GDC 2007 - Marzec 5-6 GDC sessions talks on the CELL and RSX March 5-6:GDC sessions talks on the CELL and RSX never before disclosed information from Sony's first party development teams:
Session DescriptionThe SPUs are the power-house of the Cell processor in the PlayStation 3 allowing it to achieve unprecedented levels of performance, but the innovative multi-core architecture brings with it new design challenges to understand and address before this power can be leveraged. This session examines how Sony Worldwide Studios have attempted to harness this power in their games. The talk considers high, mid and low level questions covering topics such as selection of tasks to offload, sharing of SPUs, synchronisation, system architecture, memory layout, DMA efficiency and instruction optimisation - trying as much as possible to focus on concrete use cases rather than abstract theory.
Idea TakeawayThis session's goal is to explain in detail how SCE 1st party games use SPUs, and offer ideas for improving your own games by making better use of the SPUs.
Intended AudienceThe session is intended for programmers wanting to learn more about how to utilize SPUs in their games. Attendees are expected to be familiar with the PS3 architecture.
Session DescriptionDuring the runup to launch, Sony Worldwide Studios learned a great deal about creating high performance graphics applications on the Playstation 3. Much attention has already been devoted to shader programming, so this talk focuses instead on the other half of the equation; topics discussed will include the origin and usage of the libgcm API, algorithms for optimal use of the RSX vertex cache, and use of the CELL in tandem with the RSX including necessary synchronization techniques. This material has never been presented before at any developers conference.
Idea TakeawayThe audience members will learn a number of techniques used in SCE 1st party games, with a focus on using the CELL in tandem with the RSX.
Intended AudienceThis session is intended for graphics programmers who already know how to make surfaces bumpy and shiny, and are interested in learning other useful techniques for the PlayStation 3.
Today, we posted two new talks to the site, Real-World SPU Usage and RSX Best Practices, that expose publicly for the first time the tools and techniques that Sony's first party developers used to create their launch titles.
These intermediate level talks go beyond the simple architecture descriptions previously disclosed to describe the real-world lessons of building for the PlayStation 3. Furthermore, these sessions aim to simplify the complexity cited by some developers in creating games for the platform. Anyone considering or who is already knee-deep in programming for the next gen platform must attend these sessions.
Both talks were created by Mark Cerny, the Game Developers Choice Awards Lifetime Achievement Award recipient for 2005. He will lead the RSX session, while Chris Carty from SCEE ATG will lead the SPU session. Mark played a key role in developing many of these tools, and we felt it was necessary to bring some of this learning to the greater GDC community. After all, the whole reason for GDC is to support the development of better games, and what better way to showcase a platform than to facilitate the development of rich and varied content by the entire game development community.
Real-World SPU Usage -
https://www.cmpevents.com/GD07/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=4548RSX Best Practices -
https://www.cmpevents.com/GD07/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=4549
