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New Features for PlayStation 2
[3.4]

Pipeline Delivery System (PDS)

Pipeline Manager

The PDS is a uniform and customizable way of handling the pipelines, giving the experienced developer much more control over how all the generic & custom pipelines get deployed. With 90 different pipes now available on PS2, the PDS is essential for advanced developers to exploit all avenues of optimization.

Significantly faster G3x Pipelines

We now provide these new rendering pipelines as faster alternatives to the generic G3-pipelines. They get their increased speed by operating under bespoke conditions, so you will need to choose the configuration that closely meets your application needs in order to fully benefit. The pipes also deploy adaptive data format checking, ensuring that cycle times are optimal under all scenarios.

The G3x-pipelines focus on one specific lighting situation at a time, applied to tri-strips or tri-lists under perspective projection without true clipping. The following two tables showing the full range of skinned & static pipes and their respective performances under pure rendering conditions.

              AMBIENT &              AMBIENT & 4           AMBIENT & 
              DIRECTIONAL            DIRECTIONAL           POINT
              LIGHT                  LIGHTS                LIGHT 

  GENERIC     G3x_ADLGenericPER      G3x_A4DGenericPER     G3x_APLGenericPER
              20M vert/s             14M vert/s            16M vert/s

  DUAL PASS   G3x_ADLDupPER          G3x_A4DDupPER         G3x_APLDupPER
              14.5M vert/s           11.5M vert/s          12.5M vert/s
              (29M output)           (23M output)          (25M output)

  ENV-MAP     G3x_ADLGemPER          G3x_A4DGemPER         G3x_APLGemPER
              13M vert/s             10M vert/s            11M vert/s 
              (26M output)           (20M output)          (22M output)

Table 1: Actual G3x Static Pipelines performances in vertex processing capacity

              AMBIENT &              AMBIENT & 4            AMBIENT & 
              DIRECTIONAL            DIRECTIONAL            POINT
              LIGHT                  LIGHTS                 LIGHT 

  GENERIC     G3x_ADLSkinGenericPER  G3x_A4DSkinGenericPER  G3x_APLSkinGenericPER
              8.9M vert/s            7.1M vert/s            7.3M vert/s

  DUAL PASS   G3x_ADLSkinDupPER      G3x_A4DSkinDupPER      G3x_APLSkinDupPER
              7.4M vert/s            6.1M vert/s (x2)       6.3M vert/s (x2)

  ENV-MAP     G3x_ADLSkinGemPER      G3x_A4DSkinGemPER      G3x_APLSkinGemPER
              6.4M vert/s            5.5M vert/s (x2)       5.8M vert/s (x2)

Table 2: Actual G3x skinning Pipelines performances on customer artwork.

Cloning Pipes

As part of the PDS, we now provide two cloning pipes, one for use with pre-lit, static objects, the other for use with ambient and directional lighting. These specialized pipes facilitate the fast cloning of simple objects such as particles, but only under these two lighting conditions.

Pipe Rationalization

Following the introduction of the PDS, the linker now strips out unused code, so that the final application size is reduced and runtime memory is smaller.

Higher Performance DMA manager

Following several improvements to the internal workings of the DMA manager, it is now noticeably faster and more efficient in its operations.

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