Who is supplying the hardware?
IBM, Toshiba and Sony are supplying the Cell processors, while NVIDIA is handling the graphics processor. Tell me about the graphics chip… NVIDIA’s chip is codenamed RSX. The chip runs at 550MHz and is capable of rendering video natively at 1080p, or 1920×1080 progressively (non-interlaced). It’s touted to hit 1.8 TFLOPS of floating point performance and can perform 100 billion shader operations per second, or 136 shader operations per cycle. The RSX uses 128-bit precision for enhanced color definition, making the system capable of High Dynamic Range rendering. Programming-wise, it’s based on OpenGL and NVIDIA’s CG language. The GeForce 7900 series GPUs for the PC provides a reasonable real-world approximation of what sort of effects the RSX and PlayStation 3 can handle.
