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Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

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Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#11

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

wk_end wrote: post #3
nightowl_games wrote: post #2

How far do I gotta read before this article will expand the "GS" acronym? Interesting stuff but I'm being left behind here.

It stands for “Graphics Synthesizer” - Sony’s name for the “GPU” in the PS2.

I realized from recent Anand Tech sunset article[1] that 'GPU' was coined by Nvidia way later than I expected -

>A lot of things have changed in the last quarter-century – in 1997 NVIDIA had yet to even coin the term “GPU”

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anan...

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#13

Post by midnightclubbed »

2600 wrote: post #9
djtango wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing! Back then the appeal of console games to me were that beyond a convenient factor, they were also very specialised hardware for one task - running games. I remember playing FF12 (IZJS) on a laptop in 2012 and it ran very stable granted that was 6 years post release but by then had the emulator issues been fully solved? Re. Wild time for low level programming I remember hearing that Crash Bandicoot…

I heard something similar with Jak and Daxter, where they took advantage of the embedded PS1 hardware on the PS2 to scrape together some extra performance. I very much enjoyed this video that Ars Technica did with Andy Gavin on the development of Crash Bandicoot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o

Most PS2 games used the PS1 hardware for audio/sfx so you freed the main CPU for rendering/gameplay.

I believe Gran Tourismo 3 used the ps1 hardware for everything except rendering, which was the kind of nuts thing you could do if your games were single platform and with huge budget.

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#14

Post by wk_end »

fmbb wrote: post #8
djtango wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing! Back then the appeal of console games to me were that beyond a convenient factor, they were also very specialised hardware for one task - running games. I remember playing FF12 (IZJS) on a laptop in 2012 and it ran very stable granted that was 6 years post release but by then had the emulator issues been fully solved? Re. Wild time for low level programming I remember hearing that Crash Bandicoot…

Pretty sure all 3D PS1 games tapped into assembly for performance. The most “famous” thing about Crash programming is probably that it’s all in lisp, with inline assembly.

I don’t think either of these things are true.

By the mid-90s, C compilers were good enough - and CPUs were amenable enough to C - that assembly was only really beneficial in the most extreme of cases. Sony designed the Playstation from the jump to be a 3D machine programmable in C - they were even initially reluctant to allow any bit-bashing whatsoever, preferring devs used SDKs to facilitate future backwards compatibility. No doubt some - even many - PS1 games dropped down into assembly to squeeze out more perf, but I doubt it’s anything like “all”.

As for Lisp, Crash used a Lisp-like language, “GOOL”, for scripting, but the bulk of the game would’ve been native code. It was with Jak & Daxter that they really started writing the game primarily in a Lisp (GOAL, GOOL’s successor).

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#15

Post by BlackLotus89 »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #11
wk_end wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It stands for “Graphics Synthesizer” - Sony’s name for the “GPU” in the PS2.

I realized from recent Anand Tech sunset article[1] that 'GPU' was coined by Nvidia way later than I expected - >A lot of things have changed in the last quarter-century – in 1997 NVIDIA had yet to even coin the term “GPU” [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anan...

How about the "Sony GPU" (1994) used in the PlayStation?

Edit: source https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/chasing-pixe...

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#16

Post by boricj »

fmbb wrote: post #8
djtango wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing! Back then the appeal of console games to me were that beyond a convenient factor, they were also very specialised hardware for one task - running games. I remember playing FF12 (IZJS) on a laptop in 2012 and it ran very stable granted that was 6 years post release but by then had the emulator issues been fully solved? Re. Wild time for low level programming I remember hearing that Crash Bandicoot…

Pretty sure all 3D PS1 games tapped into assembly for performance. The most “famous” thing about Crash programming is probably that it’s all in lisp, with inline assembly.

Definitely not. I'm reverse-engineering Tenchu: Stealth Assassins and the original Japanese release's game code is written entirely in C as far as I can tell.

It does use the Psy-Q SDK which contains assembly, but it's not something that the game developers have written.

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#17

Post by forgotpwd16 »

chaboud wrote: post #5
nightowl_games wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That helps immensely. Surprised the author assumed this was implicit.

Among the intended audience, it likely is. I think this article is here to equally amuse and traumatize folks familiar with the system. The Emotion Engine (CPU) to GS (GPU) link was what made the PS2 so impressive for the time, but it also made it somewhat hard to code for and immensely hard to emulate. If I recall correctly, the N64 has something like 4x the memory bandwidth (shared) of the PS1, and the PS2 had roug…

PS2 compatibility on PS3 went through 3 phases. Launch models had EE+GS+RDRAM (full PS2 hardware), just after had only GS, and finally emulation was done entirely in software. Using a CFW can utilize the latest method to play most (ISO backed-up) PS2 games.

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#18

Post by dagmx »

fmbb wrote: post #8
djtango wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing! Back then the appeal of console games to me were that beyond a convenient factor, they were also very specialised hardware for one task - running games. I remember playing FF12 (IZJS) on a laptop in 2012 and it ran very stable granted that was 6 years post release but by then had the emulator issues been fully solved? Re. Wild time for low level programming I remember hearing that Crash Bandicoot…

Pretty sure all 3D PS1 games tapped into assembly for performance. The most “famous” thing about Crash programming is probably that it’s all in lisp, with inline assembly.

Both PS1 and N64 games were beyond the generation where direct assembly was required to achieve necessary performance.

Compilers were good enough by that point in time for the vast majority of games.

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#19

Post by dagmx »

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #15
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realized from recent Anand Tech sunset article[1] that 'GPU' was coined by Nvidia way later than I expected - >A lot of things have changed in the last quarter-century – in 1997 NVIDIA had yet to even coin the term “GPU” [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anan...

How about the "Sony GPU" (1994) used in the PlayStation? Edit: source https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/chasing-pixe...

I believe the distinction from NVIDIA was that they considered their product as the first all in one graphics unit

> a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second

It’s kind of arbitrary, even when you take out the processing rate. But prior to that there was still a significant amount of work expected to be done on the CPU before feeding the GPU.

That said, the term GPU did definitely exist before NVIDIA, though not meaning the same thing we use it for today.

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