More RSX vs Xenos war notes

I really haven’t updated this damn thing in a long time.

Here is an interesting post I read at VE3D.COM regarding the PS3 hardware slow and broken article from the Inquirer.

..clip from the original article…

Then came the horrible news, RSX appears to be limited to setting up 275 Million triangles/second, anemic compared to the 500+ million in XBox360. When asked about this apparent thumping dished out by MS, the reply from one notable ISV relations boffin was a terse 'What a Piece of Junk'. Talk about a steak in the heart.

…VE3D.com post regarding the news article.

The GameMaster
Flood
posted June 05, 2006 02:12 quote:
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Originally posted by Dehnus Nörder:
What could be the case, is that what Gamemaster also claimed, is that the Cell does a lot of the Vertex and Poly pushing while the RSX is cut down on this to save money and/or get more pixels hading out of it. That that is why it can't do as many Poly's as a Xenos, but in combination with the Cell it would reach that number.

I don't know I just think there are always two sides to a story and there must also be to this one .
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You can't exactly split graphics processing like that, especially not on such dissimilar architectures that is the Cell and the Geforce. Meaning that you can't have the Cell do "Part" of the geometry processing and have the RSX do the other "Part. Now you could have the Cell handle all of the Geometry processing, but that means you have to basically dedicate nearly HALF of the processing power (in addition to the ~20-25% of the processor time taken by OS resources) to processing geometry in order to equal that found in a 8 vertex pipeline Geforce 7900GTX. This STILL would pale in comparison to that of Xenos's geometry processing capacity. This processor is quickly becoming overburdened even before any work has started...

Right now the games we have been shown are running on full fledged Geforce 7800/7900GTXs, what do you think is going to happen when we go from those 7800/7900GTXs with 24 pixel pipelines/8 vertex pipelines + 16 ROPs and 51GB/sec of graphics bandwidth to a GPU that is more akin to a 7600GT with 16 pixel pipelines and 4 vertex pipelines + 8 ROPs and roughly 22.4GB/sec of graphics bandwidth. The nightmare scenario is a GPU with no vertex pipelines... and reduced quantity of pixel pipelines.

I am sure developers have been dealing with that issue already, they just did not know what was going on until now. Now that they know what are their alternatives? The main alternative put forth is basically do the SPE work across system memory instead of local memory. This basically means the processor in the PS3 (which I previously did not consider very favorable for games to begin with) crippled.

If all of this is true... then you can expect to see many of these PS3 games (which only a handful could be considered XBox360 level to begin with) are going to have downgrades made to their graphics engines in the final product.

But wait! It gets worse...

Yields are still an issue for the Cell... what if they are forced to reduce clock speed back down to 2.4Ghz and/or disable another pipeline to get yield to an acceptable level? What about the BD-ROM drives abysmal performance (half the performance of a 12x DVD with 3 TIMES worse access latencies)? Will they even be able to put everything in the actual PS3 shell they showed off and do so without the system frying itself to a crisp?

Sony has got a lot of problems... and it is becoming more likely this system will not launch this year. If that is the case... how far back will Sony need to push the system in order to fix these problems?