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[sportzhead]

You guys amaze me sometimes. I was reading this thread then I just stopped, thinking shit, where the hell did all you guys learn this stuff. Everyday I learn something completely new here that if brought up in a conversation with friends, they would say, "Was that even in English." Some of you guys are amazing. That being said, I still don't know WTF this interview mean. :lol

 

[Vince]

For shader ops it wouldn't be wrong. There defintiely is value in having more logic transistors that give you more shader ops. Ati's R500 chip is using lots of transistors for a different purpose, that also has it's significant value, though.

Agree completely. In terms of shading we have two data points at this time, a fixed value for the R500 (232M) and a variable one for RSX (n<~300M).

The RSX has alot of unknowns at this point, the question comes down to how much the RSX deviates from the NV40 and G70: Going from the NV40 to G70, how much of the mnicroarchitecture was redesigned and resynthesized? Going from the G70 to the RSX, did they rip out the Programmable Video Processor? How many transistors were spent on supporting OpenEXR complient FP32 blending, FlexIO, etc...

Your welcome Midnightguy.

 

[mrklaw]

plus presumably RSX will need some FSAA logic in there, which on Xenos has moved completely off the main chip onto the daughter board. The actual transistor counts could be pretty close.

And from the description of Xenos, it sounds very custom, so anything not needed will be stripped out.

 

[Drek]

where the hell did all you guys learn this stuff.

I learned all my comp. engineering while studying comp. sci. in college.

Now I study things like isostatic rebound, seismic profiling, etc. though, so the technical jargon has always stuck around much too long.

However, I try to keep my comments in threads like this to a minimum, but thats as much from my not being educated recently or highly enough to really dig into hardware as complex as this.

Really amazing where consoles have gone though. From simple little game machines to the cutting edge of real time computing. Funny how a billion dollar industry boom will do that.

And from the description of Xenos, it sounds very custom, so anything not needed will be stripped out.

k, I know its still up in the air just how much RSX will be like the G70 or whatever nVidia is currently codenaming their next chipset, but removing anything not needed is a pretty obvious step when customizing for the PS3. Neither chip is likely to have dead weight left dragging along I wouldn't think, they'll make use of every last scrap of silicon they put in the boxes.

Unless of course you consider two HDMI dead weight, like so many seem to. :lol

 

[Lord Error]

plus presumably RSX will need some FSAA logic in there, which on Xenos has moved completely off the main chip onto the daughter board. The actual transistor counts could be pretty close.

Only if RSX uses 70+ million transistors for FSAA and blending, which I really doubt. It's probably a small fraction of that. Consider also that R500 needs that shader related logic not found on other graphics chips. I'm talking about that instruction arbitraring logic which decides the shader load.

 

[Hajaz]

hrm. on my pc switching from no AA to 8xAA drops my frames from 90 fps to like 70 fps.
wouldnt the transistors dedicated to this would be more then a "small fraction" of 70million if it takes that much of a hit?

 

[dorio]

Unless of course you consider two HDMI dead weight, like so many seem to.

I'll consider it not dead weight when I see GT running on a dual HD span at 30fps.

hrm. on my pc switching from no AA to 8xAA drops my frames from 90 fps to like 70 fps.
wouldnt the transistors dedicated to this would be more then a "small fraction" of 70million if it takes that much of a hit?

That's a pretty good hit in performance. It's usually much higher than that.

 

[Hajaz]

depends on what card you got afaik. Ati's latest cards all have aa at a pretty low performance hit.

 

[Pimpwerx]

Only if RSX uses 70+ million transistors for FSAA and blending, which I really doubt. It's probably a small fraction of that. Consider also that R500 needs that shader related logic not found on other graphics chips. I'm talking about that instruction arbitraring logic which decides the shader load.

Those unified shaders (even if they're fragments) should be fatter than a VS or PS pipe by itself...IMO. I thought it was discussed last year, and it was agreed that while the pipes are more efficient, they'll also need more logic since you need to be able to do verts and pixels all on the same pipe.

And since I seem too negative on Xenos lately, I'll mention that the MEMEXPORT function sounds cool, as does the explanation about the arbitrater. PEACE.