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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."
relying on other playstations on the internet to do 3D rendering for you?
How is that possible even if there were gigabit ether internet connections?
I want 30+fps games here not 1fps because at 9pm everyone is playing their ps3 and theres no processing power left to be used
this is completely worthless read. IT just throws out a bunch of buzz words and make no sense at all.
"Buoyed by so much processing power, consumers will be able to interact with these worlds without worrying about hackers, viruses, or lost connections."
What the hell are they talking about? I want to say some clever comment but I am not so much stupider having read that first sentence of the paragraph that I can't think of a thing to say.
it would allow consoles to properly render bouncing breasts with a real time physics engine in full AntiAliased, Anistropic filtered, with 8 light sources, and 50,000 polygons and textures per breast glory.
Exactly. What we need 1000x more of is developer hours on the games.
Teh graphics are pretty damed realistic now. The plot-lines and interactivity of most games is at about the level of the games in the 80s. Worse in many cases.
Why do these companies continually throw processor performance at a problem that requires a larger but no more processor intensive code base.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Seriously, I'm not kidding.
Though graphics in general have improved a whole hell of a lot more, they still aren't perfect. One interesting area of research is that of how the reflections and light absorption of one object affects the lighting of another/all others in a certain area. Processing power at the moment hasn't yet been sufficient to simulate the global effects caused by local objects. 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. Multiply this by a factor of 10, and you can see why you might need a lot of processing power to simulate this.
Of course, this is assuming that the article really isn't just tossing buzzwords around.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Oh yeah. No fucking way.
Look, I think the chips themselves will probably be great, and with 500 million transistors, they'll probably kick ass, do massive anti-aliasing (to get rid of them PS2 "jaggies"), and render Final Fantasy XIV chicks so realistic that 14 year old masterbation fantasies won't be realized by the CGI scenes, but by the game engine itself.
But. I don't believe that broadband will be far enough into the market - even by 2005 - for distributed computing to take off. Let's ignore my own home firewall and the like, where there's no way in H-E-double-hockey-sticks I'd let another computer "borrow" some of my processor power so they can play Grand Theft Auto 5: The Leiberman Censored Editition.
Powerful chip? Sure. Distributed computing for games? I'm not buying it yet.
Then again, if the product shows up and works with the distributed net and all, I could be proven wrong, and I have no problem admitting that. For now, I'm waiting for it, hoping it's PS2/PSOne backwards compatible, and keeping my fantasies just to Selphie Tilmitt. (Nunchucks...rowr!)
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There's no point in pretending to argue against any of this because it doesn't say anything.
This is like being presented with the statement 'in ten years, men will fly like birds!'
You just can't say it's not true because it doesn't particularly carry any meaning in the first place.
how many people will really want their bandwidth getting chewed up by a console that they are not playing, so that others can play? especially with all the talk of providers going to a capped model that allows you to transfer X number of gigs per month before incurring additional fees.
personally if they could even make the sucker work, i would just yank the cat-5 out of the thing whenever im not playing
as far as i can tell they want to make a gaming console that will be able to surf the web, check email and play movies etc.
well, can't a PC already check email + browse the web and play movies? and a PC can already play games!
as far as i'm concerned the PC already IS the media center/all in one box for the modern home, with a vast pool of development resources behind it. Why are these companies trying to reinvent the wheel?
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.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
It's interesting. I havent heard much mention of it, but supposedly Hiroshi Yamauchi's replacement, Satoru Iwata stated in a press conference that ...
... "No matter what great product you come up with, people get bored. I feel like a chef cooking for a king who's full."
"We can't be optimistic about the game market,"
For anyone interested, it's on Page 26 of issue #112 of Game Informer (GameSpot's review mag)...
Not much mention of it otherwise, appearently they thought he was refering to the fact that M$ and Sony really aren't upgrading graphics or sound so much as making them "trojan horses" for downloadable media.
Nintendo isn't really leaving the market, just won't be developing new hardware all of the time.
Anyhow, now that it looks like Nintendo is voluntarilly getting out of the hardware race, wonder how this will effect Sony and M$ and moreso, who might take the "3rd spot"???
When will you learn that the inherent assumption when describing a console is non-upgradeable/fixed platform/known hardware?
Making it significantly upgradeable makes it not a console.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
It's just the Sony hype machine again. Remember what they wanted you to believe about the PS2?
Of course PS3 is gonna be faster than the PS2. No, it won't be 1000 times faster.
-jfedor
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]
Why is Everyone so negative? I mean who isn't going to try and get setiathome (and other distributed computing projects) to work on ps3, I mean thats the only realistic application of Broadband based Parrallel computing. My Duke Nukem Forever Platinum Titanium 3000 won't work with a 250ms lag time for borrowed cycles...
Anything this wierd will require some kind of distributed OS to manage the thing. (Obligatory "Beowulf cluster" remark might actually be appropriate here.) Operating systems like that are hard to do and not, historically, easy to use.
The hype is totally out of sync with the hardware concept. "If Sony's aspirations succeed, then the Playstation 3 will not be a pure video game console, but rather measure the amount of milk left in the fridge, record TV programs to hard-disk, automatically download new software..." Huh? For this we need massively parallel computing?
Note that the last IBM press release on this was 16 months ago.
This has to be a bad description of what Sony, IBM, and Toshiba are up to. Those are real companies that do real innovation; they have to have a clearer vision of where they're going.
OK, some valid points, but do you think that Sony will price the PS3 at $299 initially? With all those features I wouldn't be surprised if they price it at $499, which then makes the whole "upgrading every 4 years is cheaper than PC's" a mute point. Though if they do decide to price it competitevely, then I agree, upgradability becomes a non issue.
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
Instead of using a mouse or game controller, players might wave their hands in front of a Web cam, showing what they want to do through gestures.
Sony...where half the fun of a game is watching someone else try to play it.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Wow... I can't believe Sony is planning a worse development nightmare than PS2 is. I can't speak from personal experience, but from many developer interviews, the general consensus seems to be that it's a pain. As games become larger and larger and more and more complex, developers will want to spend _less_ time fighting with the hardware. The trend is definitely moving away from this very low level hacking and more towards using standard API's (e.g. id is using C++ and OpenGL).
It took almost a year to see any decent apps on PS2 because of the extra development time. Where XBox shares titles with PS2, they typically look as good or somewhat better, and only a few months after launch. Throw out some massive parallel/distributed monster and it'll sink like a stone.
Why is PS2 alive and well today? Because PS1 was traditional architecture, quickly had lots of good apps, and bought them tons of brand loyalty. I don't think that's going to work for them again on the next iteration.
i;m not sure about you, but i don't think its skynet that will be running the world over with machines....
It's gonna take one hell of a lot of PS3 Minesweeper players for me to get the kind of framerates in my 3D games that they're speaking of...
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
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.
"Who leaves their playstaion on all the time?"
:-)
I do.
I've had my PS2 (running linux of course) on since I bought it about 2 months ago. Works great.
I think you'll find the reason it's not yet popular to leave the PS2 on is that there's no reason to. As soon as there is a reason to, it will happen. In my case, it's so I can ssh into it from work
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Lets get something strait- It's homefield advantage that's killing the XBox, not hardware. I think we can all agree that Japan is the undisputed gaming captal of the world and it just so happens both Sony and Nintendo live there. With few exceptions, the Japanese is very hard for US companies to penetrate effectively. It's literally hostile territory in terms of importation and marketing, where the US is a lot more leanient in those areas, despite what you may hear. The fuss made over a small batch of XBox's scatching game DVDs is enough proof of that.
The biggest issue is the games, in my opinion. Not that they are bad (exceptions noted), just that I don't consider them nessisarily console games since the XBox seems to be leaning more toward American style PC games. Beyond Sega and one or two other popular developers, there's not a whole lot from the Japanese side of things. It feels more like a PC than a console now. If the Xbox wants penetration, it's machine needs to feel like a console and the Japanese have shaped a lot of what that feels is for just over 20 years. Those developers need to be a major presence to compete against the homefiled players.
Of course, MS seems very adept at viral infection of markets. Gates and company tend to have a very long view of their ultimate goals.
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Um, yeeeah... Something like that...
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I don't know anybody that leaves their console on while their not using it for long stretches.
I personally know several. Some people play old NES games that take hours to beat yet do not have a save feature.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I know Sony must have some engineers, or they could never have built the PS2. The engineers must know that everything that's been written about the PS3 so far is hype and fluff, but they must also have a non-stupid idea in mind. So the question is, can we extrapolate from the hype and fluff what the non-stupid idea is? Two thoughts come to mind.
1) The PS3 processor will be composed of many small, simple computing elements which will make it possible to keep a lot more of the silicon busy if programs can be parallelized, which in the case of world simulation, which is what gaming is converging into, maybe it can. You can just assign individual processors to individual components of the world.
2) Future PS3s will be joined together into some kind of virtual computing grid, where the grid as a whole will simulate the gaming world. Using a grid to do rendering won't work. Even if ping time was 50 msec and processing time at the remote node was 0 that would set a limit of 20 frames per second. Before someone thinks I'm stupid, that's only one of the reasons it won't work. Meanwhile, GPUs are getting so powerful that there is no need to offload rendinging to remote processors.
However, what if a portion of the processing capacity of each console was used for shared world simulation? You could have a peer to peer MMORPG game. It would require that the consoles be trusted and that the world state be saves as consoles joined and left the game, but if it could work we might be able to have MMORPGs where you just have to buy the game but not pay a fee to someone else to run a server for you. Not that that would be good for Sony since they make tons of money running the servers, but it would be great for gamers.
Anyway, this is the best I can make of the utter nonsense that's been written about the PS3 so far. Bother very futuristic, but not outside the pale of possibility. Meanwhile, maybe someone can explain to that reporter that a fast computer does not protect you from hackers and viruses, any more than a fast car protects you from car theives and catching a cold.
Nerds in Iraq don't fantasize about Beowolf Clusters of things, but rather Playstation clusters.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Sure, "better graphics" provide the motivation -- but the difficulty in coding for the more advanced processors tends to work against them.
By the time developers really master the art of coding for the new platform, it's already "outdated" anyway, and they're just struggling to make it appear as good as whatever the new "latest and greatest" technology is.
When I look at my collection of PS2 games, I see that the vast majority of the titles released in the first year or so have decidedly poor graphics. (Fantasy of Flight, for example, or Real Pool) These things look like 4+ year old computer games. They certainly don't look any better than most "respectable" PS1 titles.
The graphics details they're trying to address in new platforms are miniscule problems compared to many issues they've *never* really fixed. (EG. Graphics glitches that draw black space instead of the side of an object when your character walks to just the right place and angle.)
I don't even play SSX Tricky that often, but I've managed to "fall into" graphics screw-ups twice now. One time, my snowboarder kept getting redrawn over and over on top of a glitching, flickery backdrop that looked like it was stuck between updating two different frames. Finally, I pressed enough buttons that he "fell out" of the "trap" somehow and back onto the snow.
Even in Grand Theft Auto III, I've had at least one instance where I managed to walk "through" the side of a building partially.
To me, these experiences completely ruin the game's atmosphere - and are far more serious issues than the fact that some object doesn't cast the right shade of colored lighting onto a surrounding item.
You need 1000x and change for better graphics. Seriously, the industry wastes huge amounts of man hours forcing artists to keep their polygon count down. If those artists could be freed to other tasks, the quality and depth of games would skyrocket very quickly. Most games made today are not programmer bound at all in terms of depth and balance. When artists can stop worrying about polygon count, you'll see some amazing games.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Sony had this set up at the Game On exhibition in London (still on at the Barbican if you're here in the next few months) - camera pointing at you, with some software that lets you 'grab' a control and do something on screen by waving our hands in front of it. You could get some nice effects such as rippling water, flames, etc, but I'm not sure it would work for precise control of a game. Interesting idea though, and Sony are planning to put it into future games, according to the video that went with it.
Hmm. That's very odd.
The PS2's geometry engine is a 4x4 arrangement (16 pixel pipelines in total), so the fastest possible render is irrespective of 4x4 or 0x0. Given that a 4x4 triangle at least possesses triangular nature, I'm surprised that they would go for 0x0.
The PS2 also doesn't use co-ordinate space of 0,0 to be anything special - the hardware has automatic scaling from an abstract 4096x4096 space into whatever resolution you happen to be working in. Typically (at 640x480), the co-ordinate (0,0) is at (1728,1808). Why then does it matter where you render the triangle ?
Whether you draw the buffer to the screen or not is also not relevant - you can't "draw" to local memory - it's drawn to RAM with a 2048-bit bus on the same chip as the video processor. There's no reason why displaying the screen would slow that down, so why open yourself to criticism if that were the case. Odd behaviour to say the least...
In short, I think you're wrong.
There are detailed figures for different types of draw operation in the GS users manual. The 75 million/sec is for no-texture, flat-shade, no-anti-alias. It drops down to 16 million/sec for textured, gourard shaded, fogged, anti-aliased triangles.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
"If Sony's aspirations succeed, then the Playstation 3 will not be a pure video game console, but rather measure the amount of milk left in the fridge...(snip)"
Is there a point at which I can say my life is digital enough? Maybe I don't want PS3 to monitor my fridge, sharing the milk inventory with sony, spamming me with ads from 5 vendors who want to bring me milk, telling a data mining service how much milk I drink in a year, telling a doctor I need more milk, telling many people things that are NONE OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS!!!!
that until they design a system that is upgradable, consoles will NEVER be able to compete with PC's
Heh. That's not true by any means. It usually comes down to this:
Cost of a new console: $200
Cost of a fancy new video card, sound card, or hard drive: $200
Now even if the second is less than $200 sometimes, you get the idea. PC upgrading isn't free, and you still have to chuck your PC every few years and get a brand new one, and that doesn't preclude all the upgrading that can be done in the meantime. So your argument is a red herring.
Confuses cell computing with network distributed networking.
I doubt the average user ever opens the box, let alone realizes that they need a new video card (as opposed to a faster CPU, more ram, etc). Not only do people not posess the knowledge to upgrade, but with crappy PCs, it's pretty hard to upgrade, anyhow (few slots, etc). I assume that most people who buy HPs/Gateways/etc just buy a new computer every few years, and give the old one to their kids or to their grandma.
It always amazes me how out of touch /. people are with the non-geek reality that a large number of people live in.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
The original gameplan was use the first generation EE/GS for the PS2. The next generation, EE2/GS2, would be used for graphic workstations and would have "100x the power" of the original EE/GS combo (or something like that, Sony PR). Then, the EE3/GS3 would be used for the PS3, giving it "1000x the power" of the PS2.
Distributed processing for console games (or games in general) is not a good idea. People want their games to work all the time, not only when peak bandwith isn't occuring. It doesn't sound good on paper, and definately wouldn't look good for actual processing and rendering.
Maybe if the game required you to find an actual extra-terrestrial, then you might have a reason for distributed processing on a game. Otherwise, I can't think of any reason Sony would do this. It would be a headache to keep maintained and wouldn't really bring in the cash considering the slower-than-expected broadband invasion.
This article isn't really a great read.
This is exactly what my friends and I talk about. Instead of finding and training better coders, they just build bigger and faster hardware. This in turn makes for lazier coders. We need the guys that used to code for Atari and Nintendo "back in the day" to write code for the new platforms. Games would be incredible because they would be effeceint. Load times would be next to nothing. And then we need some really great writers to create story lines to base the games on. Then we need more artists like Gyger (horrible spelling ... the dude that did the Alien series). Beautiful art, wonderful story, and programmers to pull it all together. What's missing ... oh, someone that knows how to make it FUN. Call in ID (:
~LoudMusic
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3 interesting things I see about this.
1. maybe they could make some money off selling you additional processing resources in the aftermarket, so you don't have to keep getting incompatible hardware and developers can build satisfying worlds. Supercomputers for business are expandable.
2. Sounds like they're trying to build a second world wide web on a proprietary protocol which would suck in a Burning Chrome / JM kind of way, and your game playing would slow down maybe when people come to visit. More like people asking your machine to render rooms for them or send graphics commands to be shaded on their own PS3. Though if it was totally opened (protocol and code) it would be very cool. Totally open except to M$ is also okay.
3. Someone is going to have to add some secret code to the PS3 like they did for the PS2 which lets you ignore regionality on DVDs or otherwise kill the DRM features.
Unfortunately, the rest of the article is vapor ^ 3.
Does the parental admonition "Close the door! I'm not paying to heat/air-condition the whole neighborhood!" ring a bell? How many parents are going to allow their kids to tie up a phone line or leave the console on 24-7 to allow complete strangers all over the world to use their PS3?
Anyone here on the SETI or other simalar project? Ok, people will leave their systems on for others to use if it's the same type of people keeping it on. Also look at Kazaa and other P2P services, they all rely on people leaving their systems on- which really, a ton of people do.
The only reason that I wouldn't leave mine on would be if it sucked a ton of electric. 400 watts would just be unacceptable (however for some reason I don't mind leaving on my AC all the way, as well as the 6 computers in that room...)
For a gaming system 400 watts would be too much, but face it, no game system currently takes that much that I know of- so it's not really an issue.
As for tying up the phone, I don't think that's gonna be an issue. Alot of people playing PS/3 will be college students with always on connections or people at home with always on connections. I have had over 30 computers at home connected, I don't think a Playstation in the mix would really hurt anything.
I guess though, that this makes the prospect for the 'mobile' PS3 nonexistant (unless wireless national networks ever happen)
Tibbon
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