3 ms·

one thing i do remember clearly. the r3k cpu was quite slow and there was no fpu! it did have a gpu though, perhaps an early case calling for gpgpu and perhap

• kevingadd 5y ago
  The GPU didn't really have the kind of muscle you'd need to do gpgpu, since a lot of the rendering workload was handled by dedicated instructions on the CPU instead of special-purpose or general-purpose GPU hardware like we have today. The PS2 inched closer but the PS3 was probably the first time Sony hardware could do anything resembling GPGPU. I don't think you were missing anything obvious :-) AFAIK some other console vendors' audio DSPs were used for compute by specific games, though - I recall reading about a console game for one of Sony's competitors using the console's DSP to decompress game data during loads instead of synthesize audio.
  • eru 5y ago
    Might have been the Sega Saturn. That one had lots of chips?
    • inDigiNeous 5y ago
      At least the Nintendo 64 had a GPU that you could control with microcode, maybe that could be called a GPGPU ?
      • monocasa 5y ago
        Eh, that "GPU microcode engine" was a fairly general MIPS with a vector unit like the CPU of the PS1. The GPU itself was just a rasterizer too like the PS1's (albeit more complex, understanding the Z dimensions, antialiasing, and subpixel coordinates). I wouldn't really call it GPGPU.
  • Lammy 5y ago
    > I recall reading about a console game for one of Sony's competitors using the console's DSP to decompress game data during loads instead of synthesize audio. Maybe Burning Rangers for SEGA Saturn? That game uses alpha transparency for rendering fire instead of the usual (for the time) SEGA-style mosaic transparency, but it uses the sound processor to do it and has very sparse audio as a result: http://segabits.com/blog/2011/06/05/retro-review-burning-rangers/ http://segabits.com/blog/2011/06/05/retro-review-burning-ran...
• marcan_42 5y ago
  The PS1 didn't really have a GPU in the modern sense. It had a rasterizer. That's it. A thing that draws triangles or quads, with primitive texturing. It doesn't have any vertex processing. It doesn't even understand the Z dimension. Nothing even remotely resembling shaders, of course. At its core, all it does is draw 2D triangles and quads at integer pixel coordinates. Instead, the CPU had specific instructions (a coprocessor, in MIPS parlance) to accelerate fixed-point geometry processing. That's where the math happens. So it did have an "FPU" - a fixed-point unit, not a floating-point unit :-)