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Sony's Monster Graphics Chip
GFD writes "EETimes Has an article about a monster (462-mm2!!) graphics chip discussed in a paper at the ISSC. The numbers are astounding such as 256 mbits of on chip memory. Barely manufacturable though..." I'd still love to see what that bugger can do... bet it still can't simulate realistic hair in real time ;)
Can you imagine running Quake 3 at the higest detail level at the higest resolution. Spilling the blood of your opponents on a big monitor with no noticeable frame rate drops would be heaven for me. (Forgive the Pun)
anymore, as most porn starlets are shaven, or maybe have a thin, sleek landing strip.
To the power of the Force. Do not put too much faith in this technological terror. It would be nice to rest on our laurels for a minute and not have something 12e500 x better than what we bought this morning. Oh well, at least I can still play Alice...
There is no guarantee that the content has been read or understood.
Get out! That just can't be! 462-mm2? 462-mm2??
Just imagine a card with two of these. It'd be...carry the one....924-mm4!
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MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
WARNING! This is a goatce.cx link! P.S. It said "sony won't say" whether it's for PS III.
Ashes of Empires and bodies of kings,
The truth about Michael
Did anyone catch the number of transistors on that chip? It's close to the number you find on AMD or Intel CPUs. Either it's incredibly complex, or deisgned horribly. Think of the cooling system needed to cool the chip. I'd think it'd just about HAVE to have a heat sink and fan along the lines of what you put on a CPU. I could be wrong, but doesn't heat disappation have something to do with the number of transistors? Still like to see some performance numbers.
Khyron
PS2, for all its l33t hardware, doesn't seem too impressive. For all that neat stuff, its designed for benchmarks, can't really use it all that well and its too hard to develop for.... when they make use of this thing, will they have the same probles, eg "Hooray, can render up to 65536x65536 res texture maps on over 4 billion polys... but its only got 4 megs of video ram". Or something to that effect. For that matter, when you get to that level how well can a human develop for a platform? Modelling gets tougher and tougher as the renderers get better.... Making more polys, better texture maps, multiple maps (bump, alpha, luminosity, reflection, etc) for layers, blenders, better frame rates for animations.
I'm all for this hardware, but ya gotta wonder: can we even properly use it.... then again, that's been said many times before.
I've just finished reading the article. A few thoughts spring to mind:
First of all, this sounds like the Emotion Engine hype all over again. It might be an amazing chip, but it'll probably just be "decent" when it finally gets here.
Secondly, don't expect to see this in quantity until 0.15/0.13 micron fabs get here. Remember the Emotion Engine. Fabbing a chip that big is a royal pain. It'll get much easier when finer linewidths shrink the die size.
Thirdly, CMOS fabrication processes can be optimized for good quality DRAM, or for good quality logic. Not both (without throwing lots of money at it). The two types of circuit have contradictory requirements for transistor characteristics. In practice, this has meant that DRAM-plus-core chips have either had slow cores or bulky, slow, hot DRAM.
The only saving grace is that most of the chip area will be DRAM. This means that most of it will be tolerant of manufacturing faults (you usually have more DRAM rows than you need, and cut out the faulty ones before packaging). This is the only thing that will let them fab a chip this size at all.
The chip should provide interesting perspective when it arrives (much as the Emotion Engine did), but I don't expect it to take the world by storm.
Toshiba has expressed interest in offering the 128-bit processor for high-end routers and switches.
For....graphics? "Hey, this is great!" "What are you talking about, we lost two whole subnets!?" "Yeah, but look at how beautifully those error messages are rendered"
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Why pray tell are you running at such a low resolution and why are you satisfied with such a low framerate. I for one will not be happy with anything less than 1280x1024 and ~70-80 fps. So no this chip is far from the final chip.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
While it is true that something like 50 million polys/s would be the upper limit for the number of renderable polys on a screen of that size, you are forgetting about all of the hidden polygons necessary to build a realistic scene.
I've seen estimates that figure it would take about 50-200 million polygons to render a modest scene in photo-realism. Now multiply that by 60 frames/s. You are already talking about 3-12 billion polys/s here, and we haven't even started talking about extremely complex surfaces like hair/fur/grass/leaves.
I think we will be building chips for some time before we reach the same clarity with 3d that motion video currently does in 2d.
woah..so they got 32Megs of ram on a chip that happens to be a huge chip. woop!
I suppose thats more impressive than 32megs on a 7" chipset...
Actually, the story said 256 mbits. 256Mbits would be equivalent to 32 Megabytes. You can't do much of anything with 256 millibits
ah kiss --- such nonsense.
>Therefore, logically, when we reach 50 million
>polygons/second in calculation for a graphics
>chip, it is effectively impossible to make the
>graphics quality any better without improving
>the quality of the screen.
Oh Bollocks. Just spitting a pixel to the screen has nothing to do with the overall quality of the image that is produced. Anti-aliasing. Motion blur. Depth of field. Programmable shading (no more of this gourand/phong with badly mapped textures etc etc). Don't even get me started ---- TONS of effects that can be incorporated. Hair, fur, skin, particles, atmospheric effects, lens effects, volume rendering effects, etc etc etc.
Until you can make a CG image indistingishable from a live source at that resolution there is TONS that can be improved.
Have u worked in the graphics biz? I have......
j
1600 X 1200 resolution at 60 fps is over 115 million pixels/second. IIRC, 60 fps is the limit our eyes can see. Also, I'm not sure your pixel to polygon comparison is valid.
-B
Jesus taco, enough pr0n talk already...
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(snip)
I assume the mean that the wafer is 21.7x21.3mm^2, this is a little under an inch to a side. At first read I thought they meant total package size, which isn't that impressive considering even the size of an old PII.
Let's hope Sony doesn't alienate its developers like they did for the PS2.
fialar
However, if this is another stupid die-shrinking example, I strongly advise you to go to your local Sony representative, and slap him or her in the face.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
So this chip has the same fill rate, but 8x the RAM, only 2x the RAM ports, and 7x the complexity?
It sounds to me like Sony have just made this an 8x multitexturing part at *huge* expense. And an 8x multitexturing part with only 2x the internal bus for texture cache reloading. Slow.
And supersampled antialiasing will cost you 75% of your fillrate, since that isn't increased either.
I just don't understand who this chip is for.
IBM tried this with their monster machines (e.g. vax 8650, etc). Found out that you get better performance with distributed systems.
In a smaller way, chip manufacturers found this out, too. They were doing it for a different reason, though -- speed of an electron slows things down. You want a short path from memory to CPU (like the on-die memory of Pentium Pro), but manufacturing wasn't up to par (thus the excessive failures of the P-Pro). Apparently, the tech hasn't advanced enough to produce such huge chips without excessive loss. For instance, slot-1 tech with cache stored external to cpu allows you to match working components, and toss only the failures.
The PS2 lost huge percentage of chips due to technical problems, and so will this if attempted without some new die manufacturing tech.
"The numbers are astounding such as 256 mbits of on chip memory."
Wow, two hundred fifty six millibits of on chip memory. That's like, what, almost 1/20th of a byte?
So what? The NV20 will probably be close to that when it's released, and will eventually beat it. Not to mention the NV20 is only a matter of months away, and this thing probably won't even live to see mass production.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Indeed one would normally expect a chip of this size to suffer yield problems as dictated by Murphy's law (that's the REAL Murphy's law, where fractional yield is given by
Y = ((1 - e**(-AD))/AD)**2, where A is area, D is defect density
rather than the other Murphy's law which affects all our lives). However there are remedial measures, especially with DRAMs, which can keep Murphy at bay. These largely have to do with redundancy, which is to say one designs the RAM array with many more rows than can actually be addressed, then one detects dead or malfunctioning rows at device test and substitues in the spares. This is a relatively easy thing to do with a nice regular structre like a RAM.
Also one wonders whether with that many polygons squirting past the eyeballs, is it acceptable to ignore a modest number of defects? After all, human vision is reasonably fault tolerant compared to many computing applications.
Even so, I take my hat off to anyone who gets acceptable yield from a device more than 2cm on a side. RESPECT!
Robert
Nemo me impune lacessit
HDTV doesn't get better then 1024x768 at 60Hz
:-) ) supports resolutions of up to 1080i which equals 1920x1080???
I thought that HDTV (if it will ever exist
Doh!
I checked myself, it's 21.7mm x 21.3mm. Also, that article misused the power of 2 and the term "square millimeters". I call upon the wrath of Le Système Internationale!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Yeah, but the size in the article was 462 *square* mms. That's not quite so big, and is under a square inch. 462 / (25.4 * 25.4) will give you the approximate size in square inches.
Actually the resolution of a standard TV is far less accurate than that of any pc monitor out there. It's just that you don't notice it because you're too far away, the signal is analog instead of digital, and the pixels are auto-antialiassed. I think somebody once told me the resolution of a TV corresponds to something like 625 lines, 50 Hz, 2:1 interlace, 4:3 aspect ratio. So if you play your game on a regular TV you're wasting an awfull lot of detail (& computational power), still all these powerfull and expensive gaming consoles usually are connected to home TV's.. strange thing, no ?
With great power comes great electricity bills.
You're assuming that each pixel only has one texture or lighting pass applied to it, which hasn't been true for years. Modern games can hit 6. Also, you're tossing out the possibility of anti-aliasing.. 4x4 supersampling will multiply your fill-rate requirement by a factor of 16. Sticking with your 36Mpixels/sec number, to get the same performance in an app with 4x anti-aliasing and 5 passes, you need 2.88 BILLION pixels/sec.. That's quite a bit more.
Possibly, but the "i" means that you only have to do half the refresh rate. Substantially reducing demand
-Michael
-Michael
One thing that always bugs me about the the graphics chip industry is that they only talk about simple measures like polygons per second. Polygons per second of what? You can render a billion phong shaded polygons per second, and you're still going to have awful plastic looking surfaces and unrealistic, difficult to illuminate building interiors. There's more to graphics rendering than polygons and OpenGL. We have a long way to go before chips replace software for high quality photorealism. A chip that accelerated high fidelity ray-traced radiosity solutions, now _that_ would be cool.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
The comparison *is* invalid. Remember that FPS measurements are averages, not sustained performance. 60fps isn't that great if the card slows down to 20 or less in a critical moment of the game when things get heavy. There is much to be said for people who claim to see the diff. at higher framerates.
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HDTV does 1920x1080 frames. They can be up to 30Hz progressive scanned or 60Hz interlace (that is, drawing half of the screen at a time) scanned. Or, you can bump the resolution down to 1280x720 60Hz progressive. 1080i, as they call the 1920x1080x60Hz Interlaced standard, is still a pretty good resolution and is nothing to sneeze at. In a few years, there will probably be HDTV sets with computer-friendly inputs that will do 1920x1080x75Hz progressive.
Gentoo Sucks
Your eyes see much faster than 60fps. I'm not sure what they see at, but to prove this point: wave your finger in front of your monitor -- you see the strobe behind it. Now wave your finger in front of a constant light source, like a white piece of paper -- no strobe. The strobe is because you see faster than 60 fps (or 85 with my monitor).
Though I agree with you, just wanted to nit-pick:
Hidden surface removal is only really a factor when the card can't handle the current volume. It scales with the complexity of the scene. Plus there are technologies such as ATI's (and now nVida) that help reduce the effect considerably.
FSAA is largely irrelevant when you achieve high enough resolutions. Results may vary though.
Stereo has never been a major factor, nor do I think it'll really catch on; especially on a console, unless you split the output signal.
Still there are plenty of other common sence arguments promoting the continued bleeding edge development. Not least of which is the fact that the intro's are still rendered seperately.
-Michael
-Michael
If I remember correctly, our eyes see at ~430 FPS so we still are talking about a long way to go to make a "realistic" image where the eyes physically are slower in refresh compared to the video.
I hardly think our realism barrier consists mainly of faster-than-TV refresh rates. If that was the case, I could get out my CGI-pong video game and run it up to 1,000fps.
Better yet, net hack!!!
-Michael
-Michael
as many others have replied you're missing a lot about what pixel rates are about (hidden pixels, alpha blending, antialiasing etc etc)
However there is a grain of truth in what you're getting at that in the future may eventually result in a whole new generation of hardware. basicly it's this - the number of visible pixels on the screen isn't really changing much, certainly not at the same rate that the ability of silicon to manipulate them is .... which means that rendering techniques that are proportional to the number of pixels (rather than screen complexity) may become more interesting - for example - ray tracing - the number of rays is (to a 1st approximation) is proportional to the number of pixels rather than the scene complexity (however the cost of processing each ray also goes up with scene complexity - but not necessarily always at the same rate if you are carefull) ....
Question:
how is sony expecting to get decent yields on such a big die? The probablity of a chip flaw goes up with the surface area
Answer:
256Mbit = 128Meg Byte = approx 500Meg of HIGHLY symmetric transistors. We're already building chips with 20, 30 and even 100Meg of complex transistor layouts (granted, most is in symmetric caching or register sets). Additionally, single ported memory is a lot simpler than multi-ported LRU-tagged cache. So while Intel, AMD, Alpha, SUN fuss over 4Meg L2 cache sizes, we're all in a similar ball-park.
Next, a little over a year ago, I read an article about a new DRAM memory architecture that was designed for extremely high yields.. Basically you'd have dozens, hundreds or thousands of mostly independant memory cells, then after the testing stage, you marked which cells were good, which then allowed the memory to ignore bad chunks transparently. As long as you met a minimum memory-size, you were golden. If a similar technology is used here, then they'll probably over-allocate it a bit, and allow down to like 70Meg to be considered passing.
However, I've read other interesting questions such as "are they going to optimize this for power consumption / heat dessipation or performance?"
-Michael
-Michael
Since when is 32 megabytes on a card impressive? Maybe last year or the year before, but 64 is sort of standard now for any sort of high-end pro-line gaming or rendering card.
Why would they sight the memory in megaBITS? Sure it sounds more impressive to people that don't know the different between a megabyte and a megabit, but it's still ONLY 32 MEGABYTES!
Girly.
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"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
This story puts everything in bits it seems. As a result the numbers appear much better than their byte counterpart. Here are some things I noticed.
:)
462mm x 462mm? You want large? There are 25.4 mm per inch. This is saying it is almost 18.2 inches x 18.2 inches (can anyone say 1 1/2 feet by 1 1/2 feet?). I sure hope this is a mistype of the actual size of this beast.
256mbit of memory? that comes out to 32MB of memory. I got a geForce2 GTS coming in the mail with 32MB of mem. Granted the memory is embedded in the chip itself but I think that would result in the price being alot more, especially if you want 64MB of mem.
75 million polys/sec. Sure, when the chip has nothing else going on, doesn't have to worry about lightning, textures, and the triangles it is drawing are all touching each other so there are less vertice's to draw. Splitting the triangles up so there are 3 vertices being drawn per triangle will easily drop this number to be 1/3 of it. Throw in some lightning and it drops more. Same with textures.
"the chip can process 75 million polygons per second, has a pixel fill rate between 1.2 and 2.6 gigapixels/s and can draw 75 million polygons/s". Anyone like being redundant? I count 2 things in there and it seems they are searching for features.
A 2,000 bit internal bus means a 250 bytes internal bus. Why 250? why not 256? Most chips have the maximum internal bus the size of how many bits the chip can handle. If the chip is a 128bit chip then it appears to have a bus double of that so it is feeding the chip faster than the chip can empty it. This could be good but it can also be bad.
With all said and done, the sony graphics chip is 4x as big as nVidia's geForce2 GTS and only 2x the power. Yep, lets slap a huge beast into a machine that probably sucks up the power supply and generates more heat than the CPUs
Per-Pixel shading. This is where we'll see a drastic improvement in the quality of interactive graphics. See those nice 3D renders from MAX? Those are likely Phong/Blinn shading models, which are per-pixel. As opposed to Gouraud shading, which calculates color values at each vertex and interpolates across the polygon. This latter method is what is used today in interactive 3D. This is why you can see the nasty aliasing across a low resolution mesh when using realtime lighting.
Unfortunately, this technique doesn't rely on enormous fill rates that this new Sony chip probably offers, but rather it requires an incredibly fast, integrated hardware lighting engine. Nothing in the article mentions this, and in the current PS2, rasterization and hardware T&L, while they work together, are completely seperate entities. Could be a while...
--Terrence
See Shenmue on Dreamcast, particularly on the Passport disc where you can zoom in close to the characters' faces. The game supports the best realtime skin and hair work I've seen (right now, beating the Playstation 2).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
So this new Uber-chip does 75 million triangles, and has a fill rate of 1.2 - 2.6 G/pixels. Doesn't that seem familiar to anybody? Those are the box specs for the PSX2. The extra memory will be quite helpful, but this isn't very impressive so far.
That's 400 SQUARE MILLIMETRES which is less than a chip measuring 1 inch x 1 inch.
256mbit = 32mbyte
Its 8 bits to a byte in my world.
FunOne
FunOne
Or plastic if that's your thing.
Just not in sales, Nintendo made the best HW platform availible. It was the licensing and media format of the N64 that hurt it so badly. While the playstation was printing games and discs for about a dollar each Nintendo was forced to make expensive memory carts. That and the size limits of the carts and Nintendo's very strict policies drove game makers to the other platform.
FunOne
FunOne
I'll be happy once they put this chip in their next series of z505's. Then you could play...errr...work on the road.
-Spidey
Be nice to everyone, they out number you 6 billion to 1.
It was called the Glaze3D.
I say was because it never materialized, just as this chip never will.
Only if you assume zero overdraw... and good luck with that...
Justin Dubs
I don't think this is correct. An HDTV that does 1080i can't do 1080p, because that isn't part of the spec. the highest progressive rez is 720p. Lucas is using special cameras to do 1080p 24fps recording, but that's cause he has money. Perhaps this is where the confusion is coming in?
No, no, no.
256 millibytes = about a quarter of a byte.
That would make it 2 bits.
This chip contains a Shave and a Haircut.
:)
How can this be informative when the person doesn't even know how to go from bits to bytes? "@56MBit = 128Meg Bytes = approx 500 Meg of HIGHY symmetric transistors". :).
256mbit = 32megabytes. 256mbit != 128megabytes. There are 8 bits in a byte. The Sony chip also have 287.5 million transistors. 1/2 of what you said and the amount of memory does not determine the total number of transistors in the chip. It does affect the count but not how many the chip can hold as you showed in your equation. Current CPU chips (the AMD Athlon/Thunderbird for instance) have ~37 million transistors, it is million or M, not Meg. Please have your numbers correct next time
462 mm^2 == (21.5 mm)^2, or about (.85 in)^2.
I hope to clear up a few misconeceptions that people seem to have. I have read some of the replies and it seems that most people are making valid points that are not taking into account all of the factors involved.
1. As many people have noted, raw polygons are only the underlying factor in the visual quality of a scene.
2. There are things that are wasteful both in memory bandwidth and processing power such and redundant pixel redering on the z-buffer. PowerVR, ATI, and NVIDIA are all using techniques to bypass rendering more pixels than necessary. PowerVR in a current card, which is in the middle end because of a lack of hardware T & L (transform and lighting). PowerVR is using what is called tile based rendering, which is a more elegant way to reduce load. ATI has a somewhat less pure technique called hyper Z which decreases memory bandwidth usage (as seen in benchmarks at very high resolutions), and NVIDIA is doing something similiar with the NV20 but doesn't have anything built into their GeForce cards.
3. Yes multi-pass rendering is a factor, but at the same time techniques are being used to render multi-textured polygons in one pass instead of many. PowerVR's has this feature (at least when used with DirectX).
4. Yes, anti-aliasing is a factor also, but 4x4 anti-aliasing doesn't have to require 16 times the rendering power. Only the pixels that have enough contrast to contribute to jaggedness in the first place need to be assesed.
5. The limit how many polygons actually need to be rendered is MUCH less than one per pixel if enough optimization tricks are used. When proper smoothing algorithms are used, nothing distiguishes a highly facted sphere from a regularly facted sphere except for the edges, which will be smoother with increased polygons. A low polygon count object's edges can be smoothed more efficiently with some 2D tricks. Objects far in the distance can be simplified so that the aren't taking up more polygons than necessary.
6. More power can always always always be used. And not just for higher resolutions eighther. One of the things that is so cool about console systems I think, is that they are made to run at 640x480 so they can use plenty of effects and in the end up the visual quality quite a bit.
7. This took me a while, and I didn't preview it.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Except that the article says 256 millibits.
The Shave and a Haircut chip doesen't debut until 2004.
256Mbit = 128Meg Byte
Are you using the same calculator as the guy who said the chip is 18" by 18"?
From the article: "The device contains 256-Mbit of on-chip embedded DRAM"
MEGAbits, or 32 MB
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
think the real push should start moving away from higher polygon rates and more towards greater visualization enhancements for each polygon. We're already dealing with cool things such as environmental bump mapping. I'm still waiting for the fully featured ray-tracing engine. I'd be perfectly happy with a scene that was only 30fps, 800x600, average number of polygons if I could just feel the glimmer of living light.
If you have decent calculation engines on-chip, you can use a silly polygon throughput to emulate nicer features that might be difficult to implement directly. Tesselate large polygons to make NURBS surfaces. Add multiple semitransparent "halos" for fancy lighting effects. Use various sneaky tricks to emulate volume effects like smoke and Ye Canonical Plasma Field. Etc.
You can do all of these in the main CPU, but it bogs down the CPU like crazy and saturates your system bus (sending all of those triangles to the chip). If you can get the chip to do it for you, then it'll look almost as good as real curved surfaces/lighting/etc, without hogging system resources (just rendering resources).
While a true hardware implementation of nifty features would be more efficient, the brute force approach lets you use mainly well-understood designs, and lets you patch bugs in firmware instead of needing a new chip revision.
No idea what Sony's actually going to do.
WHY is this at +4, idiot moderators? There are 8 bits to a byte, not 2. 256/8 = 32. Jesus fucking Christ.
If you're talking about any normal video card, that's really not that impressive, but the fact that it's embedded on the die is pretty stinking cool, IMO.
the human eye doesn't even come close to seeing 430 fps.
J
Look here (http://www.duhaime.org/dict-b.htm) man, and get that chip away from me!
I can't believe he mentioned hair in the same sentence. Ewwww!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, regardless of how fast the eye goes (and I don't think it really has much concept of frames, humans are temporally analogue) the human brain generally doesn't make use of more then 60 fps, except for motion-blurring, which can be simulated onboard.
You are correct, higher resolution models is an answer, but keep in mind that this also increases your memory and bandwidth requirements by a huge margin (local memory on the vector units was severely lacking on the PS2). You must also transform all of those vertices in your mesh, which is a rather expensive process (4 vector multiply-adds and a divide on a PS2, just for the model->screen transformation), plus lighting, and then you must cull and clip these (a very expensive process). And then you still have to interpolate when it's all done! Whereas per-pixel shading requires far fewer vertex transformations, requires less memory, and at the same time generally offers smoother results.
--Terrence
Before any of you freak out about the chip being 1.5ft^2... the actual size is actually reported at 46.2mm^2. Read more closely.
Our eyes only need ~20FPS to perceive motion, but there are definitely aspects of our vision that are sensitive to higher frequencies, particularly our peripheral vision. At I can see monitor flicker at >60Hz out of the corner of my eye, but I don't notice it really at all if I look at the monitor head-on.
Most of the reason we need high frame rates is that we don't do motion-blur when we generate the image. Without motion blur, you need high frame rates to ensure that contrasting edges don't move far between frames. Otherwise, you get "edge inversion" artifacts where your eye superimposes the same edge at two positions from consecutive frames.
This is also why live video from slow-motion cameras played at normal speed by dropping frames looks strangely crisp and unnatural.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
-1d4 to intelligence
Simulating hair in real-time.. oh, c'mon, that's easy, ANYONE can do that!
*pulls out a comb*
See? I didn't even need to fiddle with IRQ's.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
... but I'll bet Poser 4 still runs like a two-legged dog on it in 640x480, antialias, with tons of texture, bump and reflection maps.
(Guess what I've been waiting for, for a good hour-and-a-half now?)
Throwing mad polygons is nice, but much of the processing in raytracing is done with the CPU, not the graphics chip. Yeah, real-time raytracing would be nice. I've seen it done on a stock Amiga 500, to some degree. But there's not a lot more we can do with television resolution beyond that. Physics and detailed simulations will become important soon, until we all have HDTVs.
752 x 480 is about it, or is it? Focus has a new chip set for scaling down 1024 x 768 PC output to TV resolution while keeping detail and clarity. (Press Release). From what I can see, Sony is planning on using this chipset. Combine the three, and you have the makings of a nice rumor: Playstation 3 running BeOS, with web connectivity. Then there is the Nintendo/Be rumour camp...
The basic idea is that if BeOS is ported to such consoles, they instantly become programmable in OO C++/OpenGL. No learning curve for developers, and no hurdles to porting apps.
Get my free Hitchhiker's Guide Tribute Novella:
Now, let's go onto something more simple. The SI notations for these things, which would really help when people are reporting on professional newspages or SlashDot alike, so we don't have to freaking guess what you mean!
1. a bit is a lowercase "b
2. a byte is an uppercase "B"
3. the prefix for a thousand is a lowercase "k" (don't listen to Microsoft and all the other sheep who think it's a capital; they're both wrong and stupid)
4. the prefix for a million is an uppercase "M"
5. the prefix for a thousandth is a lowercase "m".
In case you want to know this as well, though it's not directly relevant to the confusion here, the notation for a billion is an uppercase "G" and the notation for a trillion is an uppercase "T".
Now, some examples so you can remember this. It's really rather simple; in case you feel bogged down by the immense complexity, a small "m" means it's a small number, a big "M" means it's a big number.
So, a Mb is a megabit, one million bits.
A MB is a megabyte, one million bytes.
A kb is a kilobit, one thousand bits (okay, technically these are all 1024, not 1000, but that's not the issue; if it were they could not technically be called kilo- or mega-bits or -bytes.)
A kB is a kilobyte, one thousand bytes.
That should be all you need to start your new lifestyle. If you're still having difficulty with these concepts, pack your computer back into its original packaging (don't worry if you don't have it; just use any old cardboard box), kiss it goodbye and send it back to where you bought it from, because you're too stupid to own one. Do not ask for your money back.
return 0;
Actually, if you check out the ATSC standard, the standard specifies both 1080i and 1080p. 1080i is available in 59.94 and 60 Hz, while 1080p is available in 23.976, 24, 29.97, and 30 Hz.
Where the confusion lies is that 1080p is not at 60Hz, just at 30Hz. So everybody sends 1080i instead, because it's the same frame rate but the action is a little better.
Now, with 720p, you can do it at 60Hz.
I suspect that in the future, HDTV manufacturers will be adding functionality so that their sets will be able to display 1920x1080x75 Hz or at least 60Hz progressive. Right now, this is not the case, so most HDTV sets are constrained to 1920x1080x30Hz p or 60Hz i, so they make you use 800x600, because they don't want to de-interlace the video.
Gentoo Sucks
First off.. The memory size was a typo, but too late for that.
Second, Mega means 1E6. M/Meg often refers to 2^20, but not always.. Depends on what you're talking about (such as hard drive, system memory, etc).
-Michael
The 128 bit chip is a MIPS-based regular CPU, albeit a full 128-bit, dual issue super-scalar CPU. ie. very fast and useful when it comes to routers.
It is an entirely different chip to the graphics processor that most of the article is on about.
I think you missed the 2000+ bit bus bandwidth section of the document.
Your ram on your video card, at best probably goes through a measly 128 bit bus. However, most cards on average probably have only 32 bit or 64 bit buses (if you're lucky).
Movies and cartoons are 25 rames per second aren't they?
Once you're past a certain frames per second level it all looks smooth. The extra frames just make is less flickery.
But then again you could remove flickering by simply repeating the same frame twice. (Think of 100hz TVs displaying 50hz signals - they don't flicker but they don't render extra frames in that mode - right?)
Then there's resolution, your eye has a limit to resolution and 1024x768 is already way above it.
The only reason you can see pixels at all on the computer screen is because you're looking at a small PART of the screen, which isn't what games players do (OK, except AOE players).
Do this: bring the whole of a 19" monitor into the center of vision then try to read slash dot without focussing your eye on any tiny part of the screen.
Can't do it huh? So many pixels, so few colour vision neurons.
Same goes for subpixel rendering at these resolutions - these tiny shifts in the colour of a pixel are imperceptible at these resolutions.
I side with the 'final chip' opinion.
Time for a rethink on the pixel/sec race.
Interesting to see that the performance of this monster chip is 75 million polygons per second - which is what Sony claimed playstation 2 could muster. It shows just how stupid these claims were in the first place.
Who modded that up?
"462mm x 462mm? You want large? There are 25.4 mm per inch. This is saying it is almost 18.2 inches x 18.2 inches"
462 mm^2 means the height multiplied by the width is 462, so the sides are equal to the square root of 462 (assuming it is square).
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
I am sorry to spoil your party, but 1024x768 isn't quite way above the limit the eye can discern. Unless you are seriously visually handicapped, 1024x768 comes nowhere near, say decent 1200 dpi prints.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
billion used to be 10^12, but now common UK-english has billion at 10^9, and trillion at 10^12. I,m not sure when change occured, I vaguely think it changed about the same time a shilling became 5p instead of 12d.
Whenever some says a billion pounds they mean 10^9 not 10^12. You must find the financial news very confusing.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
By writing a driver for POVray and given enough processingpower could I use beowulf-cluster as my graphics card? And play nicely rendered counterstrike? ..and and get more girls?
Yes, no (unless you like playing at 5 beautiful frames per second), and only if they're geeks, respectively.
Where did those Sony engineers get the balls to even attempt such a design? It's going to be a while before it's manufacturable in quantity. At least they are thinking ahead, knowing the manufacturing process will catch up to the design, in the meantime they perfect it. This could kill the x-box, or it will be used in the x-box!
Try thinking three dimensionally.
In a 3D game, everything is made of polygons. Even circles, are polygons (that explains why grenades in Counterstrike are sort of jagged.)
The more polygons that the chip could render per second are better, which brings smoothness and realism to the game.
.sigs are useless; it doesn't protect you from imposters.
I guess 30 fps with beautiful visuals would be nice for games that don't involve too much action, but I'm a Quake3 fan, and you simply cannot play Quake3 competitively at 30 fps.
Um, like that was Digital with the Vax 9000 somewhere around 1988. They had huge wafers, and horrible yield problems. I don't follow your logic on distributed systems being faster -- you must have gotten faulty instructions from the mothership. Back then, the 386 was state of the art, as was a super-ninetendo. For larger machines, it was still common to see a cpu made up of lots of discrete parts on a board. I think enough things have changed since then that this may well work -- but like the original pentium 60/66's, it won't catch on until the next die shrink.
Cat: The other white meat