3D Accelerated Graphics Are Coming to PS3 Linux

Nice news indeed RexVF5, +Rep and I also moved it to the Site News as well so that more people will see it. ;)2

I am keeping my fingers crossed on this one.

Thanx a lot - nice picture you created for it. I was waiting for this news for almost a year since I have heard of Gallium and planned Cell driver. Hopefully this will provide some basis for great stuff - for example unavailability of 3D accelerated graphics meant that there can be usable emulator requiring such functionality (for example PS2).

If Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) will include this ... my goood... I'll upgrade my PS3 in a minute... I'm waiting for this kind of news for over 3 years now!

P.S.: http://www.mail-archive.com/karmic-changes@lists.ubuntu.com/msg04226.html It was already accepted... now to see it really take off ... :)

Not 100% sure what this is actually for,

But this will allow us to watch videos without any problems?? (Under linux) or even possibly make software rendered emulators like N64, Snes, etc. etc.

This will provide 3D accelerated graphics - for example OpenGL. That in turn can be used to program various emulators that require 3D capabilities. I wouldn't call it "software rendered" - SPUs are powerful vector units very similar to GPUs but much more flexible. Recently GPU vendors are going in a direction of more flexibility (i.e. CUDA) allowing to use GPU for other tasks than just graphics.

It also can be used to accelerate video decoding.

Not very likely. Maybe some ps1 level games but the cell is not going to do CPU work AND GPU work to the point where it would you could play a ps2 emulator with any satisfactory smoothness. Unless i am not comprehending the awesomeness of the cell in the ps3 well :p

Why isnt there 3d access to the rsx in linux? whats the security benefit?

Now this is wonderful news.

Maybe there will be some progress in a mediacenter app running from linux, like xbmc.

I wonder how soon the different linux distributions will get this in their repositories. I haven't played around with Linux on the PS3 recently, but with wireless controllers working and now 3D acceleration it may be time to get it setup again with emulators to test it out.

What I would like to know is how many SPUs will this utilize, and since there are multiple SPUs in the PS3 couldn't some be used for 3d acceleration and others for CPU power? Or maybe I don't have a good understanding of how they are utilized when booted in linux?

Might I suggest that everyone rush over to the boxee/xbmc forums and encourage the devs to get to work on a PS3 port ASAP? :p

This was the only reason some of the XBMC dev's claimed there would never be a PS3 port.

Protection against pirated games. what else :)

Linux is able to read burned games, whereas GameOS is not.
Only problem is that linux cannot play any 3d games because its not fast enough (hypervisor).

ARGGGG

I'm not sure if blocking off the RSX was for piracy. Even if you could access the graphics card in linux, it doesn't help you run unsigned code under GameOS.

Some people have said it was to prevent any competing games from poping up on the linux side. But even that is kind of ridiculous, how many people are going to play tux racer instead of wipeout :)

There is also some work on a cell driver for DirectFB at code.google.com/p/ouros. I would be interested in a comparison of these two approaches to accelerated linux video on the PS3. Both would appear to link to SDL and GTK, popular graphics libraries.

I think that is actually the case - you are underestimating the power of SPUs. Read about how much of a performance people got from it in various areas - decoding/encoding video, cipher attacks, ...

I already made the comparison: today's GPUs are basically fixed-function vector engines (vendors are trying to escape this by things like CUDA). SPUs are precisely the same - highly performing programmable(!) vector processors. So I (and it seems smart guys at Mesa/Gallium) believe the SPUs can easily take the function of GPU without sweating.

I think it will take some time (at least to Mesa 7.5.1 as stated in release notes) to be generally usable ad well integrated. But it's coming.

AFAIU this is configurable - so you can use part of them for graphics and part of the for something else.

I do not see anything like that there (only reference to FB) and to tell the truth what you wrote doesn't make much sense to me unless we're talking about 2D/3D acceleration. FrameBuffer means you have a part of memory that is directly mapped to video output (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framebuffer) If you read the Cell driver release notes (http://mesa3d.org/cell.html) you will find that it is using FB. Cell/SPUs do the tricky math stuff required to compute the image but they put the calculated data into FB.

"Accelerated graphics" in the title of this post means that specialized HW (SPUs) is used to compute (3D) graphics operations as compared to computation of general CPU (PPU in this case) which is called software rendering. Performance of the first approach should bring generally acceptable results while software rendering is (usually) too slow for any real-time usage.

I tried to update to 9.10 Alpha 2 but the upgrade process failed... I think I'll just wait a little bit more to install the new 9.10 Karmic on my PS3!

In the meantime if anyone has some results please post them here so we know what to expect from this. Is it usable? Does it work out of the box?

Before I rebooted (and My PS3 died with a lot of beeps and no error messages) I tried some GLScreensavers... They seemed a little bit faster but no real improvement... maybe I got my hopes real high... or even the driver wasn't really active... Who knows... i'll tinker with it if I manage to update my machine successfully!

This sounds really exciting but I still have to wonder about performance. PS3 devs get the GPU *and* SPUs to work with, where we'd have only SPUs and a software layer through Mesa to work with. Can we honestly expect to see 60fps performance out of this (to something of the quality of say Bionic Commando Rearmed? I don't expect homebrewn games even close to as good as inFamous).

Would be like running ps2 games through an emulator installed in winxp on a ps2 wouldn't it? Will be severely crippled and no way would there be ps3 games run on it. Even if linux could use the rsx most we would get are ps2 emulators, i think, in that situation.

Definitley keeping my the fingers crossed on this one, it will be so cool.

I would guess that ethernet bandwidth isn't enough for this, but it would be interesting if one could create a ps3 cluster and use this.

It seems Sony will be putting an end to linux support in 3.0, but like previous SKU's they may still support it on the fat console. I know this has made a lot of linux users angry, and dev's. Hopefully they will still support it like they still support SACD on older models, and PS2 emulation etc on EU 60gb and accelerated graphics will only improve. Guess its just the Slim that will be hacked lol.

hi forum,

take a look at this link : http://www.flashforum.de/forum/video/221479-playstation-3-cell-flash-streaming-server-flv-encoding-cluster.html

he can play 2 fullhd-videos include ac3 sound at the same time under linux;
using a flashplayer optimized for gpu. this was 2006.

greets
mike

Hi. I took a look at the link that you posted and I found out that it is in a language most of the forum can't read.
Babelfish comes up with a error when attempting to translate it.

Would you mind posting an english version?

hi,

sorry, i havent a english version, its a german forum :rolleyes:

and my english is too bad to translate it :(~

perhaps this will help you :
http://www.onlinelib.de/index.php?mact=Search%2Ccntnt01%2Cdosearch%2C0&cntnt01returnid=-1&cntnt01searchinput=ps3&submit=Go


greets
mike

Linux still had access to RSX in 2006, and wasn't blocked then, so it was capable of hd video playback etc.

This is a great news, but i'd like to point out that accelerated graphics is not only about number crunching. Even more important is memory bandwidth, and without DMA access to video memory there would be no change of high performance video decoding or graphics rendering

That is some great news. I hope it works good. :tup:

I am looking forward to 3D Accelerated Graphics being available on the various Linux distributions for the PS3 too.