Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Commodity" meaning "something that could be bought at the store".
From the Rambus store!
Ok
Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation
61–69 of 69 posts
Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation
#62Earlier 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…
Most third parties weren't able to explore the PS2 properly, until Sony had to go through a revamp of their SDK, and collaborated with Gran Turism folks to show what was actually possible.
Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation
#63> Pray you have programmable blending I prayed for programmable blending via "blending shaders" (and FWIW programmable texture decoding via "texture shaders" - useful for custom texture format/compression, texture synthesis, etc) since i first learned about pixel shaders waay back in early 2000s. Somehow GPUs got raytracing before programmable blending when the former felt like some summer night dream and the latter…
Isn't 'VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock' kind of like programmable blending?
Or Raster-order-views in DX land.
This is a great example of using it: https://vulkan.org/user/pages/09.events/vulkanised-2024/vulk...
Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Most third parties weren't able to explore the PS2 properly, until Sony had to go through a revamp of their SDK, and collaborated with Gran Turism folks to show what was actually possible.
Not sure what you mean. The entire system was available to everyone day 1 through the manuals. The introduction of the VLC VU assembler made VU development easier (single instruction stream, automatic register allocation). PATH3 texture uploads maybe?
Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation
#65My favorite part of the GS was the sheer insanity of the bus, 2560 bits wide in total with a clever split on the cache. The PS3 felt like a step down in some ways, blending especially.
Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most third parties weren't able to explore the PS2 properly, until Sony had to go through a revamp of their SDK, and collaborated with Gran Turism folks to show what was actually possible.
Not sure what you mean. The entire system was available to everyone day 1 through the manuals. The introduction of the VLC VU assembler made VU development easier (single instruction stream, automatic register allocation). PATH3 texture uploads maybe?
Just because someone gets a driver license, doesn't mean they are fit to drive on F1 GP.
Likewise most game developers weren't fit to drive PS2 without additional help from Sony.
Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, the PS2's GS RAM clocked in at 48GB/s, more than the external memory bandwidth of the Cell (~25GB/s), which meant that PS3 emulation of PS2 games was actually done with embedded PS2 hardware. That's kinda overselling it, honestly. When you're talking about the GIF, only the VU1's vertex pipeline was able to achieve this speed directly. PATH2/PATH3 used the commodity RDRAM's bus (unless you utilized MFIFO t…
Growing up with the tech press in this era, “commodity RDRAM” is a funny phrase to read! As I recall, the partnership between Intel and Rambus was pilloried as an attempt to re-proprieterize the PC RAM interface in a similar vein to IBM’s microchannel bus.
Why is it funny. You could just go to a computer store and buy RDRAM.
Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 amoun…
basically with all those bells and whistles (transform, lighting, clipping, shaders, etc, etc)
the "old way" was to engineer a bit of silicon for each one of those things, custom-like. problem was how much silicon to give to teach feature, it almost has to be fine-tuned to each individual game, a problem
So nvidia comes up with the idea to sort of have a pool of generic compute units, each of which can do T&L, or shading, etc. Now the problem of fine-tuning to a game is solved. but also now you have a mini compute array that can do math fast, a general-purpose unit of processing (GPU-OP), which was a nod from NVIDIA to the gaming community (OP - overpowered)
Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Growing up with the tech press in this era, “commodity RDRAM” is a funny phrase to read! As I recall, the partnership between Intel and Rambus was pilloried as an attempt to re-proprieterize the PC RAM interface in a similar vein to IBM’s microchannel bus.
Why is it funny. You could just go to a computer store and buy RDRAM.
It wasn’t a commodity! It was a single-owner proprietary technology. You needed a license from Rambus to manufacture it. And at least at the time it commanded a premium price over true commodity DRAM.
People on Slashdot got really worked up when Intel signed a deal with Rambus to make RDRAM the only supported technology on Intel x86—from which they relatively quickly backtracked.
Anandtech (sniff) of course has great contemporary background: