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PS3 Linux Performs Real Time Ray Tracing
fistfullast33l writes "A video posted on You Tube shows three PS3s networked together to perform Real Time Ray Tracing. Keep in mind that PS3 Linux runs in a hypervisor, so the RSX graphics chip is not being used at all. Even more impressive, PS3 Fanboy is reporting that Linux also limits the number of SPEs to 6 at once, so not all the horsepower on each of the PS3s is being utilized. According to the You Tube Summary, IBM Cell SDK 2.0 is being used for the IBM Interactive Ray-tracer (iRT). This apparently was done by the same team that presented a tech demo at GDC 2007 of a Linux PS3 rendering a 3 million polygon scene in real time at 1080p resolution."
that's not a strictly accurate description of the situation, although it's close. Linux doesn't limit it, it uses one SPE for its own benefit. So 7 SPEs are in use, just as they are when playing games, but one of them is consumed by the kernel.
I don't think this is very exciting, however. It's not like it has gaming applications; you need three PS3s to get it done. Wake me up when one PS3 can do realtime raytracing in-game.
I know there's been some limited applications of realtime raytracing in gaming. IIRC your temple in Black & White had some in the ceiling. But I'm talking about actually useful effects, not just some non-play-related eye candy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So when exactly will PS3 actually have any GAMES worth playing? I don't care if it can prognosticate the weather for all planetary ecosystems in the universe 10,000 years into the future...I just want to play 1 game that doesn't suck on it. Just one. Anybody? Forget it.
-JWR
PS3 Fanboy is reporting that Linux also limits the number of SPEs to 6 at once
That is incorrect - Linux does not limit the SPEs - Out of the 8 available SPEs, the PS3 hardware disables 1 and one is reserved for the hypervisor leaving 6 for Linux running atop the hypervisor.
This looks interesting at first but the arbitrary limitations placed on the PS3 seems to be a show stopper.
I mean why pay $600 for a "performance" machine that isn't even given the chance to live up to its specs?
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The Linux PS3 never rendered a 3 million polygons scene in real-time, it decomposed the scenes into batchs that were dispatched to blades to do the rendering and the result brought back to the PS3.
It's written clearly in the article, please read it before you post about it.
The reason only six are available to the OS is that one us used by the hypervisor for DRM purposes and the eighth is disabled for chip yield purposes. Raytracing is very parallelizable task, so it's not surprising that eighteen SPEs working in parallel could perform realtime raytracing.
One point: there's yet another SIMD engine on that chip... people forget about VMX (altivec). It's bolted onto the PPC PPU core as well.
Armored... Core...
ARMORED... CORE...
Armored... RAVEN! RAVEN! AAUGH! Aaa -
armored... core...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Raytracing, by definition, is not hardware-accelerated. Of course the RSX isn't being used. Much more impressive is the cluster that, a few years ago, ran raytraced Quake 3.
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http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~sidapohl/egoshooter
After all, with all those Cell processors, cranking out Ray goodness is a plus.
Now, if they could just grok that the lack of high quality games on the PS3 is not helping - and ditch the Blu-Ray drive that noone wants and/or needs they could drop the price to something reasonable.
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I recall early rumours about the PS3 having 39 processors, 4 cell chips with 9 each, plus 1 supervising CPU.
If only Sony had stuck with that and given us a machine that could real-time raytrace, then I probably would be queueing up to spend $837 on it (UK price of £425 converted at today's exchange rate).
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Umm, let's take a look at what you're saying there...
know there's been some limited applications of realtime raytracing in gaming. IIRC your temple in Black & White had some in the ceiling
Umm, I think you have Radiosity confused with ray tracing.
I don't think this is very exciting, however. It's not like it has gaming applications; you need three PS3s to get it done. Wake me up when one PS3 can do realtime raytracing in-game.
Then you must not know much about computer graphics. I doubt you could have done this with the PS2 or the XBox. The fact that a next gen machine can do this is very interesting, especially in a distributed fashion over the network. Distributed computing really is the future, and may someday take place inside game consoles as well. IF you have a spare processor and your buddy doesn't, is it efficient for him to borrow your CPU time? This is definitely a discussion that is occurring in normal computing space, let alone console gaming.
Not to mention, this isn't being done with the Sony SDK. This is done using free tools available via the internet. A college student could build this for a research project if they wished. This is proving that Sony allowing people access to Linux on the machine really is working. It counters the argument of XBLA's framework being the best thing ever. In fact, they could release this code as part of the GPL for free and it wouldn't be encombered by any Microsoft system or Sony system whatsoever.
Does the polygon rating mean that much in terms of ray tracing performance? From what I've done with raytracing, most objects exist as geometric additions/subtractions of primitive shapes. A door would be a cube transformed to be stretched into a rectangular plank, plus a couple cylinders for the various parts of the door handle, plus a sphere for the handle end, minus a series of cubes for the lock opening shape. Polygons only come into play outside the engine, when you're trying to decide how to map textures across objects, then you'd want to represent the side they're painting as a polygon - but only before it goes to the engine, it would just be a single texture for all sides wrapped around the visible object. You might have a separate polygon primitive, but I'd think it would be one of the least ones used, in terms of raytracing efficiency.
You can cheat a lot in comparing polys to primitives when it comes to comparing raytracers to polygon engines. Still, it's been a while since I've played with raytracers, and I'm interested in what I've missed - this seems like it would be a real treat to see in action.
Ryan Fenton
I bought a PS3 just for the Blu-Ray drive, once it became clear HD-DVD was losing the war. The games are underwhelming so far, but that's why I have the Wii.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much of anything about ray tracing... but I should hope an $1,800+ setup could render a single automobile in 3D.
I disagree. I think making games work on multiple gaming units instead of constantly forcing an upgrade to a newer model is a better idea. In five years when a PS3 costs $200 I'd be glad to buy a second one or even a third for newer more intensive games. I'd love to see a little icon on the box saying that the game requires two units. I'd hope they'd make it more user-friendly to network the machines together by that time though.
I'd love to see a massive world that could be raytraced in movie quality during realtime gameplay. They mentioned that possibility with networked PS3's early in their rumor phase and it is one of the concepts I found most exciting. As I remember they said that as they get Cell processors into other consumer electronics that some of the work could be offloaded to the CPU in your tv, dvd player, etc. That'd be awesome.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
But this means that maybe another factor of four in performance will allow for simple scenes to be fully raytraced using general purpose processors. But raytracing is an "embarassingly parallelizable" problem, so a dedicated ray processing unit (RPU, by analogy to CPU, GPU, and PPU) could probably provide that factor of four performance improvement today, per ray pipeline, and fit many more ray pipelines than generally programmable cells on the same silicon...
So does this mean we're on the edge of having raytraced rendering in specialised video cards? Will nVidia's rayForce 9Z800 show up running 40 FPS raytraced Warcraft in a few years?
Ah, the Xbox fanboy, shocked to discover that the PS3 really might be more powerful than his little console.
This demonstrates that one of the more common Slashdot anti-PS3 memes is simply untrue: you really can do useful things with Linux on the PS3. That alone makes it worthy of Slashdot and also demonstrates a very powerful feature of the PS3 that the Xbox 360 simply lacks.
This is Linux, on the PS3, being clustered together to show something really cool.
How you've managed to corrupt that into a "PS3 is unimportant" I'll never be able to understand.
The PS3 is open enough that they were able to take off-the-shelf PS3s and write clustering software to generate a single HD image. That's pretty cool and a testement to the power of the PS3, no matter what the Xbox fans think.
Forget about it if the company gives you tools and permision remap/redraw everything easily with 2d sources.
Desktop directors will be the garage band rock stars of the next few decades.
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Your civilization has built the Internet.(+2sci) This obsoletes the Hollywood wonder.(+1hap)
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
It can! Doesn't look very nice, granted, but it did it! That makes it as powerful as a PS3, right? Because we need the power of the PS3 for real time ray tracing. Wheee.
Who said I had one? I'll wait until the PS3 sells for $150 retail to buy one.
Which, since we don't have to go to HDTV until 2009, should be perfect timing.
Meantime, I'll be enjoying my 480p-optimized Wii and all the fun games for it.
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Perhaps, but it's a bit memory constrained for many higher end tasks. What is really needed is a good multiprocessor Cell rack mount system that can be given a few GB of RAM. That's when we'll see what the Cell is really capable of.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I read that as 'Imagine a Beowulf cluster of cheese'. Now, that would have been news for nerds.
Linux has, afaik, access to as many SPEs as the games... that is 6. The reasons aren't related to
linux support at all but to the PS3 design:
- One SPE is unuseable because Sony uses chips with only 7 good SPEs to improve yields
- One SPE is reserved by the HyperVisor for its own use, possibly DRM related
- The 6 remaining ones are useable by the operating system, wether it's the Game OS or
Linux, there is no difference in that area.
MMmmmm, never under estimate an engine of wolf cheese eaters clustered by the bay.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Yawn!!!! Really, how long is the crap going to keep appearing in the /. headlines?
... very old. We get it! It has a little grunt. Who keeps posting all of this totally amazing crap? Is it some Sony PR agent who's using /. for advertising ... saying "Here you go you geeks, by the way, buy lots of these and tell everybody what else you can get it to do. Eventually somebody will do something extremely cool, like getting it to launch itself into orbit. Then everybody else will want to get there hands on a PS3 as well. I'll get a bigger bonus."
It's getting old
Can we get news worthy stuff please.
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So all you've done is pushed all their duties onto one person's shoulders. Virtual set or real set, someone still has to create it. Same with props. Part of the reason we have "division of labour" is that there is only so many hours in a day, and one person can't be an expert in everything. And even with all that "raytracing" is just another tool. Not a magic bullet that will somehow make movies easier to make. More likely the other way around. Just ask the people creating todays games if realism has made their life easier. So no, the OP is naive both because he doesn't understand the filmmaking process (even if there's no film), nor the computer graphics field (and it's sister Machinima).
so you're saying that if you network enough computers, they'll be able to quickly perform a highly data-parallel computation? wow.
ok, snobbery aside, real time raytracing is kinda neat. it's just not exactly an amazing feat since ratracing isn't exactly hard to parallelize, it scales well so you actually can do it faster by just throwing more hardware at it.
While it seems like a good idea on paper, shared processing for gaming may not be so great in practice. In order for a shared processing setup to really be used reliably, wouldn't it require taking control out of the hands of the user and contractually forcing them into maintaining a set number of "always connected" hours at a set bandwith for a set number of processor cycles, so a bare minimum of threads across all connected systems can be processed for each node on the entire network?
If not, does that mean game developers will only produce games that run well on a single, unnetworked system? Or, would we have a huge mess of games whose performance is so inconsistent that it can't be benchmarked due to constantly changing network/node conditions? Does this mean we might one day face such oddities as being unable to play certain games on our brand new next-next gen consoles because there's insufficient processing power available from other nodes on the network to handle the minimum requirements?
I could see this becoming a tech support nightmare on the launch date of such a system when the first few dozen users can't get their system to do anything other than boot up to a menu and a single task bar saying something like "waiting for sufficient processing power from the network... one moment please."
8==8 Bones 8==8
Look at the ugly screenshots. Raytracers must no be used with low-res textures.
anyone else noticed they were not using any textures (except for the sky maybe)?
I guess the SPU's limited memory may have something to do with this, so maybe procedural textures would be the way to solve this.
This and other implementations (google's MapReduce algorithm, for example) prove the importance of parallelism for tomorrow's computing. I would love to have 10000 small general purpose CPUs on my machine without any custom chips than one monster general-purpose CPU and one mega-hardcoded GPU.
Some random thoughts:
The transputer was way ahead of its time.
The 100 year programming language would be the one that implements the Actor model most efficiently.
Nature's computation machines are not very fast, but they are vastly parallelized.
AAAAAAAAAAAGH!!
Why do you people keep saying this? The deadline (if it sticks) is for the switch to digital, not to HDTV. Digital. Not HDTV. Digital. Understand yet? Read it slowly. Digital. What is wrong with you imbeciles that you can't get this right? Digital. Not HDTV. You will still be able to receive standard resolution broadcasts. Most broadcasts will still be in standard resolution. But they will be digital. Digital.
This is getting worse than people confusing copyrights with trademarks.
... there's a joke here somewhere comparing the library of games for Linux to the library of games for the PS3.
It may have been mentiond but using 6 spes isn't less than the full potential of the PS3. It's generally more. There are 8 but sony shut one down at the factory. Number 7 is reserved for the OS. Number 6 is required to be made available to the OS at the drop of a hat. That means that games can count on having 5 available.
How can we know that the rendered images are really from 3 PS3's?
That's pretty amazing. If a 60 MHz FPGA (4 pipelines, 350 Mbit/s bandwidth) could do realtime raytracing with almost 300,000 polys in 2005, then when will nVidia or ATI be releasing a 450 MHz 16 pipeline 10 Gbit/s dedicated raytracer?
The price curve coincides with the switch to HDTV on-air transmission switch in 2009. Which is the same timeline for digital-only broadcasts, which will be be carried in both HDTV and 480p Digital bandwidths at first, but the 480p bandwidths can be phased out after that.
Basically, people with non-HDTV sets will not be able to receive broadcasts over the air, but they will be able to buy converters if they have satellite and/or cable and their sets can accept the outputs for them.
From most people's viewpoints, that is when HDTV goes live and they regard themselves as forced to switch.
Not everyone lives in the big city, grandpa.
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I mean, there's no way you could actually find 3 wii's to purchase for networking, let alone get your grandparents to stop playing bowling long enough to do the rendering.
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South Park was just a handful of guys, some construction paper and a camera to start with. You don't need a computer to go cheap.
On the other hand, I've seen dozens of amateur and student films with sub-3000 budgets, and in every case it wasn't the effects that needed improvement. Good actors (even just voice actors), writers and directors are rare. Cheap CGI helps a little but it doesn't fix that.
So what if it can do realtime ray tracing? It's nothing new at all. My bloody Atari 1040 ST can do realtime raytracing rendering ffs, as proven in a demo for it, which name i have forgotten. And the 1040 ST has only an 8mhz M68k CPU with 1MB of RAM, no graphics chip what so ever :P
Ofcource, it looks alot better on a PS3, but again, its nothing new :)