gpu

[holger]

just 2 notes:

This article claims to know that "the RSX GPU is 'NV47 based.' Beyond3D notes that NV47 was a code-name for G70, the GPU better known as the GeForce 7800."
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/doc ... dps309.htm
also http://www.techreport.com/onearticle.x/9683 and http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/9132/Play ... orce-7800/

These guys started writing a disassembler and some tools for NV gpu investigation:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
http://nouveau.cvs.sourceforge.net/nouveau/renouveau/

maybe worth a closer look.

[holger]

addendum: ASCII logs for different GPU revisions, some of them including GLSL/shader disassembly, can be found on http://nouveau.sourceforge.net/tests/. At first glance this tool seems to be quite useful...

[jimparis]

We don't get any access to the GPU from Linux, so unless/until someone figures out how to run native code without the hypervisor, there's not much we can do with this info.

[ooPo]

Its only a matter of time. There's nothing wrong with doing up some research in the meantime.

[Shine]

Programming the RSX could be interesting, but if you
want to write programs, which many users can use, it is a dead-end, because Sony will fix any bugs with firmware updates and then it's like on the PSP.

So better concentrate on the SPEs. It is even possible to do nearly real time ray tracing with it: http://www.rapidmind.net/samples.php and OpenGL works already with some frames per second for complex game scenes, without any optimization: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpvIHFBoMNk . I've compiled Mesa for 64 bit. Currently I'm trying OSMesa for direct framebuffer access. Holger has some nice ideas, how to improve the speed of Mesa.