Can we have skid marks on GT5? ;-;

[Mr P510]

I here what your saying.Hopefully you,myself and every other GT fan will be pleasantly surprised next year when the full GT5 is released.

 

[Quiet_Storm]

Smoke effects have little to do with the Cell here. This is all fillrate from the graphics card, which is allready being pushed waaay too hard for 1080p.

See, the RSX is capable of some really nice rendering effects via shaders. These need lots of bandwidth.
The fact that PD chose to do 1080p puzzles me, i personally belive it's due to sony's pressure to have the "1080p console".
While i'm impressed with what they've achived at 1080p, (very impressed, if you compare the RSX to today's best graphics cards.) i still think it was a mistake to do 1080p.
The ammount of rendering effects that PD could've gotten at 720p highly outweighs having more pixels to look at. (Think Quake 3 at 1080p vs doom 3 at 720p, Doom 3 will ALWAYS look better.)

Basicly, GT5 looks very impressive mainly due to the fact that PD has gotten the Cell to do more than any other company at the moment, it seems very obvious when you look at 16 cars at the track each with about 200,000 polygons. VERY impressive indeed.
The problem however, is the following:
Because they pushed for 1080p, there's not enough fillrate left for effects such as nice weather effects, realistic lightning, (such as the sunlight you see in crysis for example.) smoke effects, antialias, (This BTW would've been very nice to have at least in the cars, since they have so many curves cause of the high poly count that the pixelation is very obvious.)
the list goes on and on. Such as the low resolution shadows (while they are "real shadows" they are very low res, and you can tell by looking at them, they look very "pixelated")

Basicly PD should've really just asked themselves:
"near photorealisim at 720p, or 1080p with about half the visual impact but hey, at least you can get closer to the screen!"

720p would've yieled even far more impressive results.

Well, in summary. Lets not mistake the Cell for the RSX here, effects such as smoke and more realistic rendering won't come from the Cell at all.
From the Cell you can expect stuff like AI, Physics, and a huge ammount of polygons, Etc. (i mean HUGE, if GT5 is any indication.)

Thanks for the lesson on the difference. I'm still a little confused, though. So you're saying that the high polygon counts for the cars and backgrounds in GT5 is from the Cell? I've always thought those were due to the graphics card. The shadows are also polygon based, aren't they? If they are then why can't the Cell pump up the polygons in the shadows to make them look less pixelated? I'm just really confused because I've always thought that the graphics (cars and background) were all from the graphics card (RSX) and the processor (Cell) was the thing that made the effects like weather, physics, realistic lighting (ray tracing) and realistic smoke. I guess I had it backwards.

If you could elaborate more on what each does and how each (Cell and RSX) works in terms of graphics and effects, I'd really appreciate it.

Another question: It has been said that the RSX that Sony is using in the PS3 is inferior to the ATi(?) grapics card that MS is using in the 360, is this true? If it is, then that means the 360 would be able to perform better and more realistic effects such as weather, lighting and anti-aliasing? I've always been wondering about this so I thought I'd ask since you sound like you know what you're talking about. Thanks!

 

[Mr P510]

As for the PS3 RSX being inferior to the ATI in the 360 it depends on who you talk to and what camp they are in.

 

[Kamus]

Thanks for the lesson on the difference. I'm still a little confused, though. So you're saying that the high polygon counts for the cars and backgrounds in GT5 is from the Cell? I've always thought those were due to the graphics card. The shadows are also polygon based, aren't they? If they are then why can't the Cell pump up the polygons in the shadows to make them look less pixelated? I'm just really confused because I've always thought that the graphics (cars and background) were all from the graphics card (RSX) and the processor (Cell) was the thing that made the effects like weather, physics, realistic lighting (ray tracing) and realistic smoke. I guess I had it backwards.

If you could elaborate more on what each does and how each (Cell and RSX) works in terms of graphics and effects, I'd really appreciate it.

Another question: It has been said that the RSX that Sony is using in the PS3 is inferior to the ATi(?) grapics card that MS is using in the 360, is this true? If it is, then that means the 360 would be able to perform better and more realistic effects such as weather, lighting and anti-aliasing? I've always been wondering about this so I thought I'd ask since you sound like you know what you're talking about. Thanks!

Shadows are being rendered by the RSX, the reason why they are pixelated is because they can't afford to lose anymore bandwidth to make them more detail since they are allready running at 1080p (well, it's ONE of the reasons.)

As for the sheer ammount of polygons you see, that is thanks to the Cell mainly, of course the RSX does play a huge role here too, but the sheer raw power comes from the Cell, the RSX turns that math into polygons, so in a way it's just as responsable for it.
The RSX does have a limit to what it can be fed, but the general rule of thumb in the computer world is that the CPU is always the bottleneck when it comes to polygon pushing power.

Modern graphic cards are now very programmable compared to the ones from years ago that were made for very specific jobs, so in a way they are nothing more than CPU's now.
They are still however, a lot less genral pourpuse built than say, a pentium chip, which still means they are made for specific tasks, even as programmable as they are now.
The Cell is a somewhere in between a graphics card and a a PC CPU as far as it's general pourpuse computing goes.
It's not as flexible as a CPU such as a pentium, but it's not as specialized as a graphics card.

As far as what does what, i think i pretty much covered it.
Things like shadows, lightning effects, textures, antialias, anistropic filtering, etc. are all done by the graphics card.
The Cell is responsable for things like sound, A.I., Physics, (though there's no reason that a programmer could use the graphics card CPU time for physics either, other than they're allready using all of it in rendering the game.) Networking, and of course just giving the RSX a lot to work with (like lots of polygons for example.)

Ray tracing as far as i know (i'm no expert in any of this really, just a tad educated, so if anyone would like to add anything or correct me if i'm wrong you're more than welcome to.) is extremley taxing on CPU time, but if we were to have ray tracing in real time it would be done by the graphics chip. To my knowledge this just isn't viable at the time, as it consumes tremendous ammount of CPU time. (i mean, it's probably doable, but at the cost of other stuff that could have higher visual impact anyway.)

As far as the Xbox 360's graphics chip being better than the PS3, from what i've heard it's a "yes" and "no".
Basicly the xbox 360 was a more planned design than the PS3 when it came to the whole system itself, the 360's graphic chip was made with the "fixed plataform" in mind, and they kind of build it to try to make the best use of it at 720p with even antialias turned on.
The 360's graphics chip has i think 10 MB of VERY fast cache in there that i think helps in that. (it also does a lot of other stuff i can't recall, but you can probably find it in arstechnica.com)

So while it's not hands down better, it's a more elegant design. (At least as far as this goes, anyone that has both a 360 and a PS3 will notice just how much more "well built" the ps3 seems compared to the 360, the 360 feels kinda cheap.)

The RSX on the PS3 seems more of an afterthought. something that Sony did at the last phases of design.
I think originally they wanted the Cell to do both the CPU stuff and the graphics stuff (porbably by adding a second Cell on the PS3 for this.)
And while the Cell is surprisingly good at doing graphics, (very, very good if you consider it's a somewhat general purpose built CPU.) it just didn't hold a candle against what Nvidia and ATI had developed when it came to graphics, basicly we're at an era where we really don't need to worry about graphics in a console sucking because of ATI and Nvidia. (assuming the console builders use their stuff of course.)
So what happened here, is Sony realized the xbox 360 might end up being better hardware overall if they went the "Cell does evrything" route.
So they made a deal with nvidia and they ended up with the RSX, which thankfully for sony, is very, very good. (but obsolete compared to current high end video cards, same goes for the 360 graphics chip, the Cell however, compared to a multicore CPU still holds more than it's own, and for certain stuff has a very significant advantage still.)

So how good is the RSX? Well, Nvidia announced this as something based on the geforce 6800 architecture, except they said that it would be the same as running 2 of them at the same time instead of one. (which speedwise is very close to a geforce 7800, but lacking some of the new features the 7800 brought to the table.)
Right now of course there's the 8800 which blows the 7800 out of the water, so a 8800 has more than 2x the fillrate as a PS3 if i'm correct.
The sucky part about this, is that most PC games are made with old PC's in mind. So they are developed for older hardware, so there's a huge difference between what you can play at the time and what your latest 600 dollars videocard can really do. So what PC gamers do with all this "excess bandwidth" is just increase the resolution, the antialias, the anistropic filtering and in no time they'll bring the graphics card to it's knees. (mind you, there's a LOT of stuff the new videocards can do that isn't exclusivly bound to bandwidth.)
For the Cell however, things aren't as "grim", since i think that as far as gflops go it still has a significant advantage over modern CPU's, it might lose a battle in general pourpuse programming vs a mordern intel core duo CPU, but in multimedia intensive applications i think the Cell comes out on top by quite a bit.
So before you get discouraged about the RSX, keep this in mind:
while it maybe obsolete in the computer world, the potential in most PC graphics card remains untaped because of what i mentioned earlier.(developers build games for people with regular PC's, not people that spend 600 dlls on just the videocard.)
Basicly the PS3 developers don't have to worry about this, since all PS3's are created equal. And so far i think PD is one of the biggest examples of what you can do with the hardware if you push it to it's limits (allthough like i said, in 720p they could've done a lot more.)

So to end the 360 graphics chip vs the RSX, the 360's is supposed to be better in some areas, while the RSX is better in others.
I've heard that when it comes to shaders the RSX is faster, (shaders are another word for programs.) however, to exploit that fact you need to have bandwidth, something that you are pretty much giving up if you go for 1080p with that high level of detail, so more than the 360's graphics chip being better, think of it as a more elegant implementation that in some cases is better, and in some isn't.

I do not know however, if the RSX has what is now reffered as "stream processors" Which modern video chips have, this basicly turns the massive floating-point computational power of a modern graphics accelerator's shader pipeline into general purpose computing power, as oposed to being just for graphics.

Basicly the shaders on the RSX have a lot of potential, but from what i understand they need a lot of bandiwdth, so going for 1080p with really high quality graphics is shooting yourself on the foot, since you're sacrificing effects that might make your game look far more realistic even if it's at half the resolution.

While i think PD has shown us it can do some amazing stuff with the Cell and the RSX (just the fact that they're running at 1080p at 60 FPS is stunning for the quality they are showing.)
both of them might still have a lot of untapped potential, in GT5's case i think it's obvious that if they can do the RSX do THAT at 1080p, they could've really made some amazing looking stuff at 720p.

as far as the Cell goes, it's amazing that they can make cars that detailed, and so many of them at the same time, i do not think this is possible on even modern "core duo" intel CPU's. (let alone the 360's CPU.)

But it would've been nice of them to concentrate more on the physics themselves too, i think the PS3 is capable of producing very realistic physics, we'll just have to wait and see.

-Kamus

 

[Quiet_Storm]

Wow, thanks for all the information! I would give you a rep up if I could or know how to but awesome post nonetheless! Now that I read what you wrote, I too, would've loved for PD to run the game at 720P with other effects implemented to make the game even more realistic.

I have both the PS3 and an Xbox360 and I do agree that the PS3 is a lot higher quality than the 360. I've just been very disappointed lately with a lot of the multiplatform games that has been released for both consoles and the 360 version always seems to run smoother and look better with better anti-aliasing. This is the reason why I was kind of losing faith in the Cell and the PS3's graphics card but from what you're saying, I guess it's all up to the developer to take advantage of the Cell's power. Thanks again for the detailed explaination, I learned a lot from reading your post!