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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."
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.
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.
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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
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 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]
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.
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
Its not quite as dumb as the Redherring article makes it seem. Whoever the idiot journalist is who wrote that (not even worth my time to look it up), he obviously got confused between different forms of distributed processing. The PS3 isn't going to use SETI-like distributed processing, its going to use a large collection of local processors to do its work. Somewhat like the old Thinking Machines cubes.
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.
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**** Requirements waved for The Dragon Master
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Seriously, either the author of the article doesn't know what he's talking about or Sony's been smoking something other than Xbox sales. I saw Dean Takahashi (the author) give a talk to promote his new Xbox book at the San Jose Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago. I was sitting in the cafe area, occasionally looking over to get an idea of whether the audience seemed interested in what he was saying... but they seemed so dead I didn't bother walking over.
At the end, he distributed free X-box games to random audience members, and I distinctly remember the look on each person's face as they accepted their prize: "what the fsck am I gonna do with this?"
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.
Actually, the Playstation 2 is capable of 75 million poly's a second. They were all drawn at 0,0,0 with a size of 0, and the buffer they were drawn into wasn't drawn on the screen.
I shit you not, that's how they came to that #.
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!