RSX Reality Synthesizer

The RSX 'Reality Synthesizer is a proprietary graphics processing unit (GPU) codeveloped by Nvidia and Sony for the PlayStation 3 game console. It is a GPU based on the Nvidia 7800GTX graphics processor and, according to Nvidia, is a G70/G71 (previously known as NV47) hybrid architecture with some modifications. The RSX has separate vertex and pixel shader pipelines. The GPU makes use of 256 MB GDDR3 RAM clocked at 650 MHz with an effective transmission rate of 1.3 GHz and up to 224 MB of the 3.2 GHz XDR main memory via the CPU (480 MB max). Although it carries the majority of the graphics processing, the Cell Broadband Engine, the console's CPU, is also used complementarily for some graphics-related computational loads of the console. Specifications Unless otherwise noted, the following specifications are based on a press release by Sony at the E3 2005 conference, slides from the same conference, and slides from a Sony presentation at the 2006 Game Developer's Conference. 550 MHz Pixel shader clock / 500 MHz Vertex shader clock on 90 nm process (shrunk to 65 nm in 2008 and to 40 nm in 2010), 300+ million transistors Based on NV47 (Nvidia GeForce 7800 architecture) Little Endian 24 texture filtering units (TF) and 8 vertex texture addressing units (TA) 24 filtered samples per clock Maximum Texel fillrate: 13.2 Gigatexels per second (24 textures * 550 MHz) 32 unfiltered texture samples per clock (8 TA * 4 texture samples) 8 render output units (ROPs) / pixel rendering pipelines Peak pixel fillrate (theoretical): 4.4 Gigapixel per second Maximum Z-buffering sample rate: 8.8 Gigasamples per second (2 Z-samples * 8 ROPs * 550 MHz) Maximum dot product operations: 51 billion per second (combined with Cell CPU) 128-bit pixel precision offers High Dynamic Range rendering 256 MB GDDR3 RAM at 650 MHz 128-bit memory bus width 20.8 GB/s read and write bandwidth Cell FlexIO bus interface Rambus XDR Memory interface bus width: 56bit out of 64bit (serial) 20 GB/s read to the Cell and XDR memory 15 GB/s write to the Cell and XDR memory 576 KB texture cache (96 KB per quad of pixel pipelines) Support for PSGL (OpenGL ES 1.1 + Nvidia Cg) Support for S3 Texture Compression