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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."

4 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    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'?

  2. 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.