[ydl-gen] No video hardware acceleration on PS3

[John Doe]

Surely you would have the SPEs render to the local XDR memory (which has 
higher bandwidth than the VRAM). Or better still, perhaps, use tiling and 
have the SPEs render into their local SRAM where there is huge bandwidth. 
Once the frame was done it could then presumably be copied to VRAM for 
output (if that is necessary).

Of course, the SPEs alone will never be as good as the GPU in the system. 
But they could perhaps do a decent job..decent enough for homebrew games and 
the like, in the short term. I think there's lots of interesting things that 
could be done with software rendering on Cell, but in the context of a 
traditional polygons/texturing pipeline, it'll probably be screamingly fast 
at the former (transform/lighting), but relatively quite poor at the latter 
(texturing).

I think the real question as to whether a port of OGL/Mesa or some other 
software rendering solution would be worthwhile is how long we'll have to 
wait for hardware acceleration. If it's only going to be a short time, it 
may not be worth it (except for one's own education/curiousity)..although 
it's arguable that it would still be useful even after that, for projects 
which wanted to mix Cell and RSX rendering.


>From: David Seikel <onefang at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: Discussion List for General Yellow Dog Linux User 
>Topics<yellowdog-general at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com>
>To: yellowdog-general at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
>Subject: Re: [ydl-gen] No video hardware acceleration on PS3
>Date: Sat, 2 Dec 2006 10:54:55 +1000
>
>On Sat, 02 Dec 2006 08:44:30 +1000 Stephen Braithwaite
><braithwaite.s at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
>
> > Suppose people did get a project together to port Open GL to compute
> > its pixels and vertices on the 6 available SPE's...
> > Does anyone know enough about graphics cards to know how fast this
> > would result.  I think the SPE's would be suitable for this sort of
> > work, but how would this stack up against a GPU?   Whether or not it
> > would be worth starting such a project would depend on what sort of
> > results could potentially be obtained.
>
>The main issue will be bandwidth from the SPE's memory to the video
>memory, and I suspect that has to go through main memory.  The GPU has
>direct access to video memory, so it will still be a lot faster.


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