nVidia to build PS3 GPU

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: MDE

Originally posted by: jiffylube1024Everyone is switching sides - Nvidia is now with Sony, Dell has let AMD in the door... What is this world coming to?

Dell has always let AMD in the door, they just always show them the way out rather quickly.

LOL! You don't think they maybe sicked their dogs on the AMD execs once or twice in the past? And by their dogs, naturally, I mean the Intel Bluehitman Crew of course .

 

[Malak]

I always liked the playstation 1 and 2 for the wide selection of gaming pleasure. Plus there really wasn't any competition for the PS1. There really wasn't much competition for that matter for the PS2 when it came out either. You couldn't pay me to take a gamecube, I haven't liked nintendo since the snes. They are always trying so hard to be different, despite their competition kicking their ass.

But the xbox had a lot of games I enjoyed. I never got one because.. well the console was massive. The PS2 was small, and heck I could fit a PS1 in my pocket. The controller for the playstation was always superior to anything else and is cloned by many companies, but I can't stand the xbox controller. I think if they can fix those 2 issues, I would consider the xbox2. But for now, I think I may have to stick with Sony if I do get another console.

 

[jm0ris0n]

Let the record show I am a nintendo fanboy ;P

 

[BenSkywalker]

Now I have a bit of time for some commentary on this, this is a very big deal.

First off in the console market Sony has locked down the most powerful console *by far* title for this generation. Pretty much everyone was expecting them to bolt another super Voodoo1 to Cell and call it a platform, this would allow MS and Nintendo to have a good chance as Sony's CPUs weren't that far ahead of the others. Now Sony should have nigh parity to possible superiority on the GPU front along with having a significantly more powerful processing unit. Sony has locked down, and easily so, the most powerful console this coming gen.

Financial wise this is a godsend for nVidia. With Sony handling the fabrication of the chips, all nV has to do is sit back and collect royalties on chips they don't even have to worry about. If they followed a typical console licensing agreement, they would also get a kick back on every game Sony sells- again without having to worry about yields or their fabs running into other issues or RAM supplies drying up. It is pretty much all upside. Also reading the release it appears that this deal extends beyond the scope of the PS3- other set top Sony devices that use any nV technology would also be open for royalty kickbacks.

On the PC side this may irritate MS a bit, but how much remains to be seen. With MS leaving nV out in the cold on the FP precission in DX9 despite them working together on the XBox it is a bit up in the air as to how badly MS is going to want to try and push around nVidia- particularly when they are already lined up with Sony on a gaming platform. I would imagine that MS will do something to slap nV's wrist for DXNext development, but I don't think they will end up pushing it too hard. If pushed hard enough nV could likely make it so PS3-Linux ports got real easy real fast(again, I doubt this would ever happen, but the possibility is certainly there).

Ok, nvidia writes their drivers primarily for openGL and DirectX. Could it be the playstation 3 will run in openGL or a slight derivative of openGL ?

Because i was thinking of all the man-hours required to write radicly new drivers for a hardware part that is capable of running openGL and DirectX but runs some Sony Graphic API. A sony Graphic API to me seems silly as Nvidia is designing the graphic hardware, not sony. So why not stick to something Nvidia has great success with (openGL). Its obviosly not going to be running DirectX, so why wouldn't it run in openGL ?

This is an extremely important element and one I have yet to see discussed.

Sony sucks at developer relations. Standard issue dev libraries were not available for a couple of years after the PS2's launch. A couple of years ago there were some rumors floating around about nVidia developing their own API- at the time pretty much everyone dismissed them and figured it was just people thinking that nV was going to go a lot further then their stated Cg plans. Now, while I am not saying that nVidia already has an API ready to go for this platform it could well be that they have at least already ported OpenGL over in a very friendly manner(in terms of mapping API calls to their hardware under ideal circumstances- fixed platform so why not) and this would give Sony extensive tools to draw on some time prior to the launch of the PS3. With nVidia's history of developer relations it wouldn't be shocking in the least if they offered to code certain shaders for dev houses and posted sample code, free to use, on their site for developers to use. This would be a very big boost for Sony, something they needed desperately and something nVidia has a rightly earned reputation for providing. This is glossed over in the press release, but I don't think most people are thiking in terms of total impact at the moment, just the initial shock that Sony outsourced their graphics chip(which they have stated in the past that they would not do) and the fact that nVidia is the one they went with.

An interesting aside that I don't think will actually come to be- Cell is easily powerful enough to handle emulation of a 733MHZ x86 CPU with plenty of power to spare and the PS3 is going to have nVidia based graphics on board....the ultimate backwards compatible machine

Seriously though, I own all the console now and I will buy all the next gen offerings too(as always) I just had been figuring that Sony would end up with the least visually appealing titles again and now that certainly doesn't appear to be the case. Between Cell and a decent GPU they should have little trouble crushing Xenon.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
An interesting aside that I don't think will actually come to be- Cell is easily powerful enough to handle emulation of a 733MHZ x86 CPU with plenty of power to spare and the PS3 is going to have nVidia based graphics on board....the ultimate backwards compatible machine

That sounds all well and good... except that's the *wrong* console that they are supposed to be emulating. MS would sue Sony to heck and back. No way that would ever happen - MS would adopt a distribution of Linux as the core of their OS offerings before they allowed Sony to emulate their console.

You are correct though - Sony's plans for backwords-compatibility between the PS3 and their prior PS2 and PSX consoles are based on software emulation technology. At least this time around, Sony's console should support actual proper hardware mip-mapping.

I'm curious about the memory and cost issues though - high-end PC accelerators use something like 256MB of 1Ghz-effective memory (in some cases). Yet, consoles have to be designed on a much lower "hardware budget", and still display game images that rival PC games. The PS2's entire RAM was far less than that; so was the XBox's. What kind of video-memory arrangement will NV's new super-duper console GPU have? Or will they bust out some sort of super-secret tile-based rendering engine product, based on the IP that the acquired from GigaPixel?

I'm actually slightly wondering too, if perhaps that press-release was mis-read somehow. Isn't Sony using a non-inhouse-designed graphics chip on the PSP? Could that be what it is referring to? This whole news seems nearly too unbelievable to be true. Not that I don't think it is - it would be a great boost to NV's finances the next couple of years, and could definately provide a decent boost to Sony's graphics capabilities. Everyone knows that out of the current three (PS2, GC, XB), the PS2 is the weakest in the graphics dept., by a not too insignificant margin.

 

[Goi]

It's all about the games...

And XBOX will never get the Gran Turismo series

 

[BenSkywalker]

MS would sue Sony to heck and back.

Who said Sony had to do it?

The PS2's entire RAM was far less than that; so was the XBox's. What kind of video-memory arrangement will NV's new super-duper console GPU have? Or will they bust out some sort of super-secret tile-based rendering engine product, based on the IP that the acquired from GigaPixel?

Couple different ways of approaching this. One is with the level of processor power they have they can use some very high compression levels to deal with texture loads, although this is not the way Sony has been indicating they are going to go. It appears that they are looking at replacing texture mapping, more then likely using shaders as substitutes. Given the fabrication goals Sony has for PS3 launch, nV should be able to be packing around 400Million transistors or so for their GPU(fairly comfortably by Sony's standards). Shaders can be packed extremely tightly obviously, and if Sony's implications are correct(they have stated flat out they want to ditch texture maps, shaders seem like the logical path) RAM considerations likely won't be huge. Also, it is fairly reasonable to figure on the next gen consoles having 256MB-1GB of RAM(8x-32x the prior gen is standard depending on which consoles you compare).

Everyone knows that out of the current three (PS2, GC, XB), the PS2 is the weakest in the graphics dept., by a not too insignificant margin.

Reading this news it seems to me that Sony is taking MS very seriously. On a realistic level with the power of Cell they could have put forth a reasonably competitive product using an in house rasterizer, even if they were bested on the visual front by MS again. Now it should end up that Sony has MS whipped on every hardware spec- with Cell being bidirectional even if MS's GPU has an edge over the PS3's Cell can offload a decent amount of the burden itself. With the amount of processor cores Cell is supposed to have, it is likely that a good deal of them will be sitting idle from general purpose code anyway(as even with 2GB of RAM the processing power of Cell should significantly overpower it).

 

[magomago]

Why does everyone assume the cell will be some uber processor? What if its just behind a triplecore XBOX2 soluation? I'm just wondering, tho i'm not anti Sony in that regard as I got a PSX, have a PS2 and will most likely buy a PS3 within 3 years of its introduction

 

[BenSkywalker]

Why does everyone assume the cell will be some uber processor?

IBM is backing away from POWER to move to Cell. This isn't just some Sony thing for their consoles, IBM's supercomputer efforts are now focusing on Cell along with most of their future large scale technology(mainframes etc). Simply going over Cell's raw specs it should be an extremely powerful chip.

IBM is making the processor for the XB2, GC2 and PS3 and the big difference is they are going to drop the two former while the latter they are betting their future on. To me, that is a good indication that it is some sort of uber processor.

Also- for historical sake the PS2's CPU was significantly more powerful then anything in the x86 world for some time after the launch of the PS2- it is by no means unheard of for consoles to have an advantage in this aspect.

 

[ronnn]

Not being a big fan of xbox or playstation. I have a hard time getting interested. Last I heard Nvidia was better off without xbox as they had more resources to design a next gen gpu. So with both companies involved in this, is future development slowed?

 

[R3MF]

any speculation on the nature of the GPU?

it won't need to tape out till june next year, so here's my guess.

> .09u chip
> 320m transistors
> 320MHz clock speed
> 256MB of 256bit DDR2 memory clocked at 500MHz (hdtv will be big by 2006)
> 32GB bandwidth
> unified shader model
> equivalent of 32 pixel pipes

howszat do ya?

 

[Zebo]

but "The Evil Empires" are getting into the PC business with thier consoles which I think will finally put the screws to sony.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=19615

This is not the first time I wish I had bought some nVidia stock.

it's not too late.. i may buy more right now

 

[vshah]

Originally posted by: Goi
It's all about the games...

And XBOX will never get the Gran Turismo series

check out Forza Motorsport. it has potential

 

[dguy6789]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker

Why does everyone assume the cell will be some uber processor?

IBM is backing away from POWER to move to Cell. This isn't just some Sony thing for their consoles, IBM's supercomputer efforts are now focusing on Cell along with most of their future large scale technology(mainframes etc). Simply going over Cell's raw specs it should be an extremely powerful chip.

IBM is making the processor for the XB2, GC2 and PS3 and the big difference is they are going to drop the two former while the latter they are betting their future on. To me, that is a good indication that it is some sort of uber processor.

Also- for historical sake the PS2's CPU was significantly more powerful then anything in the x86 world for some time after the launch of the PS2- it is by no means unheard of for consoles to have an advantage in this aspect.

Ps2 was overhyped and that was it. It didnt even have twice the power of dreamcast, and they had well over 600mhz P3s and Athlons at time of launch, so saying the ps2 had the fastest cpu at launch is just plain stupid.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Ps2 was overhyped and that was it. It didnt even have twice the power of dreamcast, and they had well over 600mhz P3s and Athlons at time of launch, so saying the ps2 had the fastest cpu at launch is just plain stupid.

Gee whiz, they were clocked higher. I wish I knew as much about this technology stuff as you do.....

 

[Regs]

Major Coup for Nvidia? No. Major coup for Sony. The PS2 was a horrible piece of hardware. Hopefully all these contracts can put together a console at a reasonable price to the customer with an unprecedented gaming experience.

Sony needed this to compete with XBox. It's not the other way around. Nvidia did not need Sony to compete with ATi.

 

[R3MF]

lol, apparently a 128bit vector processor (of which there were two) running at 294MHz is nowhere near as good as 32bit Celeron running at 733MHz..........................

[/from memory, so don't slag me off if i'm slightly wrong]

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: Regs
Major Coup for Nvidia? No. Major coup for Sony. The PS2 was a horrible piece of hardware. Hopefully all these contracts can put together a console at a reasonable price to the customer with an unprecedented gaming experience.

Sony needed this to compete with XBox. It's not the other way around. Nvidia did not need Sony to compete with ATi.

This is a good point, but it will help nVidia compete with ATI. More money= better raises/staff retention, more for R&D, better stock sales/value, etc. etc. etc..

This is definitely a big deal for nVidia as well.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker

MS would sue Sony to heck and back.

Who said Sony had to do it?

Good luck getting some 3rd party to implement that functionality.

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
Couple different ways of approaching this. One is with the level of processor power they have they can use some very high compression levels to deal with texture loads, although this is not the way Sony has been indicating they are going to go. It appears that they are looking at replacing texture mapping, more then likely using shaders as substitutes.

I assume that they will be using some form of hardware-accelerated compression, as the PSP is also going to. I also don't think that they will do away with texmapping, even if they add massive shader-power. Why? Well, for one thing, it would present hardware similar enough to the hardware of other systems that uses texture-mapped polys (making for easier ports), and two, even if the output is generated using shaders, many of them require multiple 2D data maps as input, whether or not those are directly used as output textures. (Normal maps, etc.)

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
Given the fabrication goals Sony has for PS3 launch, nV should be able to be packing around 400Million transistors or so for their GPU(fairly comfortably by Sony's standards). Shaders can be packed extremely tightly obviously, and if Sony's implications are correct(they have stated flat out they want to ditch texture maps, shaders seem like the logical path) RAM considerations likely won't be huge. Also, it is fairly reasonable to figure on the next gen consoles having 256MB-1GB of RAM(8x-32x the prior gen is standard depending on which consoles you compare).

1GB of RAM? That won't be cheap. I wonder if they will split the market and offer two models, one with "base RAM" (256-512MB), and one with "upgraded RAM" (1GB)? A low entry cost is critical for console market-acceptance. It doesn't matter how good the console is, if the price is too high. The 3DO is the canonical example. (I personally find many of the games to be more enjoyable, and have better graphics than the PSX, for example.)

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
Now it should end up that Sony has MS whipped on every hardware spec- with Cell being bidirectional even if MS's GPU has an edge over the PS3's Cell can offload a decent amount of the burden itself. With the amount of processor cores Cell is supposed to have, it is likely that a good deal of them will be sitting idle from general purpose code anyway(as even with 2GB of RAM the processing power of Cell should significantly overpower it).

Cell being bidirectional? I don't understand what you mean by that.

I really doubt that any of these up-and-coming consoles will sport 2GB of RAM though, that's just way too much. Then again, if you look at the need for memory for textures and level data of current cutting-edge PC games, you do really need a min of 1GB, and if those consoles are supposed to remain competitive for several years longer.. hmm. Perhaps 2GB is a good number, but at current prices, I still think that will be highly cost-prohibitive. I guess we'll see some time next year how it pans out.

 

[MadEye2]

Whatever the specs are for the new consoles I'm sure they'll be hyped up beyond sanity - I remember several years ago reading about how powerful the "Emotion Engine" was - so powerful that it's banned in China because it can launch nukes or some crap like that. And I remember seeing "genuine" screenshots of N64 development projects that made it look like it could render the CGI effects of T2 in real time...

Can't remember who just asked, but the Wonderswan is a handheld made by Bandai/Matel released around 2001. Its comes in monochrome and colour versions, has a 16bit CPU running at abour 3Mhz - no idea what model the CPU is. It had a 2.8 inch screen 224x144 pixels, could display 41 colours out of a palette of 4096 - 57 in "extended" mode, and had 512k of RAM. It had a couple of big name games, like Megaman and Final Fantasy and the rest were strange Japanese things and classic arcade titles.
I think it's still on the market, although on the fringes - try ebay, but they'll almost definitely become collectors' items in a few years time.

 

[gururu]

I'm very excited to see this. nVidia did wonders on the xbox console, I have to imagine they are going to rock the PS world. It's a major score for nVidia as Sony is absolutely huge. I wonder why Microsoft switched to ATI. Or rather, why nVidia switched to Sony. I know why.....BIGGER paycheck.

 

[REMF]

they won't split the specs of the next-gen consoles.

a version with a harddrive is one thing, half the ram quite another.

 

[dguy6789]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker

Ps2 was overhyped and that was it. It didnt even have twice the power of dreamcast, and they had well over 600mhz P3s and Athlons at time of launch, so saying the ps2 had the fastest cpu at launch is just plain stupid.

Gee whiz, they were clocked higher. I wish I knew as much about this technology stuff as you do.....

They were clocked higher, and had just about the same performance for clock. The PS2 was NOT that spectacular. Just look at the cpu's performance numbers, heck look at the games.

If you knew half as much about this stuff that I do, you would have understood this and not have even had to post in the thread at all.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: gururu
I'm very excited to see this. nVidia did wonders on the xbox console, I have to imagine they are going to rock the PS world. It's a major score for nVidia as Sony is absolutely huge. I wonder why Microsoft switched to ATI. Or rather, why nVidia switched to Sony. I know why.....BIGGER paycheck.

i would rather have PS3 and Xbox Next, but that is just me. personally.... i would have treated Microshaft a lil better than nvidia did so i would have gotten the contract.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
Not too shabby.

But I gotta ask. What the heck is the Bandai WonderSwan?

Edit - Whomever named it needs to be shot.

Wonderswan is/was a portable game system released primarily in Japan to compete with Nintendo's line of portable gaming machines. I think it originally debuted at about the same time as the NeoGeo Pocket, and possibly slightly before the GameBoy Color. Various revisions of the Wonderswan exist, apparently.