look 10X better than any of the previous trailers, INCLUDING the E3 trailer.

[QUOTE="5FingersOfDeath"]Has any games yet took full advantage of the cell? if not, then wich upcoming games will?HuhJustaBox

Don't expect to see any games take FULL advantage of the Cell anytime soon. Have you seen the amazing game, Uncharted. The lighting, animations, graphics, character models, etc all look amazing. The devs have claimed that they have only tapped into around 30% of the Cell and the final product will have tapped about 40-50% of the total power of the Cell.

Yea I remember that interview now, but what I'm wondering is when a game comes out that uses a big chunk of the cell power, will it be possible to port that game to the X360?

All I know is that the ps3 has 7 logic CPUS, custom RAM 4x faster than normal RAM, and the RSX that i think it's a standard GPU optmized for OpenGL. It's up to the devs to use the hardwere.FireFalkon

well the ram is ddr3 so its better than what we have on pc right now.but they do have corsair ddr3 sticks out now.its not cheap though.the mb that use it arent available either so really doesnt matter does it.

This isn't a theory, this is a hypothesis that has yet to be supported or even substantiated by anything other than scattered information and hope.Redfingers

*cough* Xbot *cough*

[QUOTE="Redfingers"]This isn't a theory, this is a hypothesis that has yet to be supported or even substantiated by anything other than scattered information and hope.AliasUK

*cough* Xbot *cough*

but his icon shows red rings? why glorify failure if he's an xbot?

well the ram is ddr3 so its better than what we have on pc right now.but they do have corsair ddr3 sticks out now.its not cheap though.the mb that use it arent available either so really doesnt matter does it.

KandyKornMan

I like how people are talking like they actually know what's going on inside of the PS3.Do you really think that they let us know all the specs in the PS3?.So unless you built the PS3 or actually worked on it your logic and theories have no weight.sakura_Ex

Sony has released all of the specific information on the PS3 and IBM has all the white papers on the CELL processor. They only thing we don't have all the information on is the RSX. NVidia has never released all of the information on the RSX. That is the one part that NOBODY outside of Sony and Nvidia know everything about.

[QUOTE="sakura_Ex"]I like how people are talking like they actually know what's going on inside of the PS3.Do you really think that they let us know all the specs in the PS3?.So unless you built the PS3 or actually worked on it your logic and theories have no weight.eclipsed4utoo

Sony has released all of the specific information on the PS3 and IBM has all the white papers on the CELL processor. They only thing we don't have all the information on is the RSX. NVidia has never released all of the information on the RSX. That is the one part that NOBODY outside of Sony and Nvidia know everything about.

RSX is made up of approximately 300 million transistors, just like the GeForce 7800. There are a few differences, such as the inclusion of a Turbo-cache like system where RSX can access system memory in addition to the dedicated graphics memory (256MB) it already has. Other than that, nothing has surfaced that would make us believe RSX is a GeForce 7800 on a 90nm process with a 550MHz clockspeed.

As for sakura, read up if you want to know things:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2379

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2453

[QUOTE="sakura_Ex"]I like how people are talking like they actually know what's going on inside of the PS3.Do you really think that they let us know all the specs in the PS3?.So unless you built the PS3 or actually worked on it your logic and theories have no weight.eclipsed4utoo

Sony has released all of the specific information on the PS3 and IBM has all the white papers on the CELL processor. They only thing we don't have all the information on is the RSX. NVidia has never released all of the information on the RSX. That is the one part that NOBODY outside of Sony and Nvidia know everything about.

That's my big question. What is RSX? They only say it's similar 7800GTX . I know RSX using only OpenGL and not support HLSL. 7800GTX doesn't like that. We saw PS3 game close with Xbox360 even they use only 20% of Cell's horsepower for some stuff. Why?

[QUOTE="KandyKornMan"]

well the ram is ddr3 so its better than what we have on pc right now.but they do have corsair ddr3 sticks out now.its not cheap though.the mb that use it arent available either so really doesnt matter does it.

FireFalkon

Who cares about your theory? Hey your "theory"!? How ridiculous is that!?!?!? Just DELETE this topic for the love of God.Vojkan80001

I agree with u.

[QUOTE="KandyKornMan"]

well the ram is ddr3 so its better than what we have on pc right now.but they do have corsair ddr3 sticks out now.its not cheap though.the mb that use it arent available either so really doesnt matter does it.

FireFalkon

sorry after i posted that i realized it was wrong.ddr3 wasnt really available at the time was it.still both are faster than ddr2.but xdr has never been popular with pc because of price and other issues.

[QUOTE="KandyKornMan"]

well the ram is ddr3 so its better than what we have on pc right now.but they do have corsair ddr3 sticks out now.its not cheap though.the mb that use it arent available either so really doesnt matter does it.

FireFalkon

Wasn't it proven that despite being actually decent at geometry work, the Cell was actually quite terrible at shaders? I've heard about how it may be capable of radiosity calculations, but so far, nothing has come to my attention that's amazing or incredible. Cell is overrated and to do all those graphics calculations that everyone hopes it could, it doesn't have the right architecture to get those classes of pure GFLOPS in graphics calculations. If I remember right, I think I heard that, used as a GPU purely, the Cell was equal to something on the likes of a GeForce 6200, and that makes me laugh.

Cell is still obviously a great at floating point calculations like physics but other than that I don't see the Cell being the Alpha-Omega of processor design. However, it may be the beginning of highly-parallel CPUs considering Cell is supposed to bridge the gap between CPUs, GPUs, and PPUs (physic processing units). Even still Cell really isn't too useful for game consoles without a true graphics processor, and frankley Sony could have done better than a G72 (or is G70?), as the GeForce 7800 is somewhat limited. I actually view the Xenos GPU in the 360 like a I view the Cell in the PS3. They are amazing pieces of technology. Xenos may be eclipsed very much already by PC graphics processors but it was the first of the unified shader graphics processors, and it kicks the crap out of the 7800 not just in theoretical numbers but it can actually achieve close to it's theorecticals in actuall games.
TacticalElefant