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The Nuts and Bolts of PlayStation 3D
The Digital Foundry blog took an in-depth look at how Sony is introducing 3D technology to PlayStation 3 games. They give a step-by-step description of how the system generates a 3D frame (or rather, a pair of frames), and the graphical hurdles that need be to overcome to ensure the games look good. The article also discusses some of the subtle effects 3D technology can have on gameplay:
"'One interesting thing came through in the immersion aspect was that in the first-person camera view, it felt so much more like being there. Typically when most people play MotorStorm, something like 90 per cent play in the third-person view,' Benson explains. 'As soon as we put the 3D settings in place, the first-person view became a lot more popular, a lot more people were using that view. This could indicate that 3D could perhaps change the standards, if you like.' ... 'We found that in the first-person view the game is giving you all the sorts of cues that you're used to in normal driving: speed perception, the ability to judge distances, things like that. It's far easier to avoid track objects.' The insertion of true stereoscopic 3D into MotorStorm also brings about a new sense of appreciation of the scale and size of the game world and the objects within it."
3D will never really take off until they can figure out a way to implement it comfortably without requiring the ridiculous glasses.
This fad will pass soon, hopefully, and we'll stop thinking about how cool the technology is and be back to thinking about making playable games.
There's a reason 120 Hz TVs have been pushed lately. That solves the frame rate issue. As for resolution, you shouldn't need to use much more processing power to get 3D from most games; after all, modern graphics are modeled in 3D then flattened. All 3D requires is that you flatten it from two slightly different perspectives; the incremental cost should be small, on the order of 10% or 20%, not enough to require you to drop from 1080p to 720p. One of the few things those extra processors on the PS3 can be used for without requiring a lot of work on the part of the game programmer is "free" stereoscopic 3D.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
If you read the article, you would know that many games requires going from 1080p to 720p because the PS3 can't push enough pixels in 3D to maintain 30 FPS in a 1080p resolution.
The new Samsung TVs are 240Hz, too.
As for the rendering, it's not 20% of the processing time. It's a lot more than that, especially when you work in all the reflections and other eye-candy that PS3 games are expected to have. I would guess it's pretty close to 90% of the time is spent rendering. (And that's an educated guess, as I've fooled around with 3d game programming on the PC for a while now.)
Of course, it also depends on that game. A game with thousands of AI opponents takes a lot more CPU between renders than a game with just 5.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
It was the "next best thing" back in the mid-90's. But, it almost completely died out. I would think with the incredibly more powerful consoles we have nowadays, someone would re-look at VR again. It's be a whole helova lot cheaper than buying a new TV, etc.
Well, technically, Wipeout's creators couldn't make the PS3 do it. That doesn't mean it's impossible.
Also, Wipeout went from 60FPS at 1080p to 30FPS at 720p for the 3D upgrade. From the article, it sounds like they did it because they were lazy and didn't want to spend time optimizing their code any further to keep the FPS up.
All the hype I heard about Wipeout mentioned the 60FPS specifically, so I think that's a mistake.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Seems to me the PS3 has been in a constant spiral of removing features since the PS3 Launch, and I'm not just talking about the recent Other OS removal. So how long does anyone think Sony is going to let a novelty feature, i.e. 3D, fly before they pull the plug on who knows how many thousands of people who buy into this.
1) people are wowed by it right now. The only reason Sony's trying to get this in the PS3 is to capitalize on the fad before it disappears.
2) I've been to several 3D movies, Avatar being the most recent, and think it's a nice trick for a once in a while show. That being said, I know several people who have gone to 3D movies and complain about headaches, motion sickness, the 3D glasses are uncomfortable and they don't fit well over regular prescription glasses and some people can't see the 3D at all or find it just plan not impressive.
3) It's just another way the movie industry is going to get people to re-buy stuff they already own. Pretty soon you're going to be able to by Star Wars and Lord of the Rings digitally remastered for 3D.
I can't tell others what to do, but I recommend avoiding 3D for home theater and especially on the PS3 for gaming.
As for the rendering, it's not 20% of the processing time. It's a lot more than that, especially when you work in all the reflections and other eye-candy that PS3 games are expected to have. I would guess it's pretty close to 90% of the time is spent rendering.
The PS3 has a dedicated graphics chip. It can be running graphics at 100% and still not use up 100% of the CPU, which only hands data off to other components to be rendered.
Of course, it also depends on that game. A game with thousands of AI opponents takes a lot more CPU between renders than a game with just 5.
There is no "between renders". The GPU is working on rendering while the CPU is doing something else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That actually depends on the game. The PS3 doesn't have a traditional CPU, and most of the really nice looking PS3 games use various parts of the cell for graphics (be it texture processing, or physics, or whatever). The cell isn't used for actual rendering, but it does affect many games graphics.
That said, some of those functions will be irrelevent, as the calculations will apply to both frames (or both views of the same frame if you want to look at it like that). Physics for example is, if I'm understanding it correctly, is related to object position per frame (and effects like motion blur) so would apply largely, if not completely, to both frames. Texture processing on the other hand may not, depending on the game. Your point certainly holds up for AI, in the same way as physics, but you can't say for every game that the CPU has no effect.
It doesn't matter to me because I won't buy anything with a Sony brand on it, ever again. Or if the platform is hacked. Whichever comes first.
I'll switch to (gasp) Microsoft xbox before I buy another Playstation.
Apparently, Sony didn't learn anything from their rootkit experience and needs to be taught another lesson in manners when it comes to dealing with customers.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A good list here.
You'll be disappointed about MW2.
Those of us who wear glasses as part of our day to day vision requirements? Wearing a pair of glasses over top of our regular frames is not only bulkier, but significantly more uncomfortable, annoying, and even difficult as a result of only having so much viable nose space to properly hold them on. Sure contacts are great and wonderful for the people that want them, but for some of us, they are neither a viable option, or comfortable, not to mention that I for one don't really want to pay for more eyewear than I need. 3D is great and all, but a huge chunk of gamers wear glasses. I've enjoyed the three movies I saw in 3D in spite of the glasses, and to be frank, that has been almost enough to warrant avoiding the 3D films. (And that's not even getting into the asinine pricing scheme...)
That the Sega Master System had 3D games using those same liquid crystal shutter glasses and it had them over 20 years ago. Oh, and you didn't need a special TV to use the glasses. (Although the frame rate was 30FPS and not 60FPS like this thing.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
120Hz doesn't solve the framerate issue, it just allows you to actually deliver those frames to the user. You still have to run at double the framerate of a 2D game, which is non-trivial.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Despite the fact that 3D is just a fad, I completely agree with you. Too bad Sony completely disrespected the early adopter tech geeks with the other OS removal. They're the ones who would have or will be buying in to this technology and will make or break the technology in the first few years it's available. Hopefully people remember how Sony treats their customers.
modern graphics are modeled in 3D then flattened. All 3D requires is that you flatten it from two slightly different perspectives; the incremental cost should be small, on the order of 10% or 20%, not enough to require you to drop from 1080p to 720p.
I'm not an expert on the subject, but this "flattening" you speak of, isn't that the actual rendering? I always thought that this was the bit where the biggest part of numbercrunching is done. This is were for each pixel in the 2D plane of the screen is calculated, based on the position of objects, textures and light sources. Doubling this task would probably mean more than a 10-20% increase in load.
The cell does have a standard cpu, and then it has speciality spu's also. There is 1 PPC in the cell and 6 spu's.
For the price at the time something had to give on the MS and Sony side. It was any real hope of computing at 1080p. ... start saving up for all your old favs in Carl Zeiss 3d quality glass ...
Both consoles have lists of epic PR BS trying to get the end losers into thinking they where gaming in the future.
The only thing that has changed is the 3rd party dev teams can get a bit more out of the units.
Next gen will solve all they promise - they understand 1080p at MS and Sony now and the 3d chips for your 2d 1080p displays are so cheap now.
This new 3d glasses fad and 3d games with 3d glasses might take a while
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Rendering when you have a powerful graphics chip should not take all that much CPU power, since the rendering is offloaded. Now, keep in mind that since 3D displays with the glasses are a new technology, the current hardware is not really designed for it, so you are putting a huge burden on the system to make it work. With a new graphics chip that is designed with 3D output in mind, that additional processing drain will disappear with proper hardware support for 3D displays.
he 3D version of WipEout HD is locked to 720p, but due to geometry issues, frame-rate is halved to 30FPS. Note that all screenshots in this feature are derived from the 2D versions of the games.
Other posts have alluded to this, but let me state it explicitly. You cannot get away with lowering the frame rate when adding 3D. The additional parallax effects will make it look stuttery. 30fps is not great for a high-speed game, but 30fps with 3D will look like 15FPS with 2D. For some people, I bet the two images won't even converge. Headache city.
Drop the geometry, but don't drop the frame rate!
That actually depends on the game. The PS3 doesn't have a traditional CPU, and most of the really nice looking PS3 games use various parts of the cell for graphics (be it texture processing, or physics, or whatever). The cell isn't used for actual rendering, but it does affect many games graphics.
The PS3's CPU has one PPE and eight SPEs, one of which is disabled, and one of which is used by the operating system, leaving six for game development. The PPE is a PowerPC and its main job is to shovel data to the SPEs... if they are being used. Some of the weaker titles use the PPE for almost everything (except graphics, being handled by the GPU) and use one or two SPEs as if they were a math coprocessor... which I guess they are.
Physics for example is, if I'm understanding it correctly, is related to object position per frame (and effects like motion blur) so would apply largely, if not completely, to both frames. Texture processing on the other hand may not, depending on the game.
There's certainly games with procedural texturing. Creating these textures is going to be more or less done with the SPEs by anyone competent. It involves shoveling code and data at them and then standing back and waiting for the results to come back, then once they have returned, retrieving them and shoving them into a buffer in graphics memory, which unlike on the Xbox is a distinct and physically separate region/block of memory. So yes, the PPE will have something to do in this context, but it's just acting as a switchboard operator.
Your point certainly holds up for AI, in the same way as physics, but you can't say for every game that the CPU has no effect.
If the PPE is doing much with the graphics, then what you've got is a bad port to the PS3 that underutilizes the SPEs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Sony 3d on your new display with have to match the Sony 3d logo on your new console and on the 3d glasses for the best gaming experience.
Dont forget the new HDMI 3d ready cable with extra quad-layer shielding and new gas-injected dieletric for the extended 3d frequency response.
For every 20 back yard "anaglyphic red/blue" 2d hacks sold, the terrorists fund a new "Omar" IED.
Cable news also warns grandparents that the 2d anaglyphic red/blue hack allows socialism to enter the home, the gateway ideology to incurable communism or national socialism.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Don't forget that the PS3 only has an HDMI 1.3 connector, not an HDMI 1.4. That means that at best, the 3D experience will have 1080i to each eye. Maybe 720p was a good compromise.
It doesn't matter to me because I won't buy anything with a Sony brand on it, ever again. Or if the platform is hacked. Whichever comes first.
To those who modded this troll: I bought a Playstation. Then it died, and I bought a PSOne. Later, I bought a fat PS2. It died, and I bought a slim one. I still have it. I also bought an Xbox 360, and a Wii. And though I can afford it, and though there are actually more games I would like to play on the PS3, I have not bought one, and will not buy one. I thought I might buy one someday down the road, to run Linux on it, if the Hypervisor were ever compromised such that you could actually use the GPU... But now even that is off the table. Buying one used removes it from the used channel and increases the odds that Sony will make a new sale, and I don't want that to happen. Personally, I decided Sony must be destroyed during the Lik-Sang debacle, but the rootkit and disabling Linux on PS3 pretty much make a perfect triangle of hate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My only question is will the makers of Gran Turismo 5 go back to the drawing board to make the game 3D?? I have been waiting for year for this game to come out in its full form and I can see them delaying it longer to add 3D. If this is the case please wait until the game is released before the update. I don't want this to be a repeat of Duke Nukem Forever.
Where are these numbers pulled from? To describe the whole 3D graphics rendering pipeline as merely "flattening" is rather an understatement. It also makes no sense to compare that with "modern graphics are modeled in 3D" - modelling is not part of rendering, and doesn't factor into the performance.
"Flattening", i.e., vertex processing; as well as rendering every pixel, has to be repeated for each viewpoint (unless someone knows they're using some kind of shortcut?). Depending on the game, this can be far more than 20% of the time. Other things don't have to be repeated - for example, some kinds of hidden surface removal, as well as obviously non-rendering things like AI. But you can't make any kind of blanket statement of the bottlenecks of 3D games in general.
The PS3 has a dedicated graphics chip. It can be running graphics at 100% and still not use up 100% of the CPU, which only hands data off to other components to be rendered.
That doesn't change his argument - PCs have had "dedicated graphics chips" for 3D for 10-15 years. This is hardly new information.
Yes, so the GPU does most of the rendering. So if it's running at 100% running a normal game, how exactly do you magically make it render twice as much information, with only a 10-20% slowdown as the OP claimed?
There is no "between renders". The GPU is working on rendering while the CPU is doing something else.
You're being overly pedantic. Firstly, it's still correct to say "between the rendering calls that the CPU makes", which is what he presumably meant. Secondly, yes you could run the CPU rendering calls in a separate thread, but that doesn't really change his point - yes, a game with large amounts of AI might be CPU bound rather than GPU bound, thus you could get extra fill rate with little noticable slowdown. But this doesn't apply to all games, is the point.
Rendering when you have a powerful graphics chip should not take all that much CPU power
Yes, but it takes more GPU power. I'm confused by this argument - that because the CPU isn't being used much, the GPU can suddenly do twice as much work for free? That's backwards. The only thing you can do for free is more stuff on the CPU.
3D gfx doesn't work by constructing the scene and then simply taking a snapshot of what "camera" sees (so no big overhead if you add second "camera", moved a little to the side, right?)
It goes "backwards", draws each frame from the point of view of the camera. If you have two cameras, that means doing it two times. Sure, it's not complete doubling of work done by GPU - for example the same assets in VRAM or local caches can be used at the same time, if done smartly. Or the far background and skybox probably could be made to render only once. But it's still very considerable overhead.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I was assuming the same thing as well, but when the 3D Samsung display was set up at the store I work at, the cable was 1.3a.
When I hit info on the tv, it said 1080p@60. So I am wondering if its maybe just a lower bitrate on the picture quality or something.
OK, I can imagine a chip built to do "3D 3D" more efficiently (for example, two essentially independant renderpaths in the style of hyperthreading, with some logic between them that allows using roughly the same graphical assets from VRAM & caches at the same time (since they use nearly the same assets)). But you still want raw processing power to be roughly two times more than if you'd just render the same image once. There's still drain.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Do HDMI 1.4 cables have different connectors/pins, or is it just that one is guaranteed to work at a higher rate? If the latter, then I don't doubt that shorter HDMI 1.3 cables will suffice.
What was your source of the 3D content? Were you actually showing 3D content at the time? Is it a passive or active screen? Active 3D content is actually going at 120Hz (60Hz to each eye) for 1080p@60 (i.e. the display's info might have been accurate in a sense.)
I have glasses (relatively large frames too) and have never had a problem getting the 3d glasses to fit over my normal frames. For home use, you could also get clip-ons.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
People don't have much means to see 3D photos "correctly" because they just don't care much beyond short amusement value, a gimmick. Take this 3D Yugoslav toy that I mentioned; I can't quickly find it via google, but it was essentially a cardboard disk with dozen or so pairs of small cliches (photos of various landmarks), which you put into small handheld viewer. From the 70's.
It worked really good, the effect was very convincing (of course minus usual inability to focus naturally and natural paralax...). No obvious faults with it. It would be trivial even back then to give people the opportunity of making disks with their own set of photos; making those photos would be a bit of a problem of course. Now making such viewer + disks is even more trivial, and 3D digicam could cheaply and easily provide source photos. Nobody has done it; perhaps because such technology can't work as a one time gimmick (returning every few years), but must be sustainable in photolabs around the world. Which it can't really do, people are perfectly satisfied with boring 2D photos.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Personally, I decided Sony must be destroyed during the Lik-Sang debacle, but the rootkit and disabling Linux on PS3 pretty much make a perfect triangle of hate^H^H^H^Hcrazy.
FTFY.
Really, it's just a corporation. An entertainment one at that. Expending any energy beyond deciding whether the products contain value for you or not is highly irrational.
I'd guess it's effectivelly indeed doing 60, but since each of your eye only sees half of those...
One that hath name thou can not otter
IMHO, I think the parent might be being a bit dramatic, but they're not too off the mark. Sure this is an entertainment company, but when they get away with treating customers like garbage other companies follow suit.
And Most PS3 games arent even 720p. Many of the graphically intense ones run at a odd resolutions that are scaled to 720p.
There are very few if any 1080p PS3 games. The GPU really cant handle it.
But looking at God of War 3... they have finally managed to pull off a nice post processing anti aliasing filter that really improves image quality at 720p. It looks like 4xFSAA but has absolutely no impact on framerate.
If they can pull that off... They might be able to pull of 3D :)
It's not up to the OP to determine how the customers are being treated. It's up to the customers. The OP can only decide for themselves.
The insertion of true stereoscopic 3D
Sorry, but it’s stereoscopic 2D!
Stereoscopic 3D would be two cubes.
This is just two fixed 2D planes in 3D space. The same thing as two flat panel displays in front of you.
That the images on it are ortographically projected, does not make it 3D. The rest of the 3D volume still is out of focus for that very reason. (= It all lying on the same plane.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yeah, because you can just magically “optimize” any program endlessly forever...
Games already are on the very limits of a platform. They already are optimized to the breaking point. There’s nothing left.
You can only make the textures and models crappier and remove some physics and collision detection.
Also 30 fps from 60 fps sounds like no change at all, but simply rendering every second frame from the second pov. Which is exactly what I would have done, considering all resources already being used up, and countless months already being used up for optimization.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It’s way more complicated than that.
There are the streaming cores, where you have to define one simple algorithm, and then you can pass massive loads of data trough it. Which is good for rendering, and any other stream processing. But not for any event handling. The rest you do with the single full CPU core. And that one is very very weak, compared to the amount of stuff you can process in the streaming cores. But it has no limitations in flexibility.
So you can have 90% of your main core unused, but still not have much power left, since that part is so weak in comparison.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It's not up to the OP to determine how the customers are being treated. It's up to the customers. The OP can only decide for themselves.
Quite true. And I have decided not to be a customer because of the way Sony treats 'em. When even Microsoft treats its customers better than you do, you know you're fucking up. But the very point of my post is that it's not a troll to say you're avoiding buying product from Sony because of the way they treat their customers... MANY of us have made the same decision. If it says Sony on it, I'm not buying it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not up to the OP to determine how the customers are being treated. It's up to the customers. The OP can only decide for themselves.
I'm a customer. I feel pretty mistreated.
I could be wrong, but what I'm getting from your statement is you feel people shouldn't be going around describing how Sony has screwed them over. So, who do you work for again?
Games already are on the very limits of a platform. They already are optimized to the breaking point. There’s nothing left.
You can only make the textures and models crappier and remove some physics and collision detection.
And your point is that eg. Uncharted was optimised to the breaking point, and there was no way Uncharted 2 would look better, with better textures, models, physics and collisions?
The PS3 hardware is very complicated. Very few programmers can claim to master both the PS3 hardware and video game related algorithms. And most of them probably work at Naughty Dog or Insomniac Games.
God, root, what is difference ?
Makes sense to me to do both frame renderings in parallel, so you're generating both eyes' views for each vertex in a scene at the same time, applying the same texture at the same time, and so on. This could reduce the bandwidth required because you would be utilising at the same time in rendering the same vertexes, textures, etc, when rendering both views. Especially when you have something like render-to-texture which is then applied elsewhere (e.g., a TV screen) - it makes no sense to re-render that for each viewpoint, when the eyes are seeing the same scene.
But it would double the time to render each view, require twice the video memory for rendering, etc.
I think this will really take off in the next generation. When the PS4 comes with a HD6870 equivalent graphics card, and 4GB RAM.
Games already are on the very limits of a platform. They already are optimized to the breaking point. There’s nothing left.
That may be true for a very small number of games actually... Games use whatever resources they need, and sometimes, it is not everything. If that were the case, all games would have mind-blowing graphics. No game would ever have a memleak, no games would have any bugs. This is very far from reality, as some gaming companies release games that are not optimized correctly, with poor graphics.
If I'm wrong, please correct me ; learning is better than being right.
"Also, Wipeout went from 60FPS at 1080p to 30FPS at 720p for the 3D upgrade. From the article, it sounds like they did it because they were lazy and didn't want to spend time optimizing their code any further to keep the FPS up."
It's not quite like that. I was doing research on 3D TVs recently out of interest (I had just upgraded to an HD TV), and 30 FPS is about the most you will likely get out of a 3D game to a standard modern non-3D capable television set.
Here's why - you have three refresh rates on TVs these days - 60 Hz, 120 Hz, and 240 Hz. Those refresh rates are effectively frame rates. If you have the money, and you care about it, you have every reason to go with 120 or 240 Hz if you can...but there's a reason for that. The reason is that video signals are transmitted at around 30 FPS, while movies are 24 FPS. The TV or DVD player brings the picture up to the refresh rate of the TV by adding frames. With a 60 Hz set, video is upgraded easier than film, since 30 FPS divides evenly into 60 Hz, while 24 doesn't. 24 FPS does, however, divide evenly into 120 and 240 Hz - this means that frame duplication is nice and even, and there is no chance of extra "judder."
So, what does this have to do with the PS3 and 3D games?
Well, this is the thing about modern non-3D televisions - if you buy a good non 3D-capable LCD television that can do 240 Hz, this means that it is displaying 240 Hz...but NOT receiving it. It's actually only receiving up to 60 Hz (remember, the entire thing about the higher refresh rates is all about adding frames in playback). Now, a 3D game works by having two slightly offset images per frame - one for each eye. The glasses ensure that each eye is only seeing the frames designated for it. So, for every 3D frame per second, there must be two images instead of one. That brings it down to basic math - the PS3 is transmitting at 60 Hz, and has to double up the images. Hence, no more than 30 FPS for a 3D game.
I THINK I've explained that properly...
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
I'm a customer. I feel pretty mistreated.
Were you running Linux?
When even Microsoft treats its customers better than you do, you know you're fucking up.
This is entirely subjective. Removing the ability to run another OS and simultaneously play new games is worse than never having it? RROD is irrelevant? HD-DVD fiasco? Overpriced peripherals? Charging for online multiplayer?
I'm not interested in a pissing match. Simply to point out the experience is subjective and Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Apple all have their good and bad points. I'm a Sony customer (among others). I never touched the OtherOS option. The vast majority never did, hell, most probably never even knew it existed. My experience has been nothing but good and I own two PS3s and a couple dozen games I use for around an hour a day.
Saying "I haven't bought a PS3 in four years but now I'm REALLY never going to buy one." just sounds like a petulant child to me.
I could be wrong, but what I'm getting from your statement is you feel people shouldn't be going around describing how Sony has screwed them over.
No, what I'm saying is that doing so in the style in which he did sounds a bit nutty.
Lolwut? 'Just' flattening 'it'? Do you know anything about rendering? Two different angles means two different non-fixed pipes. You don't have the slightest clue...
Here be signatures
Yes, I'm running Ubuntu. I use my PS3 as an additional Testing and development platform when I'm developing and testing applications at home. I also use it as a 3D rendering node for hardware design.
I also play the occasional game on it, but mostly use it as a DVD/BD player. Sorry, I meant I did use it to play the occasional game and watch BDs on it. Still works as a DVD player and I can play the BD I already own, but I'm afraid of buying new BD or games that require the firmware update and disable my BD drive if I'm not willing to update.
Before you come out with, "Sony wouldn't disable your BD player", it's well documented that the CEO also said they wouldn't get ride of the Other OS support when the slim was released without the Other OS. I'd like to be able to say I'll believe it when I don't see it, but Sony let me use the Other OS for three years before it was disabled, so it might not happen today or tomorrow, but it COULD happen. So I can't trust them period and that's all I need to know to not buy anymore Sony products.
When even Microsoft treats its customers better than you do, you know you're fucking up.
This is entirely subjective. Removing the ability to run another OS and simultaneously play new games is worse than never having it? RROD is irrelevant? HD-DVD fiasco? Overpriced peripherals? Charging for online multiplayer?
Sure, I'd like free multiplayer, but at least there's no bait and switch. The latest 360 patch lets you use [most] USB storage devices, which is the opposite of overpriced peripherals, although I guess Sony's done that for a while. RROD is most certainly relevant, but it's pretty easy to get a RROD replacement these days (by most accounts, though I admit, not all) so it's a risk I was obviously willing to take. I keep the system on the top of a table where it can ventilate. HD-DVD was not a fiasco; it was clear all along that there was a format war, and that only one format could win. Early adopters knew what they were getting into, or were idiots you can't help regardless.
I'm not saying Microsoft isn't evil, or even abusive to customers. I'm arguing that they're less so than Sony... especially when you restrict your consideration to the game market.. Otherwise, I'd say Microsoft has done more evil, but I don't know that it's for lack of trying on Sony's part. Perhaps it's more than Microsoft is more competent, or merely that they are in a sector where doing evil is easier. But Sony is even more dedicated to proprietary formats than is Microsoft, and worse, they feel free to create them in hardware where they can do the most damage. After creating the compact disc with Philips, I get the feeling they realized what kind of control a single company could exert if they owned a leading media format. Thank goodness they have always failed to do it on their own.
Betamax, Memory Stick, MiniDisc and ATRAC3 and the copyright bit evil, crippled Linux in a hypervisor on two platforms, Rootkit, destruction of Lik-Sang to enforce region lockouts and protect their expensive peripheral (*ahem*) market... I'm not forgiving Microsoft. I buy everything used or third-party where it's at all reasonable, the primary exception being controllers. And I don't actually have a Live Gold account, though it's hard to say if I would get one if my internet connection had lower latency.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm not saying Microsoft isn't evil, or even abusive to customers. I'm arguing that they're less so than Sony...
And I'm arguing that your perception is entirely subjective.
especially when you restrict your consideration to the game market..
Betamax, Memory Stick, MiniDisc and ATRAC3 and the copyright bit evil, crippled Linux in a hypervisor on two platforms, Rootkit, destruction of Lik-Sang to enforce region lockouts and protect their expensive peripheral (*ahem*) market...
You are contradicting yourself.
The PS3's CPU has one PPE and eight SPEs, one of which is disabled, and one of which is used by the operating system, leaving six for game development. The PPE is a PowerPC and its main job is to shovel data to the SPEs... if they are being used. Some of the weaker titles use the PPE for almost everything (except graphics, being handled by the GPU) and use one or two SPEs as if they were a math coprocessor... which I guess they are.
That's pretty much what I meant by it not having a conventional CPU. The PPE may be a conventional CPU more or less, but as a whole the cell is not.
There's certainly games with procedural texturing. Creating these textures is going to be more or less done with the SPEs by anyone competent. It involves shoveling code and data at them and then standing back and waiting for the results to come back, then once they have returned, retrieving them and shoving them into a buffer in graphics memory, which unlike on the Xbox is a distinct and physically separate region/block of memory. So yes, the PPE will have something to do in this context, but it's just acting as a switchboard operator.
True, but I was more talking about anisotropic filtering etc. I'm fairly sure Uncharted, and probably ofther games to, uses one of the SPEs for texture filtering (probably among other things, I can't imagine it hakes THAT much processing time...of course I'm not a graphics programmer, so I may well be mistaken). Given what I know of anisotropic filtering, it would have to be done for each viewpoint separatelly no? As I said though, I'm no graphics programmer (or a programmer at all really - I do some web stuff but thats about it).
Bear in mind that when I say "the CPU", I mean the whole Cell rather than the PPE, like a kind of multi-core CPU if you will, albeit one which has a main core and sub-cores. By the way you described it "The GPU is working on rendering while the CPU is doing something else", I thought you were as well. Regardless, All I really meant by it was that it isn't always the GPUs task to do every graphics related task. Also, as the AC who also replied to this said:
...modern games do a lot of vertex processing, and sometimes pixel post-processing too, is done on the SPUs
That's the kind of thing I meant (although I wan't aware those specifc things). Of course that will not be effected by AI calculations if distributed properly, but it may have some ramifications.
Sorry, not quite... sort of on the 120hz, no on the "free" stereo 3d from the console. Most "120hz" TV's actually just interpolate the intermediate frames in their processing chip. They can't actually display real incoming data at 120hz, they just fake it.
"All it requires" for free stereo 3d as described above is about 2x the work. Game console hardware already has to drop resolution to 720p to maintain 30fps for the usual level of detail in games these days. Make the graphics subsystem render 2x frames in the same time, and at best it's going to manage 15fps. Sure, you get to re-use some of the setup work (mostly moving data into the graphics subsystem) from the first angle, but the graphics subsystem still has to do the matrix transforms to render the scene, as well as run the shaders, which are likely not designed to look good from multiple angles, and may involve destructive calculations.
Usually in games there are distinct tasks that are parallel in nature, but within a given task there is an inherent degree of serialization. Most games have a simulation thread to update the game world state, and a seperate render thread that periodically draws a frame of the current state at say 30fps or so, depending on system load. But the render thread doesn't actually do the drawing; instead it gathers up the required 3d models, textures, scene data and whatever else, and feeds them to the GPU to draw. Rendering is embarrassingly parallel. Unfortunately, snapshotting the game world state to determine what to draw in a given frame is inherently serial. Recently, shaders have added the capability to do additional manipulation of the data on the GPU itself, which is faster because of the i/o bandwidth bottleneck. (talking to the slower main system bus). Anyway, a free core on the system does precisely nothing for you unless the game architecture is designed to parallelize the render thread to some degree, which most engines do not do. Instead, that core should be used for better AI or whatever. While game consoles are designed to have more bandwidth between the graphics subsystem, main memory, and the cpu, it's still the bottleneck, just not as bad as on PC hardware.
There are other engine differences you would have to build to do this as well, so it's hardly free, and that's not even thinking about memory constraints in the graphics subsystem, and whatever requirements there are for a 3d signal to the 3d TVs (presumably some sort of alternating frame format at a higher framerate; I haven't really looked in to it lately).
Gonna be a couple generations of the 3d display technology before the kinks are worked out, too. Probably the next generation of consoles will source it reasonably well. That's still 5-7+ years out though. Which is about the same timeframe that the no-glasses 3d TV tech is anticipated to appear. That means several years of crappy rapidly changing tech are in store.
And your point is that eg. Uncharted was optimised to the breaking point, and there was no way Uncharted 2 would look better, with better textures, models, physics and collisions?
It obviously could have been optimized more. With months of effort and a huge increase in their development costs, they probably could have squeezed out another 5-10% in performance.
It's a case of diminishing returns. You'll never get anything completely optimized; but you get to where it is more and more work for less and less returns. 3d basically requires a 100% increase in performance in order to not degrade the framerate. Very rarely will they be able to take an otherwise nearly finished game, and double its performance.
Still works as a DVD player and I can play the BD I already own, but I'm afraid of buying new BD or games that require the firmware update and disable my BD drive if I'm not willing to update.
Hmmm, I am curious if the BD spec allows forced firmware updates like it would for a PS3 game. You're probably safe there from a technical standpoint rather than a company stance.
I can't say for sure though. Would be interesting if someone who knew BD had an idea.
I'm sorry for being a dick, but from which ass did you pull that 10% or 20% number ? If you're rendering the same scene from two angles, the GPU still has to do twice the work. Shaders, occlusion, stenciling, all that stuff has to be re-run because the frame has changed. Rending left/right frames is no different than rendering one frame, moving right three inches then rendering the next frame. The reason they have to drop to 720p isn't so much because of CPU/GPU power but fill rate. There is only so much memory bandwidth available, doubling the number of frames means you need to halve the number of pixels in order to maintain the same fill rate. This is partly why GPU manufacturers have been putting a lot of emphasis on AA/AF and image quality, rather than high resolutions. It is easier to throw more processing at one pixel, than it is to throw more pixels through the pipe. The Cell processor is no exception to this rule. They could build a 64-core Cell, it would still be bottlenecked at the memory controller.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It is my understanding that the reason for 120hz is because both the 24fps of a movie and 60fps of HDTV divide evenly into 120fps.
That's nothing. Wait 'til you hear my CD player.
Modern 3D glasses for cinemas etc. are actually half decent. They're a little big and bulky (to fit over your prescription glasses), but otherwise reasonably solid and well made. Certainly not cardboard and flimsy plastic, like you might be expecting.
We are running the Samsung un55c7000 tv, Samsung BD-C6900 BR player, as for the glasses.. I have no idea. All three in-store 3D displays I have seen in town use the same glasses, but they arent the same as the ones that are sold with the tv.
Yes it was actual 3D content, the "Monsters vs Aleins" demo disc they sent with the display.
I'm 90% sure its Active 3D.
As far as I'm aware, 1.4 and 1.3 have the same connectors, but I'm not sure pin-wise.
As to the hz question, I dunno. Samsung's hz rating in the info has always confused me. (I manually set it to 120 (Automotion-plus or whatever they're calling it today), but it displays "1080i@60" when watching OTA or our stores loop. It also displays "1080p@24" when a BD is playing, no matter what I set the hz to)
That should read "1080i@30"
I even edited my post first too. /doh
You know whether you have active 3D or not because the for active, the glasses need a power supply (i.e. they need to be recharged occasionally, and turned on/off). Active 3D generally means shuttering (the glasses are synced with the video display and alternatively block the view through to each eye. Passive 3D generally uses polarisation or displays that require you to be in one of several very specific viewing positions. You probably know this if you work in a store.
You don't get to specify the screen's parameters too much when you're playing back a BD. You might specify 60Hz, but if the content is 23.976Hz (or even true 24p), then that's what you'll get. This is better than the player's decoder faffing around doing 3:2 pull down, etc, or trying to change the speed of the audio. Your settings will presumably be used for the player's setup menus, etc, but not during playback. If you only have a 720p screen, then I guess there will be some scaling and maybe de-interlacing applied, but that is different to trying to change the frequency.
You won't buy from Sony because they used a rootkit and disabled linux on their machines, yet you have no problem with Microsoft? Microsoft also disables Linux on their machines.
Microsoft has put most of their effort into making sure you won't be able to use linux or any other alternative OS. The antitrust trials where just the tip of the iceburg. If it wasn't for MS, we'd probably have OS/2, BeOS and many others on the market today.
Their OS is a rootkit on the entire software market. It is designed with so much cruft and has so many bugs which application developers tune their products to use, it is nearly impossible to reliably run a program designed for MSWin on a different OS. Defective by design.
I'm not saying sony is a good company, but at least they allowed people to run linux on their console. Yeah, it is probably because they don't have a competing OS like MS, but how does this make them worse?