It's small, sleek and sexy. It plays games, music and video. It's a Sony -- a Sony PSP to be exact...
The second day of the Australian Game Developers Conference held a nice surprise for those who attended the last presentation for the day on Platforms.
By Platforms, of course, they mean gaming platforms. Like Xbox, and GameCube.
And PlayStation Portable.
Even with the subtle title of 'Overview of PSP Programming' there was, without question, a twinkle of expectation; a scent of excitement.
Well, if you happen to like thick, unassailable math equations and in-depth discussion on quanternions and matrices, then excitement all the way. It wasn't until the end of the presentation however that the golden goose -- in this case Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's senior engineer Sebastien Rubens -- laid the egg.
Hot damn, what a surprise that egg was.
Two eggs actually, in the form of a couple of working PlayStation Portable prototypes, networked via 802.11b. The game: a two-week old build of 'Wipeout: Pure', a futuristic racing game in a similar vein as, well, Wipeout for PlayStation. It's the first time it has been demoed in public anywhere, and little old Australia was lucky enough to see it first.
Developed by the Liverpool studio of SCEE, Wipeout: Pure looks great on the PSP's 480 x 272-pixel screen. The game is silky smooth – perhaps a few slowdowns noticeable, but that's expected of such an early prototype. Pure should be one of the launch titles for the unit, and with built-in support for wireless gaming, it could prove to be a popular one.
The PSP, which sports 32MB of RAM, 2MB of VRAM, a 'Graphics Engine' (GE) or graphics processor with an 8KB, four-way associative texture cache and support for flexible frequencies, was by far the highlight of AGDC: Day 2.
Flexible frequencies, you ask? It means exactly what it says -- programmers can adjust the speed of the bus, the GE, the unit's VFPU (Vector Floating Point Unit) and ALLEGREX, the unit's central processor. The reason for this capability is so developers can reduce battery drain and, if need be, disable entire hardware components when they're not needed.
ALLEGREX, the processor, can ramp all the way up to 333MHz and is a MIPS R4000-based chip with two 16KB, two-way associative caches. On the graphics side, the GE can do 2x supersampling-based antialiasing, as well as 'ToonShading' – a technique much like cel-shading in modern PC titles. There's also support for compressed textures using DXT1 through to DXT5.
Although the GE has a fixed graphics pipeline, its ability to do specular lighting and pixel blending with no performance hit, mipmapping with only a 5% performance hit, while flaunting a fillrate of 0.664 gigapixels a second, makes up for any lack of flexibility in the pipeline.
Is that enough coolness for today? It certainly is. Keep your eye on the Atomic website for more updates.Logan BookerSenior WriterAtomic Magazine
Issue: 133 | February, 2012