Sony's handheld system will support NURBS

[The Magic Pen]

1 biilllliiooonnn dolleeerrrssss ...muwahhh ha ha ha ha ha :rolleyes:

[AJ]

While it is unlikely that NURBS will become the primary source of geometry for the unit, it will allow cutscenes that previously needed to be pre-rendered to be dealt with on the fly by the unit.


If that's true - I will put one up my arse.

Sideways.

:surprised

[MosaFacku]

NURBS has been a part of OpenGL for a while.

Using characters made up of many patches would be quite a pain in the arse though.

[fxgogo]

From my experience with Animation Master, patches are so much more simple to bone and animate. it will remain to see if the processor can handle the data crunching needed.

[Mattrne]

PS2 can support nurbs, but no-one uses it, as they still have to be converted to triangles when rendered. Nurbs would be good for automatic level of detail, but the fact is, that you could have 18 characters with pre-defined LOD's on screen at once, or about 10 nurbs characters with the processor deciding how to tesselate them at each frame.

I would be very surprised if this new handheld has more power than the ps2, so I doubt that the nurbs functionality will be used.

[fxgogo]

Yeah to me, nurbs or patches only make sense if you are rendering nurbs or patches. It is a waste of time to convert to polys and render. It might make sense from an art creation point of view however.

[Mattrne]

Thats the thing though - the majority or software renderers, such as the maya renderer and the max scanline (afaik) all have to convert nurbs or patches to polys in order to render...

[victor throe]

handy for LODing tho


so the discs are going to be like minidisk then

its going to kick arse


why has it taken so long for nintendo to do backlit screens?!

[Thalaxis]

Originally posted by Mattrne
I would be very surprised if this new handheld has more power than the ps2, so I doubt that the nurbs functionality will be used.

The PS2 is based on a 300 MHz MIPS core. Alchemy (yes, the one that AMD bought last year), has a dual-core MIPS processor design that consumes under a watt at speeds of around 400 MHz.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this thing had more raw processing power than PS2 under the hood, all thing considered... though I think that it is more likely to be built using a Cell derivative than a MIPS derivative, given the amount of resources that Sony and Toshiba are dedicating to the Cell project.

[Mattrne]

However, its slated for release in 2004 and Cell will NOT be ready by then.

Check this link from the official release... (http://www.gc-inside.com/media/psp/06.gif)

[Thalaxis]

Originally posted by Mattrne
However, its slated for release in 2004 and Cell will NOT be ready by then.
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Well, that takes care of that! Thanks for the link.

MIPS it is :)

[Gentle Fury]

funny how they had to go and mention NURBS :)

sounds to me like a press release and nothing more.......for some reason as soon as they hear NURBS they think its something grand!!!!

for starters if they are talking NURBS are they reffering to actual non-uniform rational b-splines.........or are they referring to poly-proxys............it's like everyone wanting to say......oooo we got sub-d now! but its just another poly-proxy!

most snail render engines can not render actual NURBS geometry as it is an infinate tesselation scheme.......it is great though because you can adjust how it will tesselate come render time and work with it quickly in OpenGL..........it is NOT a final output geometry algarithm........its just easier to work with when making organic geometry.

as for power..........well, there are 500mhz palm units now, so why wouldnt this thing beat the PS2? It's slated for 2004......so i wouldnt doubt seeing at the very least 1ghz if not 2 by then!

the future is bright......:) ive been looking forward to their lil tiny 2 gb discs for a while, its about time they are finally planning on doing something with them :)

[fxgogo]

Be careful of throwing 'mhz' speeds around, they don't nessesarily show the systems true potential. The Amiga and PS2 are good examples of that, with their distributed processor systems.

As for those discs, I wonder if they are going to build some form of mp3 or portable music system around those discs? Especially cause it has a usb2 port.

[Thalaxis]

Originally posted by fxgogo
Be careful of throwing 'mhz' speeds around, they don't nessesarily show the systems true potential. The Amiga and PS2 are good examples of that, with their distributed processor systems.


What's faster, an Athlon at 1 GHz, or the same Athlon at 2?

Ergo, a MIPS2 at 700 MHz is most likely going to be faster than the same MIPS2 at 300 MHz.

The brains of the PS2 is that 300 MHz MIPS processor (I think it's a MIPS2, but if not the analogy still holds). Somehow, I think it's pretty safe to say that if they take pretty much the same processor and ratchet up the clock speed, it will get a bit faster.

Of course, the graphics hardware is an open question, it's quite possible that it will be lacking there, which might make up the difference. We simply do not know yet.

[Mattrne]

When you are developing for PS2 its not as simple as saying 'if only we had a faster processor'. You have all sorts of things like the vector unit, the gpu, the ipu etc to work with, which is why you can get good pc spec results on a machine which on paper is hundreds if not thousands of mhz slower.

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