[ydl-gen] No video hardware acceleration on PS3

[Warren Nagourney]

I gave up using YDL on my 17" Powerbook because of the very poor  
quality of the video drivers - even though the video was nominally  
"accelerated", there were lots of artifacts when windows were moved  
making the whole experience very painful to me compared to OSX  
(explicitly turning off acceleration made the behavior much worse and  
totally unacceptable).  I am guessing that poor video responsiveness  
would also be the case on the PS3 and this enormously reduces the  
attractiveness of using it (bearing in mind that there are a number  
of other disadvantages of linux compared to OSX). This is especially  
abhorrent on a machine with such highly touted graphics performance -  
a bit like driving a Ferarri with a governor limiting the speed to 30  
mph.

As I said, I was looking forward to porting my OSX apps, which make  
heavy use of OpenGL, to the PS3 and also being able to take advantage  
of the parallelism on the Cell (I already get a 4x speed improvement  
using Altivec/VMX on the G4). These apps would crawl on a PS3 without  
accelerated video. I also noted the word "currently" and will watch  
the developments in this area with interest.


On Nov 13, 2006, at 12:48 PM, David Seikel wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Nov 2006 13:21:54 -0700 Brian Wood <beww at bresnan.net>  
> wrote:
>
>> On Nov 13, 2006, at 12:46 PM, ugo wrote:
>>
>>> wow as you say...
>>>
>>> No 3D for any linux os on ps3 ?!
>>> No Opengl, no directX... If this is definitivly impossible, linux
>>> on ps3 wont go far.
>>> This is the baddest new i heard about ps3.
>>>
>>> Why this ? Is this a limitation coming from Sony ?
>>> No way to pass through ?
>>>
>>
>> Yeah. Although most of us here are probably not gamers, one of the
>> main attributes of the PS3, as I see it, is great video hardware.
>>
>> This basically reduces the possible video down to the level of a
>> dumb framebuffer, making it one of the fastest CLI-based machines
>> around :-)
>
> Note the docs use the word "currently", which means it might be
> possible later.  I suspect it was a case of "we can't directly access
> the GPU, so it's a hard job, lets just do a frame buffer now and do
> fancy GPU stuff later".  In other words, do the simple thing now, so
> that there is something that is usable, get it out the door, then work
> on doing all that complex, juicy stuff.  Just a guess.  B-)
>
> All access to the GPU is through the hypervisor, that adds an extra
> layer.  So your standard nVdia binary video driver is unlikely to  
> work,
> even if it does support that particular GPU.
>
> Also note, YDL 5 will feature the E17 window manager.  E17 gives you
> lots of eye candy, speed, and low resource usage.  It does all this
> without using any graphics hardware acceleration.
>
> Lets face facts, the 3D games available for Linux pale in  
> comparison to
> the actual PS3 games that will be available.  You don't buy a PS3 to
> play linux games on it.  You install linux on a PS3 for other reasons.
> Well, that's why I'm getting one.  B-)
>
> (Yes, I'm ignoring non game 3D apps.  I don't use any.  Hell, I barely
> have time to play games.)
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