TOKYO — Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. has accelerated its plans to roll out a high-end graphics computer based on its Playstation game console technology. The company announced plans this week to introduce a system called GScube next year that will use 64 processor boards with Playstation 2 technology.
The resulting parallel-processing computer will act as a graphics visualization machine with a 3-D processing capability of 4.16 gigapolygons per second and a resolution of 60 frames/second (progressive scan) at 1,080 x 1,980 pixels, the company said.
The 64-board GScube will put Sony ahead of the graphics system road map it announced a year ago, when it promised to develop a system with 10 times the processing clout of Playstation 2 in 2000, followed by a 100-times version in 2002 and a 1,000x version before the end of the decade.
Sony demonstrated a 16-processor prototype at the Siggraph 2000 show in New Orleans last July, built in collaboration with more than 20 companies. "With the feedback from the demonstration at Siggraph, we realized that the present [16-processor] prototype did not have enough performance for 3-D graphics creation and realistic rendering in real-time," said Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment. "We are planning to introduce a system with about 64 parallel-processing units next year."
Sony and one of its collaborators, a film production company called Square, jointly demonstrated the GScube in Tokyo on Tuesday (Sept. 12) by synthesizing a footage in real-time from the computer-graphics movie version of Final Fantasy. Square is now producing this film, based on a popular computer game, for release next summer in the United States.
"At present it takes five hours to render one frame," said Kazuyuki Hashimoto, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Square USA. "If GScube can process the graphics data in real-time, that means it will take only 1/30 second per frame."
The demo with the current prototype, however, reduced rendering for textures such as hair to suit the abilities of the system. Where in the movie a character's hair was rendered as 40,000 lines, for example, the demo displayed only 4,000.
"The current prototype needs data tuning," said Hashimoto. "But as the performance of the 64-processor parallel GScube will be four times [that of today's system], it can do more." He said Square was actively investigating the possibility of using GScube in its production work.
