MotorStorm dev talks SPU usage and 'cooperative rendering'

by Colin Torretta { May 11th 2007 at 3:00PM }

Scott Kirkland, the Technical Director behind MotorStorm, sat down with Beyond3D recently to talk about some of the more technical details of developing the intense off-road racer. They cover a pretty wide range of topics, from Evolution's contributions in developing the Havok 4.5 physics middleware, to culling unseen vertices in order to increase rendering performance. Here are a couple highlights:

On SPU usage:
"MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we're aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!"

On using the SPUs and RSX for cooperative rendering:
"The leap in performance provided by [the SPUs] gives us the bandwidth to significantly reduce RSX time spent processing vertices that don't contribute to the final scene. The favoured approach is to use SPUs to generate minimal scene/instance specific index and vertex buffers from compressed data."

It is a fantastic read, and well worth checking out. It gets EXTREMELY technical at a couple points, so don't feel bad if your brain catches on fire. I set off the fire alarm twice.

Tags: evolution, havoc, motorstorm, rsx, SPU

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Andir3.0 @ May 11th 2007 4:53PM

Good Stuff :)

Aex @ May 11th 2007 7:07PM

Hehe, It is isn't Andir3.0. It's a hard thing to interject during a flame battle though, Only someone with a slight understanding of graphics programming would know why the PS3 is set up to become such a powerhouse in the future.

Til then, ZOMG XENOS > RSX!

Tom @ May 11th 2007 11:00PM

bootsielon @ May 12th 2007 5:53PM

Aex,

Assuming XENOS > RSX!!11 is true (which is only true if consoles were PCs), here are some facts for you:

Cell > Xenon

Cell + RSX > Xenon + Xenos

Here's the best part though:

Blu-ray + HDD + Cell + RSX > Xenon + Xenos + DVD + Nothing

And that's even when Xenos > RSX. That's only half true, since the only thing it does better is being efficient. It's a very flexible GPU. But it doesn't compare with the new generation of DX10 GPUs. On the other hand, RSX has fixed type shader pipelines, which makes it inefficient (but each of the pipelines is faster than unified shader pipelines). But, since console games are tailored to take advantage of specific console architectures, and not of all PCs on the market, unified RAM and unified Shaders only facilitate the development process, but they don't really get you a higher theoretical performance.