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Playstation 2 Emotion Engine
Basil writes: "Here's an in-depth article on the Playstation 2 Emotion Engine at Ars[Technica] that you really shouldn't miss. The article goes a long way in explaining the intricacies of the overall design, relating the performance of the MIPS III core to their somewhat odd implementation of two vector processing units."
That's the problem. MS is really leading technical people to believe that the X-Box is more PC than console. They are selling it to developers as the "easy to program for" system. "It uses DirectX and we know you love that!" The CPU seems more likely to be a slightly altered 600 MHz Celeron chip than anything else. Depending on which question you ask and who is asking, MS developers will tell you that X-Box is not a PC and is totally a console, or they will tell you that it is exactly like a PC.
The PS2 is a console through and through. I'm a little surprised, because previous reports I had seen about the PS2 marked the Emotion Engine internals at 350 MHz, not 250 MHz. When it gets to the US, I'll look into that more. Either way, MHz is really a very poor metric for console performance. The problem with PC CPUs, it that they are Jacks-of-all trades. They do everything about equally well: Mediocre. As a result, high MHz speeds allows them to chug through stuff faster and mimic the effects of more dedicated machines. A dedicated and optimized piece of hardware can often run at one third the speed of a normal CPU in MHz and still outperform it. This is because the dedicated hardware might take 6 cycles to complete a specialized task that takes the PC CPU 20 cycles. The trade-off, is that a task outside the specialized field is likely to take the dedicated hardware 60 cycles while taking the PC CPU the same 20 cycles. (Note: This is an example I am making up as an illustration, I don't have the specs for any dedicated hardware memorized offhand.) When the PS2 tries to do email and such, it will lose the massive edge it has, because it is optimised completely for 3D games. On the other hand, email can be done just as well by a 25 MHz 386 as a 1 GHz P3.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Last time I checked the Playstation Emotion Engine running linux was the top Single CPU system in the Pov Ray benchmark tests. The Pov Ray basically renders the image to a file so you're looking at a benchmark of sheer CPU power.
This beat out Intel, Athlon, and Alpha Based systems. Usually the Alpha is considered the winner in gfx rendering. Titantic (A.K.A. Chicks version of Star Wars), used over 100 Alpha based machines running Linux to render the GFX.
I'm all for cinematic games, just so long as they aren't slap the button at just the right time games like Dragon's Lair.
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
The thing does run a mangled version of Linux internally. It can get files via NFS, and it has an internal web server that lets you perform various admin functions. They don't want you telnetting to it, though. I think they did some tricks to the pty system that may have made interactive shells a bad idea. Just a guess.
As a former PC game shop, we actually were using the Metroworks system to do development. Compared to dev studio, it was wretched, frankly. Building on a linux system with a gcc cross compiler was the recommended way to do things, and frankly, I would have preferred it.
The hardware is fucked up. Seriously fucked up. Scary fucked up. The first generation of PS2 games isn't going to get close to actually using the system capabilities. Nor is the second generation. Maybe the third generation.
We had several hard-core 3D graphics programmers with multiple commercial titles under their belts working on the system, and their progress was, frankly, pathetic. Why? Because although its not all that hard to write a simple renderer from the EE Core, its a major pain if you want to actually use the box. After all, the core is only 300Mhz, its not all that interesting. You really need to use the VUs if you want to start slamming matrix manipulations around.
The VU's have basically no memory. So, you can't actually fit an entire model inside them. So, we were going to do a pipeline where individual primitives (i.e. quads, tristrips, fans, whatever) would get queued, the VU1 would just eat stuff off the queue, do the transforms, and render. Well, we also decided that the system would be great for doing curved surfaces. That complicates everything. How does your physics system do collisions with a dynamically tesselated curved surface where the generated tris are all off on another CPU where you can't touch it? So you need to resolve collisions either directly between the surfaces (ow) or use simpler geometries. Annoying.
Then Renderware came in and gave a demo. They've had dev systems for quite a while, and they have a mature abstraction to the whole rendering process, and their entire scheme for doing the rendering is fucking wild; as I understand it, they don't even leave code on the VU's, they download it constantly, alongside whatever work they need it to do. They are running the DMA at like 90% capacity, which rocks. Their stuff looks awesome, and they get pretty damned good performance.
I personally believe that there will be more RenderWare based games than studios touching the raw hardware, especially for generation 1. Its a lot easier to learn an API than to try to understand poorly documented (and japlish, when it is documented) hardware specs.
At any rate, its not a good year to invest in the games industry. Everybody is blowing wads of dough trying to learn all the new platforms.
You think this emotion engine is complex, you should try to figure out the one in my girlfriend. Sometimes, I wish God would just Open Source women so that maybe I'd be able to understand them.
kwsNI