More PlayStation 3 Grid Computing Details

gwernol writes: "Redherring has a good article on Sony's forthcoming PlayStation 3: not too many technical details but good background to the Xbox/PlayStation wars. Sony are touting the use of massively parallel 'cell computing' to get a 1,000 times performance increase over the PS2. This plan, also known as grid computing is also discussed here."

Comments

What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, why do we need a 1000x performance increase in a gaming console? What additional features or technologies would this allow developers to implement?

--dambert

Re: What the hell?

[realgone]

After all, if I have a shiny red ball next to a shiny green ball, then depending on where I put the light source, the red might partly affect the shade of the green, or vice versa.

If you happen to have the Fight Club DVD sitting around, there's a great bit in the extras where the FX crew talks about all the headaches this phenomenom created for them -- particularly during the IKEA living room scene. (For those who haven't caught the movie yet -- for shame! -- Edward Norton's living room is reimagined as a 3D IKEA style catalogue, with furniture and floating sales copy materializing in his wake as he strolls through the shot.)

Every piece of furniture added drastically changed the ambient color of both the room and all the furntiure that had appeared prior. Trying to composite it all over the original base footage of an empty living room in neutral lighting turned out to be an absolute nightmare. And they had months to work on this. Imagine trying to render it in real-time! Trust me, every bit of rendering power the PS3 can churn out will be used.

Really interesting stuff on that DVD. The wealth of geeky behind-the-scenes materials is almost better than the movie itself.

Re:When will console makers learn...

[RaboKrabekian]

There's so much wrong with this statement.

First - it's not consoles that can't compete with PC's, it's the other way around. PC game sales are miniscule when compared to consoles. Gaming on the PC is restricted to RTS and FPS gaes for the most part - games which take advantage of a mouse/keyboard setup.

People play consoles because they DON'T have to worry about upgrading, or getting drivers to work, or crashes, or any of the other headaches involved in PC gaming. Consoles games just work - the way they're supposed to, every time. And they work the same way on everyone's system.

If you think the PS2 architecture is weird

[Bobtree]

you haven't seen anything yet.

In terms of scalability, the uber-parallel-processing-pipelined PS2 makes a lot of sense, and will continue to get more powerful in the future as its software improves. In terms of usability though, the PS2 has irked a lot of console developers because it's an entirely different beast and doesn't behave like a PC when you get down to performance bottlenecks.

The PS3 and beyond can only continue this trend. Sony hopefully won't make the same mistake ease-of-use wise, but the PS3 will be getting tantalizingly close to the "do everything you ever cared to do in a game" performance.

The future of this technology is hugely dependant on software capability to make sense of and utilize it. This will be the biggest hurdle, and clearly nothing like it really exists today.

One of the next big steps may be carbon-nanotube based computing, because it will enable architectures with massive hierarchical processing power and near limitless involatile stupidly fast memory, all embedded everywhere. Carbon (and other) nanotubes will be used for both logic and memory (as well as actual display surfaces), and ultimately be laid out more like a brain than a serial system.

I look foward having a complete system in a display where you push morphing procedures in one end which ultimately get streamed into content on the output side.

The networked aspect will be important too, but not how it's colored in this article. Your games will ineveitably run graphics processing on your local machine, with non-realtime and background tasks offloaded to others on the network. However, distributed simulation of gaming environments will only really make sense when players become the content producers and the worlds expand procedurally to simulate whatever ideas of interest their imaginations have conjured.

Then I just have to ask, when game consoles power the realization of our imaginations, whose world are we going to be living in? [hint: this is rhetorical, don't answer, just think about it]

Xbox/PlayStation wars?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Check magic box, in Japan the Xbox is being outsold about 3:1 by the obsolete PS1!! I mean, seriously, how many people are buying a PS1 these days when the PS2 isn't *that* much more expensive and plays all the PS1 games as well. GameCube is killing the Xbox in Japan, which in turn is being killed by the PS2.

In the US Nintendo's GameCube and the Xbox are selling about equal (GameCube was selling better, but the recent price drops helped SOny and MS more than Nintendo). Both are far behind the PS2. In Europe the GameCube is outselling the Xbox.

In fact the worldwide sales of the GameCube and Xbox combined don't equal the sales of the PS2 in just one of the three major sectors (Japan, US, Europe).

There are no Xbox/PS2 wars. The PS2 is the clear winner. Maybe some GameCube/PS2 wars. Definatly some GameCube/Xbox wars. The Xbox is stuggling to keep up with the GameCube for the distant 2nd in terms of market share.

Streaming games?

[Anonymous Coward]

This part of the psreported.com article caught my attention:

The Playstation 3, as well as other applications that will use the Cell, will take advantage of the CPU's "self healing" capability. "Self-healing computers will be programmed not to go down," Doherty said. "Bus and processor areas are automatically corrected using a new meshed era redundancy technology." The Cell's compression engine, for example, will use a multi-processor engine to reconstruct missing pixels or other missing features due to glitches in a streaming PS3 game or video.

(emphasis added)

Could this mean that they're intending on rendering their games on servers and streaming just the video over to the console? This would make them using the grid-computing concept more reasonable. I mean, I wouldn't want to waste any of my cpu cycles just so that the kid next door could get a few more polygons on FFXV chicks' breast. If I was playing a game myself I probably wouldnt have much unused processor power to contribue, and when I wasn't playing a game, my console would most likely be off.

What if the consoles wouldn't use their computing cycles on anything locally displayed, but would merely act as a part of the world biggest rendering farm and a dumb client for recieving the distributedly-rendered video stream of the game they are playing?

If they think they can stream movies, as mentioned in the other articly, could they also stream games? Would this be technologicly possible, in 2005? Would it even make any sense? I find it an interesting thought, nonetheless.