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PS3 games list & SPE usages
- Thread starter MikeB
- Start date
Tormentoso
Banned
commariodore64 said:
The xbox 360 has a chip that up scale the graphics,but i think that when the 360 up scale MSAA is turn off,I have a 1080p TV and many games drop frames more than on 720p.
Also from what i read at 1080p you just don't need MSAA and less 4X,where did you read this since from what i know the xbox 360 has problems with MSAA X4 even at 720,because it was say to be free because of the 10 MB of extra memory,but from what i have read many times at Beyond3d is not MSAA X4 has a good hit on performance on xbox 360,i think this is prove by the fact that several xbox 360 games doesn't even have AA implemented,in fact lately DMC4 is say to not have AA,and you can see the jagies,but i am no really sure.
commariodore64
Member
Here's the latest example of 'why'?
Lost Planet appears to run at a lower rez (H) that is doubled and low quality textures. And yet it still runs at a inconsistent framerate on the PS3. If bandwidth is no issue - how is this reversal so prevalent? (I do realize that the Lost Planet engine is an earlier version of the DMC4 engine)
http://yoda.dip.jp/Game/LostPlanet/LostPlanetMPD_04_ps3.png
http://yoda.dip.jp/Game/LostPlanet/LostPlanetMPD_04_360.png
Lost Planet appears to run at a lower rez (H) that is doubled and low quality textures. And yet it still runs at a inconsistent framerate on the PS3. If bandwidth is no issue - how is this reversal so prevalent? (I do realize that the Lost Planet engine is an earlier version of the DMC4 engine)
http://yoda.dip.jp/Game/LostPlanet/LostPlanetMPD_04_ps3.png
http://yoda.dip.jp/Game/LostPlanet/LostPlanetMPD_04_360.png
commariodore64
Member
The 'same' deepbrown from Beyond 3D? So you are completely unbiased?deepbrown said:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=41343
There is also new FIFA street game, and I think one other as well... But my point is really, that there is <begin eating>not ONE game on PS3 (not counting PSN games) that uses 1080p 4XMSAA</end eating>...
I mean, there is only one (Full Auto 2) PS3 game (Not counting PSN games) that uses 1080p 4xMSAA - yet the 360 DOES have games that do this. Why?
Let me clarify - I am a multiconsole owner and have been since I was financially able. I have NO preference or brand loyalty - but when I see blatant attacks I tend to want to question and defend. It's a character trait - take no offense or as trolling.
EDIT: I have eaten my words - the bolded has been corrected....
commariodore64
Member
Durante said:
I agree do agree and I noted it in my post - but I was under the impression that this game was developed to start making the appropriate modifications to the engine(in light of DMC4 - which released earlier than this!?)?
It is slightly puzzling in light of DMC4, but that same game proves that it has to be a software and not a hardware issue.commariodore64 said:
Regarding your 1080p/4xAA question, I still think that the framebuffer bandwidth situation on PS3 is quite precarious at those settings (as I stated earlier in this thread). But for the vast majority of games both consoles are ill-equipped to handle it. I'd be more than happy this gen if we at least got consistent 720p and 4xAA.
commariodore64
Member
Tormentoso said:
DMC4 is 720 2Xaa for both PS3 and 360. And the 1080p games I referred to are NATIVE 1080p at 30fps - fwiw.
And my apologies- I was wrong - PS3 has 2 games at 1080p 4XMSAA - Calling All Cars and Full Auto 2.
From Beyond 3D forum... http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241
360 games
Call of Duty 3 (screenshot) = 1040x624 (2x AA)
Call of Duty 4 (screenshot) = 1024x600 (2x AA)
Conan (demo) = 1024x576 (no AA)
Devil May Cry 4 (demo) = 1280x720 (2xAA)
Fifa 2006 (demo) = 1024x576 (2x AA)
Fifa 2007 (demo) = 1200x675 (no AA)
Fifa Street (demo) = 1920x1080 (4x AA)
Gears of War = 1280x720 (HD), 960x720 (SD)
Guitar Hero 3 = 1280x720 (no AA)
Halo 3 = 1152x640 (no AA)
MotoGP 2006 (screenshot) = 1280x1024 (framebuffer grab from AVS Forum member)
NBA Street Home court (demo) = 1920x1080 (4x AA)
NCAA Football 08 (demo) = 1024x600 (2x AA)
Oblivion (screenshot) = 1024x600 (2x AA)
Perfect Dark Zero (demo) = 1152x640 (no AA)
Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (demo) = 1024x576 (2x AA)
Project Gotham Racing 3 (demo) = 1024x600 (2x AA)
Project Gotham Racing 4 = 1280x720 (2xAA)
Ridge Racer 6 (demo) = 1440x810 (no AA)
Splinter Cell Double Agent = 1280x720 (4xAA) (developer)
Tomb Raider Legend (demo) = 1024x600 (2x AA)
Tony Hawk's Project 8 (screenshot) = 1040x585 (2x AA)
Virtua Figther 5 (demo) = 1024x1024 (4x AA)
Virtua Tennis 3 (demo) = 1920x1080 (2x AA)
PS3 games
Call of Duty 3 (screenshot) ~ 1088x624 (2x AA)
Call of Duty 4 = 1024x600 (2x AA)
Conan (demo) = 1024x576 (no AA)
Conflict: Denied Ops = 1280x720p (no AA) or 960x1080p
Def Jam Icon (screenshot) = 1152x648 (no AA)
Devil May Cry 4 (demo) = 1280x720 (2xAA)
Fifa Street (demo) = 1920x1080 (no AA)
Full Auto 2 (demo) = 1920x1080 (4x AA)
GT5 Prologue (demo) = 1280x1080 (2x AA)
AA 4x en 720p et garage/pit/showroom en 1920x1080 no AA
Guitar Hero 3 = 1040x585 (no AA)
Jericho (demo) = 996x560 (2x AA)
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (screenshot) = 1920x1080 (no AA)
MX vs ATV (demo) = 1024x576 (no AA)
NBA07 (demo) = 1920x1080 (no AA)
NBA08 (demo) = 1920x1080 (no AA)
NBA Street Home court (screenshot) = 1920x1080 (no AA)
Pirates des Caraibes (screenshot) = 768x1080 (no AA)
960x720 en mode 720p
Ridge Racer 7 (demo) = 1920x1080 (no AA)
The Darkness (demo) = 1024x576 (no AA)
Tony Hawk's Proving Ground (demo) = 1024x576 (no AA)
Transformers (screenshot) = 960x1080 (no AA)
Virtua Fighter 5 (screenshot) = 1024x1024 (no AA)
1024x768 en mode 1080p
Virtua Tennis 3 (demo) = 1920x1080 (2x AA)
WWE 08 (screenshot) = ? 640x720 ? (2x AA)
Tekken 5 Dark Ressurection (screenshot) = 1920x1080 (no AA)
Unreal Tournament III = 1280x720 (no AA)
It actually appears to run in the same resolution. If you'd like to point out why the hell you believe otherwise, please, go ahead.commariodore64 said:
Full Auto 2 runs at 1080p with 4xAA on the PS3. It's a piece of shit, but still.
edit:
4xAA at 1080p requires 50MB more memory than no AA. 22MB at 720p.
2xAA at 1080p requires 16.6MB more memory than no AA. 7.4MB at 720p.
Does that answer your question?
commariodore64
Member
bcn-ron said:
Maybe it's filtering, but it appears to be rendered at a lower horizontal res and doubled up.
And yeah, Full Auto 2 was a peice.
(So was Full AUto)How can they read back the pre-resolved subsamples from RSX class hardware? I'm sceptical. (Also, thanks for telling me what MSAA means!MikeB said:
)If they're actually doing real deferred rendering with real AA on PS3 hardware they should publish a paper or tech report or something on it.
commariodore64
Member
MikeB said:
What about the latency from using the cell and what's the size of the fb? Can you point me in the direction of the above info? I've been wanting to read up on their engine for Killzone 2. It looks killer. Thanks!
No I don't think so. The HUD elements seem distorted, but if you look at the jaggies in the actual game graphics, they use all the pixels. There's no doubling.commariodore64 said:Maybe it's filtering, but it appears to be rendered at a lower horizontal res and doubled up.
And yeah, Full Auto 2 was a peice.
Durante said:How can they read back the pre-resolved subsamples from RSX class hardware? I'm sceptical. (Also, thanks for telling me what MSAA means!
If they're actually doing real deferred rendering with real AA on PS3 hardware they should publish a paper or tech report or something on it.
They have done presentations:
"Deferred rendering in Killzone 2
Michal Valient, Guerrilla-Games
Next generation gaming brought high resolutions, very complex environments and large textures to our living rooms. With virtually every asset being inflated, it's hard to use traditional forward rendering and hope for rich, dynamic environments with extensive dynamic lighting. Deferred rendering, on the other hand, has been traditionally described as a nice technique for rendering of scenes with many dynamic lights, that unfortunately suffers from fill-rate problems and lack of anti-aliasing and very few games that use it were published.
In this talk, we will discuss our approach to face this challenge and how we designed a deferred rendering engine that uses multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA). We will give in-depth description of each individual stage of our real-time rendering pipeline and the main ingredients of our lighting, post-processing and data management. We'll show how we utilize PS3's SPUs for fast rendering of a large set of primitives, parallel processing of geometry and computation of indirect lighting. We will also describe our optimizations of the lighting and our parallel split (cascaded) shadow map algorithm for faster and stable MSAA output."
commariodore64
Member
commariodore64 said:
Found this. Doesn't answer the hard questions - but lays out the roadmap....
http://www.guerrilla-games.com/publications/dr_kz2_rsx_dev07.pdf
Durante said:
That presentation was linked to within the original post and mentioned later on in this thread.
An interesting raytracing demo using exclusively SPEs for rendering graphics including MSAA,
"IBM Interactive Ray-tracer (iRT) using three Sony Playstation3s (PS3) to render a model that is 75x more complex then those used in today's games. Ray-tracing is the rendering technique used by the film industry and is considered to complex for today's game systems. The code was written using IBM Cell SDK 2.0 on Linux. The iRT is totally scalable and only requires one Cell SPE to run. More PS3s = More SPEs = Higher client frame rates. All images are at least 720p 4x multi-sampled, with dynamic light sources, procedurally generated atmosphere, and dynamic shadows."
Sure they are using 3 PS3s for this, but PS3 games have the advantage of RSX to achieve more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8
Considering the original post was lost, I'm gonna retire this thread. I may write an improved version in the future, focussing specifically on the most impressive games and how this was achieved by developers. I think from now on, most multi-platform games will be as good as identical like the most impressive multi-platform games such as Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty 4, Devil May Cry 4 and others already are.
drakesfortune
Directions: Pull String For Uninformed Rant
Here you go:
Edit: Cut the OP out since it is back now
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cach...3?"&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Edit: Cut the OP out since it is back now
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cach...3?"&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Tormentoso said:
Just as a minor nitpick, the 360 does not have a seperate "scaling" chip. This was thoroughly debunked around last summer.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=42164
SRG01 said:
HDTVs have dedicated scalar chips. Some are more advanced than others, but none can improve the image quality of SDTV content towards good quality HDTV native content. I've heard claims of how wonderful the '360 scalar' is. But some food for thought: if 600p or 640p is good enough to result into optimal 1080p image quality, then why not just put cheap scalar chips into gaming PCs instead of buying those expensive CPUs an GPUs for super image quality? ;-)
@ DrakesFortune
Thanks, updating the OP!
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Nostromo said:HS -> most of the renderer runs on SPUs. How would you draw all those characters on screen otherwise?
and here I was still thinking that all frames were being streamed from the PC in your basement...!
There are loads of multi-platform games that run at a higher resolution on either Xbox 360 (Def Jam Icon, Guitar Hero 3, Pirates of the Caribbean, Jericho, Tony Hawks Proving Ground, MX vs ATV) or PS3 (NBA 07/08, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Tony Hawk's Project 8, Oblivion). Neither console is dragging the other down in those cases.tasos said:
With CoD4 it'll be performance related for both systems since it doesn't run any better on PS3.
Tiling can be cheap.MikeB said:
danwarb said:
Let me try and imagine how this can be. I would presume double buffering your transform primitives and halving your cpu cost allowance. Giving away sound assuring, your former tile would require far greater time allotment than your subsequent tiles. You would always have unequal resource usage.
MikeB said:
This is a fucking annoying bug and I already ran through it with the PAL charts threads. Basically it looks like if you're trying to update the OP and go past the characters/lines or whatever limit, it actually doesn't update if you pay attention, and completely disappears some hours later.
MikeB said:
It is because the 360 GPU does a few things internally to bump up the image resolution to whatever it needs. I suspect the same (or at least, similar) is done with the PS3 in terms of different resolutions.
(One of the links in that thread also states that the 360 doesn't use bilinear models to scale the image. It's something different.)
tasos said:
Can we please keep this **** out of this thread?
qirex99 said:
Because it was designed for the PS3. The architecture of both systems are so different, a simple port doesn't equal similar performance levels. Think of it as emulation of sorts. You need a much more powerful system than what the Dreamcast or GCN is at specifications-wise to run the emulators because your hardware architecture is completely different of that of the DC/GCN. You're not running it in full efficiency with your system's specs.
I believe the original post is now fully up to date again, if you notice I missed a relevant quote please let me know.
MikeB said:According to IBM the bulk of the PS3's processing power is located in Cell's SPEs. Without using them games development is very similar to developing a game on a decent specced single processor PC or Mac (So not really difficult at all like some developers claim, funnily those who do not even use the SPEs in the porting process! This should then actually be pretty straight foward, with of course the advantage of being able to optimize for a single uniform configuration). PS3 exclusive devs who are using the SPEs claim it's not that difficult to develop for and that it's much easier to develop for than for the PS2. Considering more and more games start to utilize these SPEs I thought it would be interesting to list those games.
SPE usage doesn't per se make a good game, neither not using them per se makes a bad game, for example simple games such as distributed on the PSN don't really need that much performance with the exception of games like Super Stardust HD, which is quite impressive with so many effects and things going on at once. However IMO for games which greatly depend on performance, not using the SPEs (enough) IMO don't make these games genuine PS3 games to judge the power of the platform on, but should rather be viewed as far from optimal ports.
Beyond3D Motorstorm interview: "Scott Kirkland: Cells SPUs provide a huge amount of processing power. Early adopters tended to bias usage towards either RSX or PPU support (we fall into the latter category). Im confident that over the coming months, exploitation of this resource will become far more balanced."
PS3 games that are known to use the Cell's SPEs:
1) Resistance: Fall of Man
"Animation and calculating collisions between objects are perfect fits, says Hastings. So those are the primary jobs Resistance doles out to the SPEs.."
Source: Spectrum online
"SPU System:
Animation
Audio (NextSynth and LR1)
Bucketer sort
Collision (separate broad and narrow)
Dynamic DB
Dynamic joint
FX update
Geom Cull Clip (for shadows and decals)
Glass
Moby constants
Physics collision
Physics simulation
Particle (weather fx)
Render mats
Static DB
Water (FFT)
10-20% total SPU utilization" (uses 5 SPEs, Resistance 2 uses 6 SPEs)
http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/articles/0108/files/RFOM_Debriefing_public.pdf
2) Resistance 2
"Propriety game systems are now being heavily farmed out to the PS3's SPUs, keeping the central PPU as a sort of traffic cop that organizes what gets attention at any given moment. In simple terms, the game is taking much better advantage of the untapped potential of the console. In regard to visuals, the expanded use of the SPUs means more enemies on screen, significantly more complex AI from all of those foes and dramatically expanded options for special effects."
Source: Game Informer
3) Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
"We were using the SPUs and that's a key to having a game that runs fast on the PS3, but there were a lot of things that we knew we could improve, and we have been improving them on Ratchet. And even with Ratchet, we're still seeing more and more things we can do; it's kind of like peeling off the layers of an onion."
Source: Gamedaily
"We are continuing to build our Insomniac Engine and have made many improvements to it since Resistance: Fall of Man. The one huge focus for us has been moving more of our processes over to the SPUs on the CELL processor. This has allowed us to get our physics and effects systems running roughly four times faster than it did in Resistance at nearly double the framerate, which is something you can see in weapons like the Tornado Launcher."
Source: The New Zealand Herald
Insomniac Games SPU Shader Presentation (PDF)
4) Motorstorm
"SPU usage is a good example. The progressive development of corresponding debugging and profiling tools made thorough exploitation of this powerful resource quite challenging for the less technically biased members of the team. In the aftermath of MotorStorm, with mature tools at our disposal, weve been developing mechanisms to make the PPU and SPUs power and parallelism far more accessible to our entire team, re-thinking data organization and algorithms in the process. MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so were aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!"
"Our SPU exploiting systems consist of:
i) Havok physics.
ii) Determination of object visibility.
iii) Concatenation of hierarchies.
iv) Billboard object culling and vertex buffer creation.
v) Updating of particles and vertex buffer creation.
vi) Updating of vehicle dynamics.
vii) Updating of vehicle suspension constraints.
viii) Audio (MultiStream).
ix) Video decoding."
"If by cooperative rendering you're referring to SPUs supporting the RSX, I strongly believe that this approach will become far more widespread. In addition to reducing the vertex load on the RSX through the use of culling and vertex pre-processing, this approach also provides an efficient mechanism to introduce procedural geometry.
Historically, CPUs have provided course grain scene culling using view frustums, occlusion planes, portal visibility and BSP-trees with GPUs left to perform fine grain rejection using guard band clipping, occlusion and backface culling. While such features improve fragment performance, they don't reduce vertex processing overhead.
The leap in performance provided by Cell gives us the bandwidth to significantly reduce RSX time spent processing vertices that don't contribute to the final scene. The favoured approach is to use SPUs to generate minimal scene/instance specific index and vertex buffers from compressed data."
Source: Beyond3D
5) Formula One Championship Edition
"We don't really use the concept of reserving certain SPUs for specific tasks. Instead we employ the concept of prioritized job lists that are executed by the SPUs whenever one is available. We use the SPUs for the following jobs: audio effects, particle system, physics (landscape collision, narrow phase and collision resolution), rain effects (rain droplets and rain splashes) and various render side jobs. The game logic is driven largely by the PPU. We use the SPUs together to collaborate on working through each frame that's displayed by the game. The SPUs are extremely versatile so they can be used to accelerate any in-game system."
The SPUs are heavily involved in the graphics pipeline and do an enormous amount of work to eliminate inefficiency before anything arrives at the PPU and RSX. For example, the SPUs are powerful enough to decompress and check every triangle [polygon] before passing it on to the RSX. Triangles that are facing away from the player, or that are not on the screen can be 'trimmed' away by the SPUs, which hugely reduces the amount of redundant work sent to the RSX. This in turn lets the RSX get on with what it does best--drawing stuff on screen.
The SPUs can also be used to augment the RSX vertex shaders, making far more vertex-heavy tasks possible which is very useful for character animation. Additionally, the SPUs can be used to implement behavior very similar to geometry shaders--F1 CE uses them in this way to render seamless interpolated levels of detail for some scene elements. So in answer to the question "Do the Cell and RSX work together?" the answer is a resounding "Yes," and I think this is one of the real strengths of Playstation 3 that we'll see increasingly exploited by development teams going forward.
Source: Newsweek
6) Super Stardust HD
"We are able to get over 10,000 active objects with physics and collisions and over 75,000 particles simulated and drawn @60fps. That said, we were unable to use all the available processing power from Cell for this game, so for the next game there are still plenty of reserves left"
Source: IGN
7) Heavenly Sword
"In Heavenly Sword, the Cell enables incredible numbers of enemies to be on screen at one time. The trick is that Cell treats entire regiments as a single unit of artificial intelligence when they are at a distance; as they draw closer, Cell gradually divides the army into smaller and smaller groups, so they eventually become individual troops with unique fighting styles and tactics."
"Heavenly Sword is one of the first PS3 games to tap into Cell's true potential. Here are the highlights.
Artificial Intelligence To keep up with the hundreds of on-screen enemies, Cell treats distant armies as a singlular "hive mind." As they approach Nariko, Cell splits their intelligence across squads, and finally, individual troops.
Graphics Wind gusts swirl Nariko's hair and clothes, and bazooka blasts send out showers of dust and rubble. 1080p support is still a question mark, though.
Physics When firing a cannon, Nariko can influence the trajectory of the projectile using the Sixaxis. Ninja Theory claims it needs the Cell to handle these complex calculations."
Source: Gamepro
"Personally I really love the SPUs as they have exceeded our performance expectations and we've got a lot of them to play with."
Source: Eurogamer
"In terms of graphics, we use the SPU as a form of object processor. So essentially everything up to and including the production of RSX's command stream probably has a module on SPU to help.
This includes,
1. A module that does a lot of object level clipping and culling both for the view frustum and ths shadow maps. Its job is per frame to calculate how big each shadow map should be in world space and what objects needs rendering in each map.
2. Animations, using ATGs (DeanA team) animation library, every animation is blended and bones updated.
3. Blend shapes, a custom module that handles facial animations
4. Skin matrices, even after animation there some work required to get them into the format used by the GPU vertex shader.
5. Flags, a simple verlet based simulation used for the flags in the game
6. Cloth & Hair, a constrained physics solver used for simple chains that are then rendered as Nariko's cloth and hair
7. Pushbuffer generation. This produces the commands used by RSX to actually render the scene. Has a number of optimisers to reduce redundent state changes.
Probably a few i've missed. Essentially a normal skinned or non-skinned character costs very little PPU time and virtually all processing is done on SPU and RSX. Its this that allows us to render the army scenes for example.
We do no per triangle work on the SPU, we let RSX do that, we however do try and prepare things on the SPU for RSX."
Source: Beyond3D forum
8) Lair
"We have all of our animations running on the S.P.U.s of the Cell's chip because you couldn't draw armies or basically animate armies of that amount and size without it. And our physics are completely on there. We are also doing fluid dynamics for the first time in a game, as far as I know. Water is not basically a sheet of a base surface, but completely animated and sub-divided, and you actually can direct with it thanks to the Cell. We actually do part of our rendering on the Cell. Simply because it's so powerful, we spent months and months moving more and more systems onto the S.P.U.'s."
"Not a specific S.P.U. Our S.P.U. code works dynamically, so we are not locking up one S.P.U. and saying "OK, you are the A.I. S.P.U., but we instead say, "OK, here are these 15 things including A.I." We run them on the S.P.U., and the code automatically distributes them. And sometimes, yes, A.I. certainly can take up a full S.P.U."
Source: Gamepro
9) Killzone 2
"In this talk, we will discuss our approach to face this challenge and how we designed a deferred rendering engine that uses multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA). We will give in-depth description of each individual stage of our real-time rendering pipeline and the main ingredients of our lighting, post-processing and data management. Well show how we utilize PS3s SPUs for fast rendering of a large set of primitives, parallel processing of geometry and computation of indirect lighting. We will also describe our optimizations of the lighting and our parallel split (cascaded) shadow map algorithm for faster and stable MSAA output."
Source: Killzoneunit
"We've created our own proprietary technology to drive the game, and this is using many of PS3's specific strengths.Large quantities of data can be streamed because we have a great deal of storage capacity. This allows for the level of detail you can see in the game.
It is not a luxury to have Blu-ray, but rather a necessity, as compression only gets you so far. I mean, the level that we showed at E3 and Leipzig topped out around 2GB! Also having the CELL and SPUs means we can offload all of our physics processing to an SPU, or process AI using the SPU's. All this processing power just means we can add more detail and create that Hollywood-type realism we're after."
Source: GamePro.com
I think the following article sheds more light on how the SPEs are currently used in Killzone 2, and addresses the advanced deferred rendering techniques Guerrilla Games already implemented for the game so far.
Deferred Rendering in Killzone 2 (PDF)
10) Final Fantasy XIII
"The White Engine reportedly uses four of the six developer-available synergistic processing elements (SPEs) of the Cell microprocessor to achieve near-pre-rendered CGI quality in realtime."
Source: Play UK through Wikipedia
11) Gran Turismo 5
12) Warhawk
"Although I would say its the sum-total of all of our natural phenomenon in the game. Our clouds, procedural water, atmospheric scattering, terrain, etc. All of this stuff runs in parallel on all 7 SPUs simultaneously every frame Im still not sure if the game community is giving enough credit to just how fast the SPUs really are."
Source: PS Blog
13) Unreal Tournament 3
"Also, Epic isnt a huge company. They dont have unlimited resource. We have parachuted in some of our SWAT team of super engineers to help them. Specifically, to optimize for SPUs, which are the point of difference that the Cell Processor has. That process is under way. The benefits that it yields to end developers whether theyre writing exclusive titles or multiplatform titles is that the performance on PS3 goes up exponentially, and it will make for a much better game experience."
Source: GameInformer (Phil Harrison)
14) Uncharted: Drakes fortune
"Like the PS2 the PS3 is a sophisticated and powerful piece of hardware. Our engineers are working very hard at making specific optimizations to take full advantage of the Cell and its SPU's. However, there is so much depth to this machine, that much like the PS2, you will continue to see developers squeeze more and more out of it over the course of what I am sure is going to be a lengthy life-cycle."
Source: IGN
"We are utilizing all SPUs in Uncharted for AI, animation and lots of other systems. We are however just starting to tap into the power of the Cell. In future games I can promise even more utilization of the Cell which will result in more of everything, including game play."
Source: Ars Technica
"As far as the Cell processor is concerned, we're actually using about a third to half of that right now, so there's still a bit of untapped potential there."
" I would say number one thing is animation, and the fact that the Cell processor has so much raw horse power that you could just throw more and more at it and it doesn't break a sweat. Our animation system is very complex, and we layer on dozens of frames of animation so you have that fluidity of movement where Nathan Drake can be running across a courtyard, stumbling over a rock as he's ducking under a hail of gunfire, reloading his weapon and rolling into cover, and all of these animations can happen simultaneously. "
Source: GameSpot
"The PlayStation 3 has a lot of power. When we started Uncharted we were really ambitious and had no idea what the PS3 would give us. Once we got the first devkits, we realized quickly that we could do everything we had planned to. The three main points for me are the Cell, Blu-Ray and the hard drive. Weve been using the Cell for pretty much all our systems: rendering, particles, physics simulation, collision detection, animation, AI, decompression, water simulation, etc and to give you an idea of the power of the PS3, we're using only 30 percent of the Cell processor.
In terms of Blu-Ray, we just couldnt have made Uncharted without it; with Uncharted we have almost filled it (91 percent). We're also using the hard drive to pre-cache data from the Blu-Ray disc. That allows us to stream up to 12 streams for sound, load level data super fast and more importantly to stream textures constantly to guarantee high-res quality on the screen. "
Source: Ars Technica
"Basically, in Jak I we had somewhere in the vicinity of 300-350 animations for Jak and everyone was really happy with the fluidity of his movement and the response. In Uncharted, Drake has got more than 3500 animations and the difference is we're now taking the cell processor and we're taking say two dozen of those animations, like we've got his running animations, flinching animations, reloading animations, rolling animations, just dozens of animations all at once being layered on top of each other and then the cell processor recreates on the fly the single frame of animation that you need to be able to play the game at that moment and the fact we can just dump more and more work on that processor and its SPUs just means we can free up our CPU to do more general purpose tasks. "
Source: PALGN
"Weve solved most of our memory problems by relying on the SPEs to perform compression, both at load-time and at run-time, using techniques developed by ICE, SCEA Tools&Tech and the SCEE ATG group."
Source: PS3Blog.net
"One of our first goals when we started Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was to push what's been done in animation for video games. We developed a brand new animation system that took full advantage of the SPU's. Nathan Drake's final animation is made of different layers like running, breathing, reloading weapons, shooting, facial expression, etc; we end up decompressing and blending up to 30 animations every frame on the SPU's."
"The main thing about the PlayStation 3 is the Cell processor and more specifically the SPU's. We are only using 30 percent of the power of the SPU's in Uncharted. We've been architecting a lot of our systems around this and we were able to take full advantage of that power. A big part of our systems is running on SPU's: scene bucketing, particles, physics, collision, animation, water simulation, mesh processing, path finding, etc. For our engine, the cool thing about having the SPU's is the fact we can minimize what we send to the RSX (the graphic chip), it allows us to reject unnecessary information and get the RSX to be very efficient. "
"We are constantly streaming animations, level data, textures, music and sounds. It would have been impossible to get this amount of data at that speed to memory without the hard drive. And of course on top of that we use the SPU's to decompress all this data on the fly."
Source: Playstation Universe (PSU)
15) Infamous
"For us, the most exciting part of the PS3 has been the cell processor, the SPUs specifically. In our highest density scenes right now, we are currently using about 30 percent of the SPUs' capabilities--with the SPUs doing lots of heavy lifting for us on rendering, visibility, particle systems, skinning, animation blending, and so on...this with scores of pedestrians, cars, fires, etc., all going on. And the best part? We've not made any significant attempts to even optimize the SPU code. I think it's reasonable to guess we could put 10 times as much stuff on the SPUs and still make our frame budgets. It's really pretty amazing."
Source: Gamespot
16) The Getaway 3
Presentation sheets
Presentation video (ZIP)
17) LittleBigPlanet
We went multiprocessor from the beginning, went multicore, and not having legacy code to hamper that code was such a blessing."
Source: Gamasutra
18) Metal Gear Solid 4
"I would also like to challenge the PS3's CPU power for not only what you can see, but also psychological effects, or psychological battles, where it can affect your gameplay."
Source: Eurogamer
List continues in post 32
tfur
Member
I thought that this paper was interesting. It describes using the SPE's for deferred pixel shading algorithms, and includes a few performance observations.
http://research.scea.com/ps3_deferred_shading.pdf
http://research.scea.com/ps3_deferred_shading.pdf
Core407 said:
I agree, my analogy would be if car speed would be a measurement of performance. A formula one Circuit is best raced on by Formula One race cars (analogy, game engines disigned specifically with the PS3s abilities in mind). You can however use a Truck to race on this race track, but you won't ever come near to maximum performance nomatter how good the driver.
MikeB said:
I'll add that I've made some testings on the lastest Pio G8 FullHD and an Xbox 360. I first set the 360 to 720p, and then to 1080p. Plain and simple : there is no differences at all. Because the internal scaler of the TV set is at least as good as the 360 one. That may not be the case on other TV sets, of course.
I added the following comments with regard to Heavenly Sword to the original post, I had to delete some other text elsewhere as the original post has reached its limit. If I go beyond this limit, the posting won't change after editing and the edit text will even be left blank. That's probably what happened when the posting got lost a day later after trying to add more comments. I should have posted a placeholder reply underneath. If more comments are added, I will probably split up the OP between posting 1 and posting 32 of the first page.
"In terms of graphics, we use the SPU as a form of object processor. So essentially everything up to and including the production of RSX's command stream probably has a module on SPU to help.
This includes,
1. A module that does a lot of object level clipping and culling both for the view frustum and ths shadow maps. Its job is per frame to calculate how big each shadow map should be in world space and what objects needs rendering in each map.
2. Animations, using ATGs (DeanA team) animation library, every animation is blended and bones updated.
3. Blend shapes, a custom module that handles facial animations
4. Skin matrices, even after animation there some work required to get them into the format used by the GPU vertex shader.
5. Flags, a simple verlet based simulation used for the flags in the game
6. Cloth & Hair, a constrained physics solver used for simple chains that are then rendered as Nariko's cloth and hair
7. Pushbuffer generation. This produces the commands used by RSX to actually render the scene. Has a number of optimisers to reduce redundent state changes.
Probably a few i've missed. Essentially a normal skinned or non-skinned character costs very little PPU time and virtually all processing is done on SPU and RSX. Its this that allows us to render the army scenes for example.
We do no per triangle work on the SPU, we let RSX do that, we however do try and prepare things on the SPU for RSX."
Source: Beyond3D forum
"In terms of graphics, we use the SPU as a form of object processor. So essentially everything up to and including the production of RSX's command stream probably has a module on SPU to help.
This includes,
1. A module that does a lot of object level clipping and culling both for the view frustum and ths shadow maps. Its job is per frame to calculate how big each shadow map should be in world space and what objects needs rendering in each map.
2. Animations, using ATGs (DeanA team) animation library, every animation is blended and bones updated.
3. Blend shapes, a custom module that handles facial animations
4. Skin matrices, even after animation there some work required to get them into the format used by the GPU vertex shader.
5. Flags, a simple verlet based simulation used for the flags in the game
6. Cloth & Hair, a constrained physics solver used for simple chains that are then rendered as Nariko's cloth and hair
7. Pushbuffer generation. This produces the commands used by RSX to actually render the scene. Has a number of optimisers to reduce redundent state changes.
Probably a few i've missed. Essentially a normal skinned or non-skinned character costs very little PPU time and virtually all processing is done on SPU and RSX. Its this that allows us to render the army scenes for example.
We do no per triangle work on the SPU, we let RSX do that, we however do try and prepare things on the SPU for RSX."
Source: Beyond3D forum
Cell (IBM QS20 Blade Serve) related article with interesting quotes:
"We demonstrate a 300x speed-up using the Gedae DE. The hardware platforms compared are an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor and an IBM QS20 Blade Server."
"While the performance is very good on system B, the Gedae/Cell/B.E. combination is 18x faster and 361x faster than the baseline implementation."
http://www.gedae.com/documents/MCBS Gedae Benchmark.pdf
"We demonstrate a 300x speed-up using the Gedae DE. The hardware platforms compared are an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor and an IBM QS20 Blade Server."
"While the performance is very good on system B, the Gedae/Cell/B.E. combination is 18x faster and 361x faster than the baseline implementation."
http://www.gedae.com/documents/MCBS Gedae Benchmark.pdf
MikeB said:Added some links with regard to the Getaway 3 Playstation Edge tech demo:
Presentation sheets
Presentation video (ZIP)
I added the following comments with regard to Motorstorm:
"If by cooperative rendering you're referring to SPUs supporting the RSX, I strongly believe that this approach will become far more widespread. In addition to reducing the vertex load on the RSX through the use of culling and vertex pre-processing, this approach also provides an efficient mechanism to introduce procedural geometry.
Historically, CPUs have provided course grain scene culling using view frustums, occlusion planes, portal visibility and BSP-trees with GPUs left to perform fine grain rejection using guard band clipping, occlusion and backface culling. While such features improve fragment performance, they don't reduce vertex processing overhead.
The leap in performance provided by Cell gives us the bandwidth to significantly reduce RSX time spent processing vertices that don't contribute to the final scene. The favoured approach is to use SPUs to generate minimal scene/instance specific index and vertex buffers from compressed data."
Source: Beyond3D
Insane Metal
Member
MikeB said:
Holy fuck!!! That is awesome!
Nostromo said:
Yes, it's real. ;-)
I think a more interesting question may be, why do we want AA in games?
In my view the short answer would be to reduce jaggies and maybe giving the image a little softer general appearence.
But jaggies can be reduced with higher resolution assets and rendering resolution, also fewer jaggies and a softer appearance can be achieved by handpicking your colors wisely (or use lighting techniques), so there's less contrast visible between neighbouring colors.
To me it often looks as if the XBox 360 does some weird color filtering / correction by default, for many games this seems to work well though, but for videos and pictures the end result IMO often seems very distorted in comparison with the original target appearance. I don't know if that's really the case though.
Insane Metal said:
To quote a buddy (who wrote various in depth public articles on the cell):
"As for performance there's plenty of research papers out there now showing Cell is not only fast on the areas it's designed for but also in many areas it's not designed for. On raw performance anything less than 8x faster than an x86 core is *low*."
The development hurdle is really redesigning legacy code for the SPEs, but the end result will be much cleaner and higher performance code.