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Distributed Playstation

Posted by Hemos on from the concatenate-two-buzzwords dept.

withinavoid writes "News.com has a story up about the next generation Playstation 3. Apparently the game developers are asking for a 1000 times performance increase and that's just not possible, so they are looking at distributed computing as a possibility. "

3 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. Sony Hype Machine by Spankophile · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hmm, the last time Sony announced their "Next Generation Console" (aka PS2), it was still over a year away, while the PS1 was still selling well. The real kicker (aka purpose) though was that it was enough to keep a large number of gamers away from the DreamCast, which was a great system.

    It would appear to me that hyping a PS3 while the PS2 is still selling strong would be an attempt at keeping people from getting an Xbox or GameCube.

  2. Comes from current PS2 architecture by iamr00t · · Score: 5, Informative

    Basicaly, we all know that it was hard for PS2 developers to make games for it initialy.
    The reason was the Emotion engine in PS2, that it explicitly multithreaded, i.e. you have to make your program use all threads (unlike PPRO for example, where CPU does it for you).

    It's really a whole new way to program.

    Now it seems that Sony convinced some developers to lean it there's nothing stopping them from making more threads (there are 16 in Emotion if I am not mistaken).

    Oh, and it has nothing to do with distiributed computing over the Internet. The application architecture is similar, but that's it. And yeah, no batches here :)

    As for IBM involvement, here is the article in Wired Magasine about their cell computer

    Oh, and ahother one about PS2 and PS3, that one is quite old, but explains where Sony is going.

    1. Re:Comes from current PS2 architecture by voronoi++ · · Score: 5, Informative

      Err, the reasons the PS2 is hard to work with is:

      1) Poor tools
      2) Arcane DMA alighnent issues
      3) Misguided selection of VU integer instructions
      (no imul, you have to jump through hoops to do xor, only 16bit, yet flags are in the upper 16bits)
      4) Hard to singlestep the VUs
      5) Very limited blending modes in the GS
      6) Very limited iterator precision in the GS
      7) No hardware clipping
      8) Wierd GS rules where rendering horizontal triangles is much slower than large vertical ones
      9) Non perspective correct iterated vertex colour
      10) Limited vram
      11) 1.0 * 1.0 == 0.999999999 in the VUs

      I.e. it's cheap and flawed (but hey that's a challenge and some people seem to like it)

      Then you go

      "It's really a whole new way to program."

      You are not a programmer are you? Didn't think so.

      "Now it seems that Sony convinced some developers to lean it there's nothing stopping them from making more threads (there are 16 in Emotion if I am not mistaken)."

      What are you talking about? I can't possibly imagine why you would want 16 threads in PS2 game.
      Genrally CPU multi threadding is quite costly. Most games are written to run at a solid 60fps*, so you can often get away with out multithreadding
      stuff like the AI, the Renderer or some trickle loader.

      BTW The only console that really had seriously multi-thredded games was the N64.

      * Due to field rendering you have 2x the fillrate (and more vram) at 60fps than at 30fps. Dropping to 30fps is bad!