Hi, Barry.
The features you describe are pretty standard in a Ray-Casting implementation as yours. Danny's also had some of them (not the image compression, though - btw this idea of compressing the image before sending is really good). However, this works fine for terrains only, 2D and a half scenes. In any case, it is very impressive having this implementation running in real-time on only 2 Cells. Congratulations.
The GPU performance advantage over the CPU is unfortunately not real. I am only trying to bring this people here back to real life. The fact is that the parallel processing advantage of the Cell easily outperforms GPUs. The reasoning is simple, bare to the bones:
GPU: 24 pipelines at 0.5 GHz = 12 pixels/time
Cell: 36 SIMD ALUS at 3.2 GHz = 115.92 pixels/time
Where "time" is some unit of time (assumed the same in both cases, but the ALU in Cell I believe to be more efficient because of the high speed local memory of Cell). Thus, the Cell NOW can be about 10 times faster than the fastest GPU.
And this relationship will remain like that because Cell has the same scalability as a GPU.
If the Cell processor really takes off, which I think it will, we will soon see the death of the graphics cards and all this hype about GPUs. I will laugh a lot, because I knew this a long time a go. Cell is just THE processor I (and I believe everyone else) was waiting for.
Take care.
Ε ειναι τελειως βλακες οι "επαναστατες" του gaming...
The features you describe are pretty standard in a Ray-Casting implementation as yours. Danny's also had some of them (not the image compression, though - btw this idea of compressing the image before sending is really good). However, this works fine for terrains only, 2D and a half scenes. In any case, it is very impressive having this implementation running in real-time on only 2 Cells. Congratulations.
The GPU performance advantage over the CPU is unfortunately not real. I am only trying to bring this people here back to real life. The fact is that the parallel processing advantage of the Cell easily outperforms GPUs. The reasoning is simple, bare to the bones:
GPU: 24 pipelines at 0.5 GHz = 12 pixels/time
Cell: 36 SIMD ALUS at 3.2 GHz = 115.92 pixels/time
Where "time" is some unit of time (assumed the same in both cases, but the ALU in Cell I believe to be more efficient because of the high speed local memory of Cell). Thus, the Cell NOW can be about 10 times faster than the fastest GPU.
And this relationship will remain like that because Cell has the same scalability as a GPU.
If the Cell processor really takes off, which I think it will, we will soon see the death of the graphics cards and all this hype about GPUs. I will laugh a lot, because I knew this a long time a go. Cell is just THE processor I (and I believe everyone else) was waiting for.
Take care.
Ε ειναι τελειως βλακες οι "επαναστατες" του gaming...
) CPU + GPU.
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