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PS3 Linux Performs Real Time Ray Tracing

Posted by Zonk on from the sweet-hotness dept.

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."

6 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Limits by normuser · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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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    1. Re:Limits by edwdig · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No they wouldn't. A couple thousand dollars per developer for a dev kit is a drop in the bucket compared to the production costs of a large game. Settling for a homebrew toolchain would cost far more in lost productivity than it would to buy the dev kits.

      And even if Sony did open up the hardware completely for homebrew, you still need distribution channels. Considering PS3 games ship on 27 GB discs, they aren't very download friendly. And obviously there is a benefit to using Sony made discs with copy protection over downloadable games without copy protection.

  2. Of course no RSX... by the+linux+geek · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~sidapohl/egoshooter/

    1. Re:Of course no RSX... by MBCook · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Um... no. Ray tracing, by definition, CAN be hardware-accelerated. All that it is is tracing the path of light beams to build the image. It can be hardware accelerated. There have been projects in the past (university students, and even companies) to make hardware accelerators for ray-tracing.

      I'd love to see that definition that say it is not hardware-accelerated.

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    2. Re:Of course no RSX... by suv4x4 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Raytracing, by definition, is not hardware-accelerated. Of course the RSX isn't being used.

      Where is, if I may ask, this 'definition'?

  3. Re:This is a Cell tech demo, PS3 is incidental by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.