Playstation 2 Emotion Engine

Basil writes: "Here's an in-depth article on the Playstation 2 Emotion Engine at Ars[Technica] that you really shouldn't miss. The article goes a long way in explaining the intricacies of the overall design, relating the performance of the MIPS III core to their somewhat odd implementation of two vector processing units."

Re:AC-3 and DTS

AC-3 and DTS are compressed formats for canned playback (a la MP3). The overhead involved in compressing a raw 5+1 bitstream to AC-3 or DTS is significant.

This is why other surround formats and APIs are used for interactive media (i.e. games).

-Isaac

Re:Dual processors is a bright idea, sort of.

I thought games like GranTurismo (2), Medievil and well lots of the newer PSX games were pushing the PSX to the limit?

troc

Re:Games for P2?

Actually, Lucas is on record as saying that (computationally) the PS2 is roughly as powerful as the gear they used for SW:TPM. Obviously, the storage and memory capability isn't there for storing all the FMV, but the computational ability to generate it is. Also, remember that the resolution being generated for a movie screen is obscenely high. Doing calculations at the same speed, but for a 640x480 NTSC TV screen instead, really helps, since the amount of data that needs to be generated is much lower.
~luge

Re:Phew! long article :)

I thought it was an interesting article. It's not too surprising, really, to see the tradeoffs that were made. Overall, it seems to me that by throwing lots of functional units in the box, with a minimum of glue, you can get a lot of performance at a slow clock rate. Unfortunately, it is the lack of glue that is going to make this a wretched beast to program (the difficulty of programming has been confirmed by my friends in the game development community.)

A general-purpose CPU like a PIII or an Athlon is designed to get reasonable performance executing a tremendous variety of programs; where the PSII/EmotionEngine is going to have to be painstakingly coded to get good performance.

I don't think I'd want to run Linux on the box, as the CPU is really pretty slow. By the time the PSII comes out, the *slowest* chips available from AMD and Intel will probably be on the order of 600 Mhz. As a web-browsing machine, it would be fine; but you don't need the Linux infrastructure for that.

From what I read here, a good PC and graphics board, christmas time this year, should still blow the PSII out of the water -- at many times the price, of course. 1.5 GHz/KNI (or 3DNow) will beat .25GHz/10 MACs.

thad

Also "just" movies?

I realize this goes against the interactivity of the consoles, but there are times where I just like to take a video or DVD into my system & sit back & watch, w/o having to defeat three zillion different monsters to get through the story line.

With these cool graphics engines coming out, how long before we can see feature-length 3D CG movies, where the data on the CD represents the setup & movements of the 3D models instead of a frame-by-frame type of video? (In particular, how long before I can see these things in the US!)

I can see interactivity up to the point where you can move through the movie "set" looking at stuff during the course of the movie (and forwards & backwards the movie too, of course) - but for the most part, the storyline is linear (unless the director wants to explore storyline branches)?

Would such a setup actually be more efficient in terms of data storage than the frame-by-frame setups? As things got more realistic, would it slowly start supplanting "normal" movies? Would you get a hybrid of 3D & "real-life" stuff (where the real-life stuff was modeled into the 3D worlds)?

Dual processors is a bright idea, sort of.

Having dual vector processing units is a good move, similar in some respects to having two Voodoo2's in SLI configuration. But there's been a problem so far:

Evidently most games out for the PS2 in Japan (this is second hand information, btw) were rushed out so quickly that they only use 50% or less of the PS2's capabilities. The upshot of which is the graphics you see currently are usually well below the PS2's capabilities.

What I'm getting at is, all the graphics power in the world doesn't mean squat if nobody's programming to take advantage of it. Just look at how amazing late-generation SNES games are.

Now, the PS2 is still a beast of a machine, no matter what, due to the machine's highly specialized graphics (3D only, and fast as a sonovabitch). But there's not much to compare it to, as the Dreamcast comes in woefully behind in the specifications race, and the Dolphin isn't even out yet.

Also, according to the company behind Bleem (the name slips my mind), the Playstation 1 was a queer beast due in part to a strange method of streaming textures into memory, and a whole wealth of other odd choices. It makes the PS1 very hard to emulate, and ironic as it seems, just as hard to emulate on the PS2!

***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

Sounds Familiar

So basically the Graphics Synthesiser on PS2 is like a blitter...and the Display List is like a Copper List.
That sounds like ye olde Amiga Blitter and Copper List combination just 16 years later, and a damn site faster...
I'd fancy that in a nice shiny G4 Amiga (Well we can all dream...)

Re: ..., but I remain skeptical (of X-Box)

For a console (and that *is* what we are talking about, right?) 600 Mhz would be a breakthrough, right?

That's the problem. MS is really leading technical people to believe that the X-Box is more PC than console. They are selling it to developers as the "easy to program for" system. "It uses DirectX and we know you love that!" The CPU seems more likely to be a slightly altered 600 MHz Celeron chip than anything else. Depending on which question you ask and who is asking, MS developers will tell you that X-Box is not a PC and is totally a console, or they will tell you that it is exactly like a PC.

The PS2 is a console through and through. I'm a little surprised, because previous reports I had seen about the PS2 marked the Emotion Engine internals at 350 MHz, not 250 MHz. When it gets to the US, I'll look into that more. Either way, MHz is really a very poor metric for console performance. The problem with PC CPUs, it that they are Jacks-of-all trades. They do everything about equally well: Mediocre. As a result, high MHz speeds allows them to chug through stuff faster and mimic the effects of more dedicated machines. A dedicated and optimized piece of hardware can often run at one third the speed of a normal CPU in MHz and still outperform it. This is because the dedicated hardware might take 6 cycles to complete a specialized task that takes the PC CPU 20 cycles. The trade-off, is that a task outside the specialized field is likely to take the dedicated hardware 60 cycles while taking the PC CPU the same 20 cycles. (Note: This is an example I am making up as an illustration, I don't have the specs for any dedicated hardware memorized offhand.) When the PS2 tries to do email and such, it will lose the massive edge it has, because it is optimised completely for 3D games. On the other hand, email can be done just as well by a 25 MHz 386 as a 1 GHz P3.

B. Elgin

Ray Tracing Benchmark

Last time I checked the Playstation Emotion Engine running linux was the top Single CPU system in the Pov Ray benchmark tests. The Pov Ray basically renders the image to a file so you're looking at a benchmark of sheer CPU power.

This beat out Intel, Athlon, and Alpha Based systems. Usually the Alpha is considered the winner in gfx rendering. Titantic (A.K.A. Chicks version of Star Wars), used over 100 Alpha based machines running Linux to render the GFX.

Re:Games for P2?

Oh, sure. One of the demos for the PS2 in early development was a live-rendered FMV from Final Fantasy VII. Namely the escape from Shinra FMV (from Disk 1?). The speaker paused the FMV and replaced characters with other characters, dragged them around, re-posed them, etc.

I'm all for cinematic games, just so long as they aren't slap the button at just the right time games like Dragon's Lair.

***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

former ps2 developer, aiiigh, flee! flee!

The game studio where I worked was starting to do PS2 development. We had exactly one "TOOL" (yes, that's what its called. The dev system is a small black monolith with the word TOOL in giant letters on the side, and a funky blue-green support stand and matching blue-green LEDs.)

The thing does run a mangled version of Linux internally. It can get files via NFS, and it has an internal web server that lets you perform various admin functions. They don't want you telnetting to it, though. I think they did some tricks to the pty system that may have made interactive shells a bad idea. Just a guess.

As a former PC game shop, we actually were using the Metroworks system to do development. Compared to dev studio, it was wretched, frankly. Building on a linux system with a gcc cross compiler was the recommended way to do things, and frankly, I would have preferred it.

The hardware is fucked up. Seriously fucked up. Scary fucked up. The first generation of PS2 games isn't going to get close to actually using the system capabilities. Nor is the second generation. Maybe the third generation.

We had several hard-core 3D graphics programmers with multiple commercial titles under their belts working on the system, and their progress was, frankly, pathetic. Why? Because although its not all that hard to write a simple renderer from the EE Core, its a major pain if you want to actually use the box. After all, the core is only 300Mhz, its not all that interesting. You really need to use the VUs if you want to start slamming matrix manipulations around.

The VU's have basically no memory. So, you can't actually fit an entire model inside them. So, we were going to do a pipeline where individual primitives (i.e. quads, tristrips, fans, whatever) would get queued, the VU1 would just eat stuff off the queue, do the transforms, and render. Well, we also decided that the system would be great for doing curved surfaces. That complicates everything. How does your physics system do collisions with a dynamically tesselated curved surface where the generated tris are all off on another CPU where you can't touch it? So you need to resolve collisions either directly between the surfaces (ow) or use simpler geometries. Annoying.

Then Renderware came in and gave a demo. They've had dev systems for quite a while, and they have a mature abstraction to the whole rendering process, and their entire scheme for doing the rendering is fucking wild; as I understand it, they don't even leave code on the VU's, they download it constantly, alongside whatever work they need it to do. They are running the DMA at like 90% capacity, which rocks. Their stuff looks awesome, and they get pretty damned good performance.

I personally believe that there will be more RenderWare based games than studios touching the raw hardware, especially for generation 1. Its a lot easier to learn an API than to try to understand poorly documented (and japlish, when it is documented) hardware specs.

At any rate, its not a good year to invest in the games industry. Everybody is blowing wads of dough trying to learn all the new platforms.

Emotion Engine

You think this emotion engine is complex, you should try to figure out the one in my girlfriend. Sometimes, I wish God would just Open Source women so that maybe I'd be able to understand them.

kwsNI