"This really makes me think that SONY may have originally intended the Cell to be the graphics processor and actually have no GPU."

Nope.

It just means that you are just another dumb fanboy who doesn't know anything about graphics hardware outside of the crappy desktop x86 pc and are unable to comprehend any system that isn't built like that archaic design.

Originally the PS3 was to simply have 2 Cells but thank goodness they did not! Killzone2 is using this dererred rendering.

Using only the Cell as a benchmark, they tested 5 SPU's against a Geforce 7800 GTX and obtained the following results:-

"We implemented the same algorithm on a high end state of
the art GPU, the NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX running in a
Linux workstation. This GPU has 24 fragment shader
pipelines running at 430 Mhz and processes 24 fragments
in parallel. By comparison the 5 SPEs that we used process
20 pixels in parallel in quad-SIMD form.
The GeForce required 11.1 ms to complete the shading
operation. In comparison the Cell/B.E. required 11.65 ms
including the DMA waiting time, and would require only
8.56 ms if the DMA waiting were eliminated."

I would imagine the combination of RSX and Cell should produce some interesting results. What is unfortunate is that we are at least a year or two away from seeing some really optimised routines.

For now anyway, the 'superior' GPU in the 360 will keep standards sky-high for lagging (timewise) PS3 devs to aim for.

Only short-sighted, moronic fanbots could see otherwise.

"...The SPUs use the Cell DMA list capability to gather irregular fine-grained fragments of texture data generated by the GPU. They return resultant shadow textures the same way. The shading computation ran at up to 85 Hz at HDTV 720p resolution on 5 SPUs and generated 30.72 gigaops of performance. This is comparable to the performance of the algorithm running on a state of the art high end GPU. These results indicate that a hybrid solution in which the Cell and GPU work together can produce higher performance than either device working alone."

I don't really agree with their "state of the art" comment. They used a Geforce 7800 GTX which is by no means old, but I don't think it is state of the art anymore. The Geforce 8800's have been out for a while now.

Edit: I don't know when the paper was written, but the Geforce 7800 GTX may have been "state of the art" when the PS3 was designed.

loops that make not ten.twenty,a hundred but thousands of calls to the SPU's and on top have another routine that manages all the data flowing out of the SPU's.

think about that and then look at EA's poor showings across the board on this platform.

A few thoughts...

What is interesting, its that back in the early days of programming, it was all data based. The hardware required it, and the languages required it as well. We then had the luxury and genius of Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, and Ken Thompson. And we got to use C (and UNIX). I remember using the K&R compiler options on SGI systems.

If you are a UNIX guy, or a programmer, these dudes are like gods...

One of the "drawbacks" of higher level languages, like c, java, c++ etc... is that you become lazy in programming. Along with limitless memory stacks, and cpu power, we no longer optimize.

We just write loop nowadays and don't even think about it... compile and run... There was a day when you would put your source in a queue to be compiled over night, and you come back in the morning and hope it runs...

SPU's require the knowledge of linear algebra... matrices, vectors etc...

One good thing... IBM does make a compiler that will unroll loops, and optimize code for SPU's. Removing branches etc... It can be downloaded and used for free...

Sorry about the ramble... just some thoughts...

DJ, your post was more educational than everything else i've ever read posted by someone on this site...

but anyways, this article points out the most obvious thing that's holding the system back: the lack of developer dedication. if they bother to learn how to program multi-core processors, they can make games beyond anything we've seen.

and for those of you who are like, multi-core FTL because it won't be implemented for a long long time. my macbook has a dual core in it. AMD released a quad core processor today. there is a shift in microprocessing from single stream to multi-stream computing which will force developers to learn new methods or they'll pay the price in subpar games.

I'm not really that articulate when it comes to the technological prowess of each system but...

I've always heard the the 360 has better ways of acessing the memory it has stored, something about "lanes or it being compared to a Highway with multiple lanes to get the information back and forth"

Whereas the PS3 does have "unlimited" potential, but the SPE's or Cells or whatever have trouble communicating with eachother due to how inefficiently the data travels, especially compared to that of how the 360 travels.

I don't know if you understand what I'm saying, but is this TRUE ???

The comparisons brought up the DMA transfers on Cell, which take up approx 18% of the cycles on the chip. What those comparisons don't include is the Front Side Bus on Xenon, which also controls the data that comes in and out of the 360 CPU. DMA transfers offer increased security, security that literally cannot be hacked or messed with. Apparently there's a security level on Cell that even programmers have no way of even seeing; it's basically automated. o_o'

As for the FSB on Xenon...no one really knows. Microsoft refuses to release performance benchmarks, so we're basically left guessing on the performance of its memory access.

Now this is what IS known. Xenon runs off of GDDR3 RAM, which is built for GPUs. GPU RAM has high bandwidth, but high latency which is perfect for GPUs; GPUs access huge chunks of data at intermittent stages. CPUs access small chunks of data at a very fast pace. Because of this, Xenon performs fairly poorly compared to how it would've run on CPU memory. It also has to share the same memory bandwidth with the 360 GPU, which you can imagine causes even more issues. On Xbox, the GPU lost out because of the memory architecture; on Xbox 360, the CPU loses out.

You may have remembered a Valve developer's comments about how the PPU in Cell runs at the same level as all three Xenon cores, which are supposedly almost being maxed out by the Half-Life 2 engine. This makes absolutely no sense until the little details are taken into account.

Cell's PPU has access to 3200 Mhz CPU memory, 512KB of L2 cache running at 3.2 Ghz, the DMA Memory Controller runs at 3.2 Ghz as well, and a 20GB/s downstream channel to RSX.

Xbox 360's Xenon Cores (identical to the PPU in Cell) have access to 700 Mhz GPU memory, 333KB of L2 cache each (quite good), but the L2 cache runs at 1.6 Ghz (very bad), the FSB runs at 1.6 Ghz (due to L2 cache speed), and the memory bandwidth (20GB/s) is shared with the GPU. All communication with the GPU has to be squeezed into CPU memory access and GPU memory access requirements.

I hope that explains the performance differences for you.

way to follow up DJ's informative post. May I ask your source? Thanks for giving the inevitable to come idiots a reason.

(below)good example pimpdaddy

is how cell and rsx were designed. i remember reading somewhere that rsx does what its designed to do very well: place textures onto geometric surfaces. those surfaces are one of the many functions cell was deigned to do.

Now now deadeyes, just cause you don't understand it doesn't mean it's made up. You run and play little guy, these grown ups get mean sometimes and I'd hate to see them hurt your little feelings.

How do the parents let immature kids like deadeye get on the internet? It's only a matter of time before he tries to receive his one free internet thanks to the coupon he "stole" from google.

You realize they only used 5 of the cells cores to come to the realization that it's equivalent to a 7800 GTX, right?

Know your tech before you open your trap.

I wouldn't expect any fanboy, or I'm sorry... MOST fanboys of either console to understand the jargon being thrown around in this topic.

To downplay such a greatsetup inside of the Paystation 3 is just having your own head up, inside of your ass with your Xbox right beside it.

The Xbox 360s GPU is superior to the RSX, but technically the RSX was designed to directly work with Cell to do graphics the Xbox 360 is incapable of doing.

I guess we will have to wait till it shows, because for now both systems show IDENTICAL graphical prowess.

Edit: You're a fanboy if you type anyone of the following: "play b3yond" "wait beyond/b3yond" "jump in" the list goes on.
Stop worshipping consoles as technological gods of your pathetic existence and act like human beings.

Ratchet and Clank Future, as well as Heavenly Sword, use absolute no SPUs for GPU assistance. The RSX does everything on its own for those two titles (and for Uncharted, as far as I know). Killzone 2, Warhawk, and Getaway however do use SPU assistance, which helps the RSX focus on what it does best, pixel processing.

which we know is logically untrue, Because games using the spu's look bad, yet seemingly these games using only the RSX look amazing.

But yeah the basics of the article are, To get these advanced techniques in, we use the spu's to suppliment the weak Gpu.

Thats funny, because I still haven't seen a game on XB that looks as good as Motorstorm, a near launch game. (Well it was a launch game for me)

Besides theres more to Cell and PS3 than just good graphics. Playing through a dynamic level that feels alive, like KZ where theres alot more going on then laymans eyes detect is the way forward in games. Another example would be the animation system in Uncharted that runs about 5 or 6 animations together giving a unique look to every movement instead of just canned animations.

Thats OK, I know you're not impressed, people like you only pretend they are waiting to be convinced while the whole time wearing a mask of impenetrable skepticism.

You'll never believe if you dont have a little faith. Thats a given. eg. If you're convinced you'll never find love, you probably never will.

Did you get tired of acting unbiased on Gamespot??? I remember debating you there too. I wish I had some more bubbles so I could school more of your kind, instead I guess I will waste Bubble no 2 out of 3 on you. I find it funny how you keep talking about these dynamic videogame experiences such as Killzone 2 and Uncharted. I mean you have so much hands on experience with these games right? Typical Sony fanboy response. Talking about 'Waiting Beyond" while the rest of us gamers are "Jumping In" right now. Talking about the Power of the Cell and Blu-Ray when so far they havent meant SH!T. Your just another Playstation Polesmoking Puppet who cant state an opinion without sounding like Sony's PR.

You want to know what I really believe? The 360 and PS3 will be pretty damn even when it comes to graphics. PS3 looks more powerful on paper yet the 360 seemed to have the more efficient design and better software development tools to make up for any perceived lack of raw horsepower. I own both a PS3 and 360 so I can have the "freedom" of choice when it comes to games. I expect both consoles to deliver some seriously awesome HD videogames for years to come. I could care less who wins, because in the end I win.

I can rag on the PS3 because none of the games I have seen or played so far show that the PS3 is 2 times as powerful as a 360, according to Sonys Marketing. In fact when I look at multiplatform games the PS3 versions are often delayed and have a hard time keeping up with the 360 versions. I deal in the NOW, hands on, show me what you got right this second. Not some false hope based on a Corporation trying to hype its product up in fear of losing to its competition.

Remember once upon a time ago the PS2 killed the Dreamcast with a similar false hype. I mean I'm still waiting for those Toy-Story CGI-quality graphics that Sony promised last generation.

So excuse me when I am a bit hesitant to buy into any more of Sonys hype. Excuse me when I am told that Blu-Ray is needed for a 6-8 hour game that with decent compression could have fit on a DVD-9 (Heavenly Sword), and that Six-Axis was next generation while force feedback was last generation to the tune of some seriously bad reviews for Lair.

I will give you this. Motorstorm looks great for my PS3 on my 40" 1080P LCD HDTV. Then again Gears of War looks even better on my 360. Whats your point??? I never siad either system would have SH!TTY graphics, I just said that not one single game for the PS3 could not be achieved graphically on the 360.

Heres the best part. I wonder how much money Factor Five would have saved if they had made Lair on the 360, how much less time they would have had to spend on development, and how much better the game would have controlled with analog rather than motion sensing, not to mention force feedback. Plus with 360's larger install base how many more people would have bought the game. If thats what the power of Cell and Blu-Ray prove, I will gladly pass on my PS3 for my less powerful on paper but somehow better performing in real time 360.

pimp, if you have all these amazing games. Why do you come into a playstation 3 story and bash the ps3, just like the other fanboys. This is an argument you and every other fanboy/troll lose on.

Maybe you should read more. That seems to help. For ps3 to be on the market for 9 months with the games it has already doesn't leave allot to complain about. Unless your just frustrated about what you can't afford like that g0dd@mn piece of sh!t Iphone. See what I did there.

Sometimes people just feel the need to *say* they own both systems so they can bash one without getting flamed for it.

Because no matter which one you bash you'll get flamed for it sometime or another.

I'll bash both because Crysis isn't on either of them!
:P