New PSM - New PSP info

Yo! Sony has decided to release an image of what the PSP's "hardware tessellation" will be capable of doing.

Amazingly, the image on the right is the PSP image, and it uses the exact same amount of polygons as the more blocky, PSOne looking counterpart.

I'm no computer tech wiz, so I could be astounded at nothing. However, if the PSP has this kind of graphic capability, I'm all about it, baby!

The rest of the magazine is pretty much par for the course. Funny pros, serious scores (even if I don't always agree with them), and goofy looking editors.

so its bassicaly a portable ps 1?

Hmmm. I'm having a bit of trouble with the attachment. Give me a sec.

You read PSM?

LOL

Yes. Yes I do.

Did they mention the battery life of the PSP? From every single search of the PSP specs, I could only get the same 3-6 hours thing. I hope that it isn't true.

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Originally Posted by Tyler_Durden

You read PSM?

LOL

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its not a horrible mag and i bet his subscription was free

3-6 hours would suck cock.

And PSM isn't bad at all. Their DVDs are usually pretty good. Hey, at least it's not Gaypro.

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Originally Posted by Shin Johnpv

its not a horrible mag and i bet his subscription was free

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I had a free PSM subscription and the magazine is pretty awful. However, I think it ran out. I haven't received this issue yet, if it hasn't.

Cap, is this the pic in the mag?

Nothing about battery life. Just a pic of a supposed 3D model using the PSP hardware . . . a pic that I've scanned, but can't seem to get it to attatch. :\

That's it! :)

Nice. But if this things runs like a Zodiac then I hope there's nothing but 2D games on the way.

Wow that's some great processing if it's real. But i'd rather have crappy looking polygons and more juice than vice versa.

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Originally Posted by Shin Johnpv

so its bassicaly a portable ps 1?

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More like a portable Dreamcast in real world performance actually. The downsides will be battery life (3-6 hours estimated) and pricing (48000 yen for Japan and between £200-300 for Europe are the unofficial numbers being quoted, expect $299 in America). Not that I care, so long as Namco/Capcom/Konami/Sega/Koei/SCEI deliver the goods I'll buy one. :)

It's not the same amount of polys. What tesselation does is multiply the amount of polys in a model to smooth out its edges. It could be that the devs make a low poly model in the game on the left and the PSP tesselates that model on the fly. So it limits devs to some degree (since they'll have to make models that tesselate well), but it'll allow the PSP to display more polys than it would be able to otherwise.

Or so I'm guessing from the limited info.

If the battery life sucks that much, I'm not interested. The reason I love my GBASP is because it plays fun games and has an amazingly small footprint when I want to drop it in my pocket and go, and the rechargable battery holds a damn long charge, backlight included.

Even if PSP has awesome software, that's not a ton of life on the low estimate. I mean, it's not when I was 10, where I'd feel fine with lugging around a huge plastic case for my boat-sized Game Gear and the AC adapter, car adapter, and battery pack I needed to keep it running whenever we were going to visit family for the weekend.

I like to think it'll last closer to the 6 hour mark, which is more than enough for one charge, I'd think. But if it's not, I imagine there could be trouble.

I'm very interested in this machine, but I don't think it's going to flat-out kill Game Boy like some people are hoping.

That looks very groovy, but if it is saddled with a 3-6 hour battery life, then I'll snatch one up when they hit $150 or less.

Sony prelaunch hype=
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~calloway/pict.../horseshit.jpg

wait for the real hardware until its time to pass any judgement.

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Originally Posted by Grave

I like to think it'll last closer to the 6 hour mark, which is more than enough for one charge, I'd think. But if it's not, I imagine there could be trouble.

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I'm thinking Sony will probably release a larger capacity battery seperately (as Nintendo is for GBA). Also, we'll probably see different PSP models & revisions over time, cutting costs and lengthening batteries. Initially though, yeah it sucks.

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Originally Posted by Grave

I'm very interested in this machine, but I don't think it's going to flat-out kill Game Boy like some people are hoping.

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Agreed. Things are going to be harder for Sony than people expect. A lot hinges on everything going perfectly...

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Originally Posted by Ammadeau

It's not the same amount of polys. What tesselation does is multiply the amount of polys in a model to smooth out its edges. It could be that the devs make a low poly model in the game on the left and the PSP tesselates that model on the fly. So it limits devs to some degree (since they'll have to make models that tesselate well), but it'll allow the PSP to display more polys than it would be able to otherwise.

Or so I'm guessing from the limited info.

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How can you scale polys out to make it tesselate well? Do they just render it out and see what the hell's going to happen? Must be a time consuming process. Although I'm sure once the algorithms are down it wouldn't be too hard to cope.

Like texturing... it looks like a pain in the ass and is, but once you get the hang of it you've.... well... got the hang of it.

Tesselation is pretty cool, it was first used in computer graphics by Pixar in Geri's game. Basically, you give the engine a polygon net and an iteration number, plus a few rules on edges(smooth or crease) and it basically divides the polys and shows them to you. It is fairly tough to get working in real time, and what Sony have done is that the iteration number changes with the camera distance. If the camera is far from the object, the oblect's iteration number is 0 or small. As the camera gets closer, more iterations are required. This cuts down on the storage of polys, because you no longer need a hi-res model, you could just use real time tesselation. Bottom line, I'm excited. :)

Ammadeu: It doesn't limit the artists who develop models at all. All they need to do is create the model using nurbs instead of polygons and then the poly net is automatically generated from the nurbs surface.

So as long as your models aren't going to be huge anyway, it saves you processor power in the end?

This is interesting. I'm going to be going to school to learn all about animation in the near future...

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Originally Posted by Andrew

So as long as your models aren't going to be huge anyway, it saves you processor power in the end?

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Yes, as long as you shift the burden of tesselation to a graphics core(processor), you're not bothering the CPU at all. In fact, in graphics programming, you can send Vertex data directly to the GPU using OpenGL or Direct3D.

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Originally Posted by seen

Ammadeu: It doesn't limit the artists who develop models at all. All they need to do is create the model using nurbs instead of polygons and then the poly net is automatically generated from the nurbs surface.

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It makes it kind of impossible to do fine details since everything is going to get smoothed out. I know from my own experience I would have to tweak a model after tesselating it to get the results I wanted. I could never get it just right from just altering the base model. But it's the kind of detail that wouldn't matter for a screen the size of a PSP so it's a moot point. :p

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Originally Posted by Andrew

So as long as your models aren't going to be huge anyway, it saves you processor power in the end?

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The whole benefit of hardware based tesselation is to take the proccessing burden away from the main cpu. As far as the CPU is concerned, there's no difference for it dealing with the tesslated and non-tesselated models.

Actually the hardware tesselation was added so the psx ports didn't look much worse than the games made from scratch for it. Though what is more important is how it is used. I mean if it makes any model no matter where they are to that, it would be a waste of power.

As for how it works, it does it by what devs tell it to do. Most devs who start from scratch won't bother with it however devs would be nuts not to use it in thir psx ports.

so sony is bassicaly doing real time subd surfaces

and it doesnt limit the modeler they just need to plan out the model better putting edges and vertex's in key spots on the low res model so it smooths nicely

ive played with SubDs in maya a bit havent gotten serious with them

Great, now all the games will look like cheesy 1997 PSX/Saturn FMVs!

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Originally Posted by Damian79

Actually the hardware tesselation was added so the psx ports didn't look much worse than the games made from scratch for it. Though what is more important is how it is used. I mean if it makes any model no matter where they are to that, it would be a waste of power.

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Not quite that easy. You can't just plug a PSX game into this and expect a shiny improved result. You have to tell the PSP how to tesselate each face of every model, because of course you don't want it to do it to edges that are meant to be sharp and since it smoothes out surfaces they also tend to lose their definition. Yeah, I'd still expect PSX ports for this on the level that GBA gets SNES ones, but there's still going to be work involved for the developers to get it working.

What's more likely is PSX games will be ported as is and make little to no use of this feature. Think about Capcom's RE ports. They could have added more polys to the figures by tesselating the models beforehand that the more powerful systems could handle, but they didn't bother.

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Originally Posted by Ammadeau

Not quite that easy. You can't just plug a PSX game into this and expect a shiny improved result. You have to tell the PSP how to tesselate each face of every model, because of course you don't want it to do it to edges that are meant to be sharp and since it smoothes out surfaces they also tend to lose their definition. Yeah, I'd still expect PSX ports for this on the level that GBA gets SNES ones, but there's still going to be work involved for the developers to get it working.

What's more likely is PSX games will be ported as is and make little to no use of this feature. Think about Capcom's RE ports. They could have added more polys to the figures by tesselating the models beforehand that the more powerful systems could handle, but they didn't bother.

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Good point, while did mention additional work on the devs part, the need for better graphics than the psx probably isn't there on such a small screen.

looks like the truform (or whatever buzzword) stuff on atis hardware. im guessing the psp devs can probably do similar stuff, like define specific normals and other stuff to get desired looks. if anyone remembers the halflife screenshots with truform before and after they made truform specific stuff for it, you know what im talking about.

and another thing i was gonna mention but damien already did, how improved do the graphics need to be on that small of a screen. just straight ports with the resolution increase and texture smoothing will probably look decent.

This is all well and good, but the real question is - How good is FMV on this thing?

So how many old PSOne games are ready for tessellation? I'm assuming some work has to be done before the older classics can be brought to light once more.

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Originally Posted by Andrew

So how many old PSOne games are ready for tessellation? I'm assuming some work has to be done before the older classics can be brought to light once more.

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It depends on the conversion process they'll use. If they use the angle threshold method then pretty much all of them are ready. I'll explain, the rule is, if an angle between two polygons along an edge is larger than the specified threshold(some value), then those polys are tesselated along that edge, and we have an effect of a smooth surface.

This is a braindead technique which can be used on all polygons passed to the rendering pipeline. This technique will have a certain amount of errors involved in the output and if you(developer) can live with those errors then porting a game is not a matter of remodeling everything. Just recompile the game so it works with the PSP and use the old model data. The shitty PSOne textures are another matter all together.

Whatever, just tessellate the shit out of FF7 or something.

That'd be cool.

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Originally Posted by kabuki

This is all well and good, but the real question is - How good is FMV on this thing?

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No, the real question is - does it play OGG?

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Originally Posted by Jeremy

That looks very groovy, but if it is saddled with a 3-6 hour battery life, then I'll snatch one up when they hit $150 or less.

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Dude... you never leave your house. What do you care about battery life?

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Originally Posted by MechDeus

Nice. But if this things runs like a Zodiac then I hope there's nothing but 2D games on the way.

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I would hope that it's a bit more powerful than the Zodiac in the 3D department. The Z's problem is the graphics processor is simply a 2D chip, not a 3D chip -- although, the software 3D engine Tapwave licensed is pretty cool.

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Originally Posted by Lhadatt

The Z's problem is the graphics processor is simply a 2D chip, not a 3D chip -- although, the software 3D engine Tapwave licensed is pretty cool.

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I know, wish is why I wish they would stop making 3D games with it. Doom II looks to be the best thing in its entire upcoming lineup (and it better run at a higher framerate then Spy Hunter), that thing seriously needs some Castlevania love. Not to mention it would look sweet as heel on that pimpy screen.

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Originally Posted by seen

It depends on the conversion process they'll use. If they use the angle threshold method then pretty much all of them are ready. I'll explain, the rule is, if an angle between two polygons along an edge is larger than the specified threshold(some value), then those polys are tesselated along that edge, and we have an effect of a smooth surface.

This is a braindead technique which can be used on all polygons passed to the rendering pipeline. This technique will have a certain amount of errors involved in the output and if you(developer) can live with those errors then porting a game is not a matter of remodeling everything. Just recompile the game so it works with the PSP and use the old model data. The shitty PSOne textures are another matter all together.

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I still think this would require a significant amount of tweaking, which the games will probably not get. All the characters are going to have heads like baloons. The textures shouldn't be an issue on a screen as small as PSP. You should only notice the shittiness when the camera gets stuck in a wall or something.

i dont know
look at the Ngage with its minute screen and tomb raider still looks like ass with those craptacular textures

Dude, it's Tomb Raider. Even if you didn't spend the entire game staring at Lara Croft's pixelated posterior, it would still look like ass.

this is true but seriously even that small the textures look bad

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Originally Posted by OmniGear

Whatever, just tessellate the shit out of FF7 or something.

That'd be cool.

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Won't happen. Square Enix specifically stated they would focus on original releases for PSP, much like GBA. I could see a complete FFVII remake eventually though, similar to Sword of Mana.

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Originally Posted by kabuki

This is all well and good, but the real question is - How good is FMV on this thing?

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Hopefully it can't do it at all...

Go back to the 1980's.