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PS2 was before the GPGPU age and its GPU is fixed functionality, so it's not suitable for general calculations. Your problem would have to align perfectly with
by Agentlien 4y ago
PS2 was before the GPGPU age and its GPU is fixed functionality, so it's not suitable for general calculations. Your problem would have to align perfectly with the computations done for regular rendering.
If we instead look at something more modern like an early GeForce with programmable shaders what was typically done was to set up your regular rendering of a full screen quad and write a pixel shader which performs your desired computations instead of actual lighting calculations.
APIs such as CUDA and OpenCL were introduced to allow people who weren't making games to make GPU calculations without pretending that they were colour calculations.
- psychphysic 4y agoThanks for the detailed answer!
- mewse 4y agoThe PS2 was actually kind of ahead of its time in this regard, with programmable vector units right there in the middle of the rendering pipeline; you could actually write the equivalent of vertex shaders and even simple geometry shaders *long* before those were available on standard home GPUs. (although you had to code them in assembly) No fragment shaders, though, it's true.
- Agentlien 4y agoI knew there were programmable vector units and fixed functionality for fragments. Seeing other responses here I feel I underestimated how flexible it was, not having worked with it myself.