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Seems I wasn't too far off - this thread has a lot of technical insider info about the audio / video in PS3 and mentions that 1080p/24 is coming. So it can do it in firmware, and will at some stage. http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=361 88

There are several firmware updates coming for Playstation 3 very soon. Here is a translation of recent interview with Sony engineers;

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=361 88

There are several substancial features coming. These include YCrCb and 1080/24 modes support !!! Also so called "deep color" will supported for DVD upscaling. After all, PS3 has HDMI 1.3 connection.
First update should be available at 7th of December.

Here are some Links showing more of Linux running on the PS3.

Also, Link of Windows XP running on Linux through emulation
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpo...4&postcount =30

http://rian.s26.xrea.com/

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=358 18

Here are some Links showing more of Linux running on the PS3.

Also, Link of Windows XP running on Linux through emulation
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpo...4&postcount =30

http://rian.s26.xrea.com/

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=358 18

Yeah, no one is clearly caring in these huge threads just a sampling of two console related sites:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=12424 2

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=12943 7

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=355 90

Thanks, good post there. I dug around a bit and found this page about the PS3's supposed Linux kernel. Unfortunately it confirms what you said about the 3D functionality not being available from Linux. Also saw this exhaustive thread on the PS3 features. Much of it is speculation and I guess we'll just have to wait and see what Sony does and how much power it will eventually give to the user.

This has been a subject of discussion at Beyond3d's forums for some time now. What people have speculated there is that the compatibility issues are on par with those that the slim ps2 had.

Moreover, it seems many/most of the problems don't severely implicate those games which have compat. issues in the first place. Some games are merely not playing BGM correctly. Regardless, the ps3 has a 97%+ compatibility rate, which is quite good considering the umbrella of games it has.

Most importantly, there's a software solution being refined for emulating the ps2 on the ps3 rather than using the built in hardware. Currently, Sony basically integrated the ps2's hardware into the ps3 (probably adds $30 or so to the price tag). When a software solution is finalized, you'll see ps3s without ps2 hardware, and possibly slightly lower prices. Not to mention that since it is emulated, there's the chance that games might see enhancements like AA or filtering.

for anyone that wants to know more about G80's architecture (not just the same pr material every website publish again and again) have a look at this in depth analysis from Beyond3d.com:
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/nvidia/g80-arch/

PS3s working together is not a new concept though. Folding@Home for PS3: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?p=815 609#post815609

This has been a subject of discussion for several months now.

With regards to the supposed overheating of PS3 units, I don't think it's because of that alone that Sony's stock dipped. Rather, I highly doubt it. Besides, there were several units being demoed @ TGS (where the temperature was quite high) and almost all of them fared just fine; I'm not worried about the PS3 overheating.

The specs will, as the article suggests, be identical to the R580. If you want some idea of what it's got under the hood, Beyond3D's review is very comprehensive and heavy on technical details (so, perfect for the average /.er :-P): http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r580/index.php

Of note is page 3 which shows some of the architecture overview. Basically, if you have the vertex shader and all of the pixel shader ALUs going at full blast, you get over 650 FLOPs per clock (in reality though, it's likely that this gets reduced down to about 2 to 300 since it's difficult to get all of the pixel shader transistors firing all of the time, and the vertex shader would sit idle a lot when doing stream processing) and the chip runs at 650MHz. So, you get to have over a hundred GFLOPS easily accessible, and if the code you're doing is optimized well for the pixel shader ALUs, you could double or triple that.

Isn't ATI designing a GPGPU (general purpose GPU) at the moment? There are indications that there will be a new product called "Firestream" that might be such a thing.

"PS3 is way overkill for a console anyway. What are they thinking? Not everyone needs a console with 1GB of memory, huge HDD, which also doubles as a DVD Player/Entertainment center/Memory stick player (you betcha sony is already adding THAT feature), oh and can also play some games."

Is this serious or sarcastic? since when did the PS3 have 1 GB of ram? Last I checked it was 512.

And what's with the "and can also play some games" remark? Last I checked Sony had the largest library of games this gen.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=77068 7&postcount=4

games based on Valve's game Engine look graphically more polished and have more realistic effects [...] is it a matter of DirectX vs. OpenGL?

No, it's more a matter of what they were aiming for. You can do pretty much the same with DX as you can with OGL. I admit that I have only played Doom3 for a bit, and that I do not know exactly what the engine is capable of. However it seems as though the main focus in Doom3 was highly detailed indoor hallways. This contrasts Half-Life 2 which features a largeish (albeit very restricted) city with mainly shabby concrete buildings.

Because of the distance to the light sources, shadows in Doom3 would be hard. In Half-Life 2 you'll want soft shadows. In Doom3 there's not THAT much to gain from HDR, while in Half-Life 2 you have a very bright sun which affects lighting a lot.

Because you only see about 5m ahead of you at any given time in Doom3, walls could be polygon rich, making for lots of details (lots of cables and ducts). In Half-Life 2, you could see several blocks down the street, and so walls in Half-Life 2 were relatively flat, using textures for detail.

Making a 3d engine always involves tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs will determine what you can and cannot do. As a recent example, look at Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. They opted for deferred rendering. This allows for complex shaders, but as "Chuck" from ATI put it: "[Anti-aliasing is] not 100% impossible, and I'm not giving up on the possibility, but there is no playable solution right now". So the result is nice looking surfaces and effects, but lose nice anti-aliased edges.

They talked about it interviews afterwards. It's still there, open for programming. You won't get the same support as licensed PS3 developers do, obviously, but it sounds like it's all systems go on that front.

Also, the HDD is a standard 2.5" HDD, so you can upgrade it with any such HDD off the shelf. Sony won't even be selling their own as accessories.

You can read more from the interviews here:

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=307 46

The Linux stuff pretty much makes it worth my while, alone.

Basically this is a ho-hum card at a high price. You can get a PCIe 7800GT + Motherboard bundle from vendors like EVGA for around $350. The 7800GT is a 20 pipeline / 16 ROP card, while the 7800 GS is a 16/8. Its no contest which is faster. You can use your old DDR and CPU with the new MB making it a no brainer to avoid the 7800GS.

And still working at that.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=202&type=expe rt
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTUz
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/radeon-x1 900/index.x?pg=1
http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articl eid=777&cid=2
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r580/

People who buy Xbox games don't get bug fixes.

What was good enough to ship is what you'll have to live with forever. One of the main pluses of buying the PC version of Oblivion is that (hopefully) the most agregious bugs will be fixed by the time the first expansion rolls around. That's basically the way Morrowind played out and the XBox people just had to do a lot of stupid shit to work around bugs and broken quests.

What's weird is Radeon X1800 beats GF7800 in Quake 4 according to this benchmark though X1800 still loses to GF 7800 in other games. So, surprisingly ATI is doing better (than nVidia) in OpenGL in the X1000 series?

Regarding the Avivo, according to this article: ATI's Avivo vs. NVIDIA's PureVideo: De-Interlacing Quality Compared, Avivo is still behind nVidia's PureVideo in terms of de-interlacing quality.

An in-depth article on Avivo for those who might be interested: http://www.beyond3d.com/previews/ati/avivo/

I heard something about this yesterday on Beyond3d:

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=1 5

I guess it has something to do with the amount of memory being too small so you would have to break up scenes into tiles and no developers are doing that. Too hard? I don't know. But I saw a quote from Allard saying developers would have to write special versions of their engines just for the 360. I also saw some talk of the problem on teamxbox, but the thread seems to have been deleted pretty quickly - I guess they don't want people to know about it.

obviously you missed the fact that when gaming at 1600x1200 and are using 4x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering that the x1800xt beats the shit out of the gf7800.

if you're buying a 500 dollar card, are you seriously worried about benchmarks that are run without aa+af? this card even does HDR (hi dynamic range) plus AA, something that the gf7800 can't.

this card is way more sophisticated and highly refined that the brute force 7800. the 7800 isn't bad but that this card can do with 16 pipelines what the 7800 can't do with 24, says a lot.

and that's just raw performance with todays games. never mind the fact that the 1800xt comes with 512megs of super fast ram... ready for well into the next generation of games, whereas 256meg 7800's are already obsolete for the high end of the next generation. sure 256 will be enough if you pare down the resolution and lower the texture detail. one example is the game F.E.A.R... on the 1800xt it absolutely trounces the 7800 in performance.

my advice... read ALL the reviews you can get your hands on. there are too many discrepencies if you only read one or two. if you want to get a more full picture, get to reading.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2552

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r520/

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/r520reviewxvxv /

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1867116 ,00.asp

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_x18 00_xt_xl/

http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/262/

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODIy

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=3603

http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?article id=734&cid=2

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews /ati_radeon_x1800_x1600preview

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=172

http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?id=407

http://www.techreport.com/onearticle.x/8864

and check out the wicked new 3d tech demos... both are very impressive but the toystore demo is jawdropping.

http://www.ati.com/designpartners/media/edudemos/R adeonX1k.html

wmv9 hi def format but plays fine in mplayer or VLC.

Listed alphabetically so no preference to which site is good or not.

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r520/
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/r520reviewxvxv /
http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/262/
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODIy
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=3603
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews /ati_radeon_x1800_x1600preview
http://www.noticias3d.com/articulo.asp?idarticulo= 527
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=172
http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?id=407
http://www.techreport.com/onearticle.x/8864

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=172

http://www.techreport.com/

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODIy

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r520/

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/crossfire/
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/09/26/ati_cr ossfire_detail/1.html
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/crossfireatire viewxxx/
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODE1
http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?article id=730&cid=2
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=168
http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?id=404
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q3/ati-crossfire /index.x?pg=1
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050926/ index.html

Full transcript courtesy of some poor schlub on Beyond3d.

256 MB RAM is definitely not enough for games with demand for such extreme graphics and realism (did he say physics?)!

I doubt that the next generation games will look like movies; except for some graphic demos like the Unreal Engine 3.

Here's an old quote from Tim Sweeney:

"Off-the-shelf 32-bit Windows can only tractably access 2GB of user RAM per process. UT2003, which shipped in 2002, installed more than 2GB of data for the game, though at that time it was never all loaded into memory at once. It doesn't exactly take a leap of faith to see scenarios in 2005-2006 where a single game level or visible scene will require >2GB RAM at full detail."

http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/sweeneyue3/

So let's wait and see how XBOX 360 and PS3 will fare...

LINK

Nothing major is going to be different between this and the RSX, just small tweaks... otherwise the transistor count wouldn't be similar nor the featureset.

If by 'small tweaks' you're referring to the output on your screen, then you're probably right in that both will be so good that they'll be largely indistinguishable. However, if you're referring to the architecture, as it sounds like you are, then I guess you haven't yet heard of the R500's unified shader core, which is more than a small tweak different from RSX's separate shader pipes. Will be interesting to see if it gives the performance edge ATI claims it will...

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2451 Anandtech has an excellent review which includes power consumption information and a good overview of technology in the new chip.

http://www.beyond3d.com/previews/nvidia/g70/Beyond 3D as always has a fantastic writeup including information on: CPU Utilization for video decoding, noise, power consumption, etc.

The ExtremeTech review is a little short on details.

There is a more comprehensive review here

The Cell processor (PS3) is made for those applications. At the Power.org convention in Barcelona, IBM presented a programming example of large FFTs on Cell. It turned out, that large FFT calculations are about 100 times faster than on a Xeon 3.2 GHz processor.
Keep in mind, that this presentation was held in front of super computer professionals and its not that easy to trick them.

> At least with current platforms architectures.
>The author seems to do plenty of research on
>current distributed computing projects, but does
>none on how the consoles perform.

Apparently from what you posted you don't know jack shit about those new consoles architectures...

>For example, there's little need for fast memory
> writing when you're mostly reading textures from
>RAM, but there's an extreme need when you do
>millions of in-place Fourier transforms.

PS3 has XDR-DRAM which is way faster than DDR2. GDDR3 for Xbox 360 UMA memory and PS3 VRAM is faster too.

For FFT, the Cell processor in PS3 performs 100 times faster than Pentium 4 in some tests, if properly configured.

What? 1080i has over twice as many pixels as 720p. Interlacing is just a matter of pushing the pixels in a different order and 1080i needs AA just as badly as 720p does. What are you talking about?

I am certainly no expert, but the experts I have read have always suggested that the interlacing does make a big difference in hardware requirements.

It appears I was wrong about 1080i sometimes requiring less performance than 720p, but as LocalH demonstrated they definitely are close. *shrug*

(And it's obvious that 720p looks better, of course - maybe I was confused by the fact that 720p screens at least used to be more difficult and hence expensive to make than 1080i screens.)

Most games support 480p because it's relatively simple. Standard Def TV is analog 480i and the only difference between 480i and 480p is that 480i is interlaced. 480i and 480p are putting out the same number of pixels/sec at the same resolution so you don't have many issues switching between the two. I don't see any reason for this to change in the next 2 years. Making your game look worse on 90% of the screens out there so that the other 10% get a sharper picture doesn't make sense. HDTV penetration need to be higher before developers will support 720p and higher.

That is only true depending on what your hardware supports. You are completely wrong about progressive display not affecting performance - it is double the pixels. Some console hardware like the Dreamcast and the Xbox internally draw graphics at 480p anyway, making an 480p image essentially free. But the PS2 doesn't automatically do this (though it is capable), which is why so many PS2 games (the vast majority, actually!) don't even support 480p. There is definitely a potential performance cost when you double your pixel output.

And I guess we'll find out in November for sure, but I'll be shocked if any Xbox360 games don't support 720p. The hardware is simply designed for it, just like modern PC videocards are designed for higher resolutions. Sure, gameplay might suffer a little on 480i TVs, but the same is true right now of gamers using crappier (or even non-480p) TVs now. Developers will surely test their 360 games on a 480i screen (MS is actually specifically encouraging that).

Microsoft has been saying 4xAA will be "free" at 720p because of the 10MB of eDRAM. I don't know how they are making this work unless they are planning on having everything running in 16bit color; each frame of 720p@32bits eats over 3.5MB. I think this is all marketing bull.

The Xenos chip basically takes a tiling approach. This extensive article explains how it's done (I would start from the beginning, but that's a link to a later page that describes how the framebuffer RAM is used). Apparently this will actually cost some performance, but we are talking a low single digits percentage - close enough to "free" for that not to be a lie, IMO.

The heart of the GPU seems to be on the same chip as the Northbridge controller, which basically means that the GPU has more direct access to the memory than the CPU.

Check out the diagram on the page I linked, which shows the bandwidth between the various components. If there is any competition for memory access, I think it will be well balanced between the CPU and GPU.

Honestly, I thought this was a slap at Microsoft. In the article they admit that the GPU is not compatable with DirectX. The original XBox's DirectX implementation was a bit funky but basically it was DirectX8 and developers bitched about that. The XBox360's Shaders(and who knows what else) aren't DirectX9 compliant, and it sounds like their is no hope for it Being DirectX Next compliant. If developers are going to have to rework a lot of complex code for the XBox360 I think this will turn off many game developers who see the XBox as a console that's cheap to port.

You might also have noticed the content of all the sites is nearly identical. Just a rewrite of the ati press kit is suppose. They all miss benchmarks (the whole purpose of sli is speed).

Here is a list of some more sites:
beyond3d
techreport
tweakers.net (dutch, but the content is identical to other sites
the faq from ati

Next in line: these same sites (i left anand tech and tomshardware out) will bring the benchmarks all the same day the nda on the benchmarks expires

Another in-depth examination of the technology can be found here

But if you're naive about the net and you go online maybe once a month...then you're a raw piece of meat in a pool full of sharks.

I am one of those naive that really don't have a clue what hardware review sites to trust. My comfort is that I am probably far from alone, in this matter.

To assist me and other naives(sp?), please join this silly poll and review the following sites (regarding credibility) with a scale ranging from 1 to 10, where 1 is "No credibility at all" and 10 is "Perfect credibility, these guys wouldn't post a biased review for world domination":

About PC Hardware Reviews
Ace's Hardware
Anandtech
Ars Technica
Beyond 3D
Cnet Reviews
Dan's Data
Dev Hardware
Extremetech
Firingsquad
[H]ard|OCP
Hardware Analysis
Hardwarecentral
Hardwarezone
IT Reviews
OcPrices
Overclockers.com
ProCooling.com
The Tech Report
The Tech Zone
Tom's Hardware
TrustedReviews
Viperlair
Xtreme Resources

If you know only a few of them, give your opinion on those.

Maybe someone with the right facilities could set up an independent poll?

Suppose Longhorn is going to be released in 2006, it's very likely that alot of boxes will still have no PS 2.0 support. Remember a lot of boxes sold in recent years have integrated graphics, and most of those integrated graphics don't support PS 2.0.

Of course, by MS's tradition, one will probably fall back to classic mode. But then, many people don't know how to configure it, so it will be better if the installer configures this automatically or at least easier.

Also, since the demos will probably be run on some very capable hardware and demostrate these nifties. It could disappoint upgraders after they found out they need to upgrade their graphics after they bought the copies. Not so good for corporate image I guess.

So it probably won't be a big issue, but neither a non-issue.

Frankly, I can't wait to see this. All that GPU power of my 9800 is basically being wasted 99.99999999% of the time right now.

I think, maybe you shouldn't have gotten a 9800 then...? @_@

BTW, for those who want/need to know which chips support PS 2.0, try this and this.

...the latest and greatest [read: 6800GT/X300] as their graphics card.

Your license to post on 3D graphics-related issues has been suspended; apply at the Higher Court for 3D Graphics for re-examination of your case in 6 months.

Long ago John Carmack said in Jan 2003 Doom3 was going to have a ARB1, nv1x, nv2x, R2x0, nv3x, and ARB2 path. We recently heard the nv3x path was dropped now that nvidia's driver compiler does a good enough job on optimizing a ARB_fragment_programs (Pixel Shader 2.0 in D3D terms) that the nv3x isn't needed. But is the ARB1 path still around?

The article says the min spec is:
*Supported 3D Graphics chipsets:
ATI: Radeon 8500, 9000, 9200, 9500, 9600, 9700, 9800
NVIDIA: GeForce 3, GeForce 4MX, GeForce 4 Titanium, GeForce FX, GeForce 6
It doesn't list other manufacturers, but I don't know if this really implies other manufacturers currently can't run it.

What about the PowerVR Kyro (no cube map support), Radeon 7x00, Intel Extreme Integrated, SiS Xabre (useless drivers), Matrox Parhelia, 3DLabs P10/P9? Without the ARB1 path they wouldn't be able to run the game. Well 3Dlabs used to support nvidia's register combiner extensions so could use the nv1x path if their drivers are up to snuff. It is one thing to be able to run the game quickly (the reson the GeForce4MX is supported when it is technically just a quicker version of the older GeForce/GeForce2/GeForce2MX) to ensure the game is enjoyable, but it is another thing to not be able to run it at all due to not supporting modern OpenGL extensions. It would be nice if older cards could run Doom3, slowly and without specular, instead of not at all.

Also what about GLSL? Even longer ago Mr. Carmack said in June 2002 (wow, they've been working a long time!) "I am now committed to supporting an OpenGL 2.0 renderer for Doom through all the spec evolutions" in refernce to the GL shading language. Will there be a Doom3 renderer which uses the high level GLSL extension instead of the fragment program extension? I get the impression there won't be, and it would be pretty pointless with the fragment program support, but 3Dlabs currently only supports the high level fragment shaders, not the low level fragment programs...

I know its hard for some people to understand the viability of software patents and why they are necessary

Yeah, most core Linux distros - for the most part - suck; and simply because a bunch of incompetent assholes decided they were going to delve in and piss around with it just because it was free.

Well check out here for all the different hardware Kyle has said they have tested it out on and they are currently in the process of writing it all up.

What does surprise me is no special support for the R100 (Radeon 7xxx) series, which supported PS 1.0, and could do 3 textures per pass.

That's not my recollection, nor does the chart at Beyond3D agree with you. R1x0 seems to support fixed-function environment-mapped bump-mapping only, which is not flexible enough to implement the D3 lighting algorithm.

Tim Sweeney will, in my mind, forever be linked to the wonderful ZZT. This interview, given some time before Unreal 2 is an interesting contrast to the one posted above. In particular, he talks about ease-of-creation:

Hercules: You moved onto to other, bigger projects long ago. It must be good to know that the first thing you ever created is still used/played a lot. Does ZZT still cross your mind, sometimes?

Tim Sweeney: Yes, one of the interesting things to do is contrast ZZT and Unreal, and look at how incredibly far we've come in graphics quality in that time. But also to see how little the industry has progressed -- or maybe even gone backwards in some respects... So, how will game development be 10 years from now? If levels take six months to build, and compiles take 5 hours each, and it costs $20 million to develop a game, then developing games won't be fun or even possible anymore.

I'm a fan of creation tools that are accessible to anyone who can play the game. (Casual players who may not be technically inclined.) As a developer, I'm hoping that we will be among the first to offer something that lets even the most casual user plink around. As a player, I'm hoping that Sweeney has retained this philosophy, and that future Epic offerings let us build -- at least a little bit -- with the same ease that ZZT did.

So much for the Sega hardware in 2006 rumor. Unless you count Pachinko machines.

Some dude wrote Frogger almost entirely in pixel shaders. http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/shadercomp/result s/ (2nd from the bottom).

another very recent interview with Dave Orton, quite interesting IMHO: http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/daveorton/

The only thing even remotely close that I can think of is that Carmack removed the NV30 rendering path from DOOM 3. But he's not exactly removing it because he doesn't like nVidia's OpenGL support.

stolen from Anandtech

HardOCP
Ascully
DriverHeaven
TrustedReviews
K-Hardware
Hardware Analysis
Hexus
The Tech Report
Beyond3D
Neoseeker
ExtremeTech
Gamers Depot
Lost Circuits
Firing Squad
Tom's Hardware
Bjorn3D
Hot Hardware

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I hope they take into consideration some of the plans that are being put into place for DirectX 10 (aka Directx Next). According to this article, it looks like there are going to be a lot of fundamental changes to the underlying architecture in DirectX 10.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to be an advocate of either DirectX or OpenGL, but it would seem like some really *neat* stuff should be possible with the changes mentioned in that article.