The Power of the "Cell"!

[Ascended_Saiyan]

This is old news to some but new news to others. Just how powerful is the Cell? What are we talking about here? How can the average gamer begin to understand the implications of what the PS3 can bring to gaming? The following was a demo to show what the PS3 is capable of (ray-tracing environments).

Click here to see the image @ 1080p!

Here are some exerts from the article and comments from the writer.

This week at Game Developers Conference IBM will show a Linux based PS3 real-time rendering a complex (3 million triangle) urban landscape, at 1080p resolution, using only software rendering techniques (iRT).

To put this render job in perspective I just ran one frame of this scene through 3dsMax’s default ray-tracer an it took my Centrino Duo (dual core x86) machine one hour eight minutes to render what Cell and the iRT renders in less than one half of a second.

Another point I wanted to clear up is that the iRT is a completely scalable ray-tracer. One SPE can render the entire 3M triangle city model by itself at 1080p. If other SPEs are found the renderer’s performance scales up linearly. Likewise if the PS3 can locate more remote Cell processors the performance will continue to scale. Minimally you need one SPE on a PS3 to run the renderer.

Here is the link.



The Cell Vs. Nvidia G80 (GeForce 8800) Family

As you can see the G80 is twice as big, which is a good indication it requires twice the power, and produces twice the floating point power on paper. However when we ran one of the benchmarks discussed in the paper, the Stanford Bunny, we found that the Cell processor when combined with the iRT produces significantly better performance...

...When you factor power into the equation it gets even more interesting, given that Cell is half the size of the G80 and produces five times the ray-tracing performance.

Here is the link.

BTW, all these tests are without the RSX (GPU) being involved.