Clemens Kirchgatterer wrote:
Matthias Schniedermeyer ms@citd.de wrote:
I'd say the only downside of the Linux support kills it as a VDR platform. Graphic is NOT accelerated.
That's the only downside i'm aware of, and i can understand Sony a little in this point. Otherwise all game developers could just skip paying licensing royalties and just develop for Linux@PS3.
but why should this matter for multimedia (video) applications? ok, we (most likely) don't have hardware accelerated xvmc, but 6 vector cores to do it in software.
Video is inherently bandwith intensive. At least (for PAL): 720x576x4x25 = about 40MB/s (*) 1920x1080x4x25 = about 200MB/s
And that's taking aside ANY of the other processing. Decoding, IDCT, YUV->RGB transformation and so on. Also taking aside the total bandwith killer, when you have to scale the material.
AFAICT the vector cores COULD(*2) help you with the first parts, but the rest has to be done by the 3(,?)Ghz RISC PPC-CPU and shoveling that much data back and forth may be a bit much, without any acceleration. But on the other side the PS3 systems is supposed to have an impressing memory-bandwith, which could rescue the day.
So unless someone tries there is no way to be sure, but for the time beeing i'm sceptical.
IOW: - SDTV maybe - HDTV no way without acceleration
*: x4 isn't a typo. Most systems use 32 bit per color. 24 bit "packed" format isn't used anymore AFAIK.
*2: If you have software that can use the SPUs, but unless someone writes a Decoder-Library with SPU support you can only use the Main-CPU.
Bis denn