Talk:RSX Reality Synthesizer

RSX specs

This is the true spec below. so if any one wants to talk let talk about the spec

• 550 MHz G70 based GPU on 90 nm process [1]
  • 300+ million transistors ( 600 million with Cell CPU ) [2]
  • Multi-way programmable parallel floating-point shader pipelines
    • Independent pixel/vertex shader architecture
    • 24 parallel pixel pipelines
      • 5 shader ALU operations per pipeline per cycle ( 2 vector4 and 2 scalar (dual/co-issue) and fog ALU )
      • 27 FLOPS per pipeline per cycle
    • 8 parallel vertex pipelines
      • 2 shader ALU operations per pipeline per cycle ( 1 vector4 and 1 scalar, dual issued )
      • 10 FLOPS per pipeline per cycle
    • Maximum vertex count: 1.1 billion vertices per second ( 8 vertex x 550 MHz / 4 )
      • Minimum (worst case) polygon count: 366.6 million polygons per second ( 1.1 billion vertices per second / 3 vertices per triangle)
      • Maximum (optimistic case) polygon count: 750 million and more depending on how many triangle strips are used in a game.
    • Maximum shader operations: 136 shader operations per second
    • Announced: 1.8 TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second) ( 2 TFLOPS overall performance )[3]
  • 24 texture filtering units (TF) and 8 texture Addressing unit (TA)
    • 24 filtered samples per clock
      • Maximum texel fillrate: 12 gigatexel per second ( 24 textures x 550 MHz )
    • 32 unfiltered texture samples per clock ( 8 TA x 4 texture samples )
  • 8 Render Output units
    • Maximum pixel fillrate: 4 gigapixel per second ( 8 ROPs x 550 MHz )
    • Maximum Z sample rate: 8 gigasamples per second ( 2 Z samples x 8 ROPs x 550 MHz )
    • Maximum anti-aliasing sample rate: 8 gigasamples per second ( 2 AA samples x 8 ROPs x 550 MHz )
  • 100 billion shader operations per second [4]
  • Maximum Dot product operations: 51 billion per second [5]
  • 128-bit pixel precision offers rendering of scenes with high dynamic range rendering ( HDR)
  • 256 MiB GDDR3 RAM at 700 MHz [6]
    • 128-bit memory bus width
    • 22.4 GiB/s read and write bandwidth
  • Cell FlexIO bus interface
    • 20 GiB/s read to the Cell and XDR memory
    • 15 GiB/s write to the Cell and XDR memory
  • Support for OpenGL ES 2.0
  • Support for DirectX 10
  • Support for S3TC texture compression

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Those are not the true specs of the RSX. The true specs are here -> http://world.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?lp=ja_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.watch.impress.co.jp%2Fgame%2Fdocs%2F20060925%2F3d_tgs.htm

Please read the article. I know it may be hard because it is translated from Japanese, but the mistakes that you have pasted from a trade show article that is over two years old are glaringly obvious. The RSX was DOWNGRADED. It is only 500MHz, and several other things changed as well. Aleksael 20:52, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Downgrade

Is it real or not? 550mhz to 500mhz.

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I restored the previous revision that had the RSX at 550mhz, as that is the last official word anyone has gotten out of Sony. If anyone has an official statement or concrete evidence (i.e., not random forum posters) to the contrary, that should be provided in this article, I think. Jonabbey 07:51, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

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Could you please cite this last official word out of Sony? Where is it? I can't find it anywhere. On the other hand I have provided a reference to the Tokyo Game Show press release information in the Japanese link which clearly cites 500MHz. If you have anything newer please share, otherwise I think this is pretty official. Aleksael 17:24, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

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The PS3 review at CNET stated: "Paired with PlayStation 3's RSX Reality Synthesizer graphics-processing unit, a gargantuan 550MHz, 300-million-transistor graphics chip..." [7]--KingEmperor24 05:33, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

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The trouble with CNET's review is that it reflects exactly Sony's earlier specifications, and Sony's announcement at TGS/September 06 differ and are lesser. In other words the specs were downgraded from the earlier, more optimistic announcement, but that announcement was more publicized and this is why CNET is going from it. Sony would not have been able to change the specs again only two months before the launch. Aleksael 19:30, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Any extra info?

Does anyone out there have any further details for this chip? I was thinking specifically of:

Pictures of the package item/picture of actual 'silicon'

Details of the Instruction Set Architecture

Infomation concerning any additional features in comparison with a standard Nvidia chip

Details of specific methods used for hardware acceleration e.g. exactly what operations are parallelised

Range and accuracy of point (vertix) storage format

Details of hardware support for vector operations (rotation, 3d to 2d transform, ray surface intersections etc)

Hardware support for rasterisation (ie 3d to 2d transform) vs. support for ray casting/tracing

Degree of autonomy of the processor (ie is it autonomous or is it 'fed' by another processor eg cell as was the case in the PS2 (Graphics synthesizer 'fed' by Emotion engine.)

Is the architecture 'turing complete'?

Is the chip also responsible for ouputing the digital HDMI / analogue (comp/vga?) signal itself or does another chip do this?

If you can supply references (web links) to any of the above info. (or related) you can assume that I volunteer to incorporate a summary into the RSX article.(Just leave a link on the talk page) Or add the infomation yourself (Even Better!) Thank you.HappyVR 05:53, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't think much else regarding that information has been released! The only thing that I have to add to the article is the rumor that the RSX is not actually based on NV47 architecture but rather is more geared towards the G80 (or rather a modified 7900GT setup that contains elements of G80). The rumor started because of how Sony has been completely mum on the RSX and we know nothing else about it except what is outlined in this article (which is why I think you won't get the information you're looking for)!

There will either be an announcement regarding the status of the RSX (whether it is indeed much more powerful than Sony has let on) or the PS3 will be released and we'll find out what's actually in there after that. StealthHit06 22:44, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I found an image of the RSX (website source on the image page), yet I do not know what license to give it. So unless one is given or figured out, it'll get deleted automatically. XenoL-Type 15:21, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

As StealthHit06 said, there's no chance somebody will leak this because they're likely under NDA. We can only speculate the instruction set and features to be similar to G80. Rasterization is obviously accelerated. From what I remember the definition of "turing complete" I would say everything that is barely programmable is "turing complete". You will never find this proven because no one in business really cares about this. BTW, rasterization isn't a 3d->2d transform. 85.18.201.168 09:26, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Speculating the instruction set and features of the RSX to be similar to the G80 would be like speculating the instruction set and features of the Radeon 9800 to be similar to the X1950. Nvidia has given press events with Sony likening the chip to the G70. Aleksael 17:35, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

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Concrete information has been given on this but it is being repeately deleted from the references section, along with the very pertinent information that it provides, like the 90 nm process for instance. You would think a war is going on here with the way this article is being edited. Aleksael 17:27, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Vertices per second

Where are these measurements coming from? StealthHit06 06:57, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

The number is totally useless. This depends on triangle layout, post-T&L-transform cache optimization and vertex shader. It says absolutely nothing at all. 85.18.201.168 08:57, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

The number is NOT totally useless. And you didn't answer his question, which is, where did the figures come from. Here is where the number is coming from. First please look here, nvidia states nothing more on their own company website than that the RSX has 300 million transistors. For the rest of it you have to look at the presentation that took place on May 16, 2006--information of which they no longer have on their site and link to Gamespot for, here. Here you find it stated that the "RSX is more powerful than two GeForce 6800 Ultra video cards," presumably when used in SLI mode. Now if you look up the specs on the 6800 Ultra in SLI you will find a pixel fill rate of 12.8 gigapixels, a texel fill rate of 12.8 gigatexels, and a geometry rate of 1.2 billion vertices per second. Here is Nvidia's current 6800 Ultra information page, for SLI mode I'd have to look elsewhere but this jives with a single card and other factors they give there which differ are due to the last 6800 being upgraded over time, the specs still match for what they were when the RSX was created and the press events happened. There are several other verifiable statements from Nvidia that RSX was to be more powerful than two 6800 Ultra cards in SLI mode, you would have to ask them why they aren't giving this information on their own page now but this does not make it any less legitimate information, and the way they presented it to us with this sort of comparison is not out of line. Aleksael 18:25, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

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It had been stated at one time, that the vertex set-up engine of RSX, was limited to 250 million vertices per second. (one every two clock cycles at a 500mhz clock frequency) That's the "approximately" the maximum number the gpu could ever actually draw. (this may be listed as the limitation of other Nvidia gpus "closely related" to RSX, and if so, it could probably be verified through the documentation of those gpus, considering official RSX specs are harder to come by.(Sony NDA)

Still, not sure if citing documentation of a G7x, would be enough of a reference. (at least in official capacity)

I do recall a site "leaking" this as part of list of things that were supposedly "broken" about PS3. (most of it misinterpreted, but did come from actual documents)

Of course, "set-up" occurs after occlusion and backface culling, etc., So more geometry could still be"processed". You could say it can "calculate" more, just not ever display them. But really, the average number of vertex shader instructions would be greater than just matrix * vector.-(basic position transformation takes 4 clock cycles for 1 vertex shader alu to complete, hence the 1.1 billion figure) And culling and the like should eliminate a large percentage of them every frame.

So there's really no point in having hardware capable of setting up the maximum number of vertices of that type, in anything but a benchmark test,

-Set-up rate, is the figure given in the white papers related to Xbox360's Xenos, as "500 million".-(250 million when tessellation unit is used, i.e. the vertices would have to be processed in two passes but with fully adaptive level of detail adjustments)

Which is a more reasonable figure, than just listing theoretical maximums based on processing nothing but basic polygon transforms it could probably not actually do.

I guess it could be said that RSX has a theoretical maximum of something like ~40 billion programmable shader flops devoted to vertex processing. (i.e 8 vertex alus, each capable of 4 floting point madd operations and 1 mini alu capable of 1 flop madd opeeration,(for special function, or scaler, or whatever) (at least I think the mini-alu is madd capable)

(madd=multiply+add=2flops)

8*(5*2)=80*.500=40 gigaflops per second.

But finding an official document besides leaked RSX pdf docs or stuff from the leaked sdk by hackers and the like, is unlikely any time soon. So not much "official" sources to go by, for expanding this article. Swapnil 404 16:14, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Really, I've never actually heard Sony themselves officially give figures on how many vertex shaders there are in RSX, as none of their official press slides give a specific number, just a number for textures, etc. (which has always struck me as odd) Leaving some sites to ad-lib figures from elsewhere, or make educated guesses on their own, based on G70 specifications. The 136 shader ops number, seems to jive with it, but those are also old) (But I guess it's never been stated otherwise, neither official nor unofficial. Plus, I noticed the TGS links someone mentioned)

There are presumed to be 8, as there are in G70/G71. But even then, this is a customized console gpu. So, while in the pc world, a gpu with a defective vertex shader alu, could be packaged as a different scew, (like 7800gt, as opposed to gtx), thus decreasing wasted production, a console gpu wouldn't seem to have many secondary uses, and the game isn't expected to be made to scale to different specs. So leaving one for redundancy to improve yield %) (as they deided to do with Cell) probably isn't out of the question. Especially given the fact that vertex shading isn't usually the bottleneck, and the fact that there are lots of things spe's are expected to do, for reducing the load on vertex processors. (like the pre-culling on Cell, sometimes required for decent performance as it is) (lots of other things besides that though)

Anyway, most of the stuff I wrote here is a pretty pointless collection of hearsay, unless there's an official source found, but I have nothing better to do at the moment, even though I have no intention of editing anything. Swapnil 404 16:14, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

But I can point out that where it says, "Maximum shader operations: 136 shader operations per second", I assume is actually meant to be 136 "per clock". Really just a typo I'm sure, as it mentions 136 related to G70 later in the article.

(24 pixel shader "pipelines") (each with 2 shader alus in each pipeline) (each capable of a vectorx and a scaler operation) (1 being connected to a floating point texture processor that computes an fp16 normalize operation) + (8 vertex shader alus) (each capable of a vector4 and a scaler)

24*2*2=96+24=120+(8*2)=136 ops per cycle. Or something like that. Swapnil 404 16:14, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Floating point performance

Also the theoretical floating point performance of 1,8 terraflops seems insanely high to me. As far as I know, this number comes from aprox. 2 years old (by early 2007) PR material claiming that the whole game console has floating point performance of 2 terraflops. In my opininon, these numbers are totally incorrect. Note that the GeForce 8800 GTX with G80 GPU is believed to have floating point performance of 500 gigaflops, the previous generation 7900GTX part - on which RSX is based - has 250 gigaflops.

On this ground (well, it's more like basic logic), I removed the 1,8 Terraflops floating point performance line.

8.3. 2007: I see the number is coming back - unless evidence is provided, it shouldn't be brought back. Removed.

15.3. 2007: Do I have to phrase it again and again? This number just can't realisticaly be true. /Anyway: "Encyclopedic content must be attributable to a reliable source."/

Agreed, removed this figure since I couldn't verify it--it has also "changed" at some point, from 1.8 teraflops to 1 teraflop, either way I could not find any thing confirming this at all. Aleksael 05:24, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

CUBE152: That's the actual performance of the RSX ( 1.8 TFLOPS) but the ps3 has an over all performance of 2.18 TFLOPS. When i edited Wikipedia i put a link beside it. Check it out at here [8]. The reason Sony made the ps3's CPU AND GPU so powerul is because PS3 will be on the market for 5-7 years and they have to make it strong enough to beat other competitors. So the RSX is stronger than the NVIDIA 8800 Ultra. and even stronger than the NVIDIA GeForce 9 which is over 2x faster than the 8800 Ultra, and the geforce 9 is coming out later in 2007, which will have an over all performance close to 1 TFLOPS Compared to ps3's overall performance it still can't beat the ps3 with 2.18 TFLOPS overall performance. Sony didn't modify and NVIDIA GPU it only made it based on it's architecture which is only the shape of the Chip not the performance of it. Sony added their own power to their own product.--Cube152 16:28, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

600 mil second?

where did you get your info that the RSX can produce over 600 mil polygons a second? Not even the ps3 fanboys at gamespot make this claim. The 360 can produce almost twice as many polygons a second something even ps3 fanboys. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.134.225.134 (talk) 03:26, 10 February 2007 (UTC).

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That's understandable, this article has been repeatedly edited, removing information and inserting spurious or unverifiable information, and ultimately removing real references from Tokyo Game Show's 2006 press release. It would seem there are a lot of Sony fans who do not want anything to cast this page in a negative light. Aleksael 17:29, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

We gotta get this right

I think we need to remove the page all together until some further information can be gathered about the RSX. Rumors are rampent about the PS3 fueling fanboys across the globe, there is no need to add to that with our speculation.

Spellings

Vetrex? I'm all for comparison against retro consoles, but this is silly. It's spelt "Vertex". There are probably other spelling mistakes there too, but since this is likely to be overhauled, I didn't check. I would have edited this myself, but it's currently protected. Hinges 15:39, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Article Nonsense

Isn't it true that all the specs in this article are based on hearsay.. The problem is, this article presents it as fact.. For example, DirectX 9c support!!! (Since when has the PS3 used DirectX APi?)

No, the specs in this article are not based on hearsay. Hit the link to the Tokyo Game Show from September 2006. Only two months before the console's release, the specifications were done and cast in stone, few reviews have reflected this however and gone by earlier press releases that were overly optimistic instead, and so the real GPU speed is 500MHz, not 550. (i.e. those original specs were downgraded.) Additionally, the RSX is G70 based. That chip supports DirectX 9. It does not matter if Sony chooses not to develop their software with that API or not. Aleksael 04:03, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Saying it supports DirectX 9 is misleading, a better wording would be that it "could support at least the DirectX9", but even that would still be misleading, as supporting DirectX 9 is just as much an issue of drivers as it is of hardware (cf. DirectX 9 intel integrated chips). DirectX9 is an API, not a feature set (contrary to the urban myth). 83.159.9.78 19:50, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

No, saying it supports DirectX 9 is not misleading. You are very correct, DirectX 9 is an API, and that is precisely why the RSX/G70 supports it. It isn't an urban myth to mention it here when the die that the RSX was built from was designed to work with its features. Just because Sony chooses not to use the API in their development environment is irrelevant to the functionality of the chip. If it were so wrong to mention the DirectX 3D set which the chip can run it would be just as wrong to mention its OpenGL ability. The only thing that you can really question here is relevancy as the development environment from Sony works from uses OpenGL and not DirectX. This does not have the same kind of bearing on the engineering of the chip however, which is perfectly capable of both APIs.Aleksael 00:48, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

nVIDA templates

Might want to chuck this on here for continuity:

Vertex

{{editprotected}} This page currently includes a link (within the text "Maximum vertex count: 1 billion vertices per second (8 vertex x 500 MHz / 4)") to vertex, a disambiguation page. Can someone with the ability to do so please change it to vertex (geometry)? Thanks. —David Eppstein 21:22, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Done. Cheers. --MZMcBride 21:41, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! —David Eppstein 02:27, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Soundstorm

Shouldn't it be mentioned that the RSX also handles sound related tasks for the PS3?

I googled for this and found little concrete information. What was there was pretty far back and I'm not even sure how official it was. (i.e. Will RSX be the Soundstorm 2?) Would be an interesting addition if you have anything specific though? Aleksael 03:11, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Tokyo Game Show Article

Okay, could I hear from anyone interested in this article, why does this reference keep getting deleted?

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20060925/3d_tgs.htm

English translation at altavista here.

http://world.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?lp=ja_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.watch.impress.co.jp%2Fgame%2Fdocs%2F20060925%2F3d_tgs.htm

Near as I can tell it's because it is the only article that shows lower specifications for the RSX--but it is also the newest, most up to date, and last official report from Sony on the specifications for this chip. Seriously people, I know that every other article in existence says the clock rate is 550MHz. I know that every other article out there says the RAM speed is 700MHz. I know that the anandtech article you keep putting in the place of this newer one direct from the Sony presentation at the Tokyo Game Show has higher specs. But if you actually take the time to READ this article, through the Translator if you don't speak Japanese, you can clearly see that the article states the higher specs were DOWNGRADED before the release. The Tokyo Game Show was in September 2006. The PS3 debuted less than two months later. Do you really think that Sony would tell everyone the video chip was downgraded with these specs, then reverse their whole operation and pump them back up again? The old information that keeps getting pumped on this page is INCORRECT. Aleksael 13:35, 26 July 2007 (UTC)