is ps3 a render farm ?

[animator]

hi guys , i bought my ps3 just 2 weeks ago and i enjoyed playing RESISTANCE but still expecting much better games , i'd love to know if i can use my ps3 to render 3d scenes .

[Vee]

Their are loads of better games coming out, i spoke to Daniel Dawkins from PSM3. He told me they had LBP and Ratchet And Clank at the office and that they were both brilliant.

As for the 3D scenes, i dont understand what you mean.

[RunawayPrisoner]

Originally Posted by animator

hi guys , i bought my ps3 just 2 weeks ago and i enjoyed playing RESISTANCE but still expecting much better games , i'd love to know if i can use my ps3 to render 3d scenes .

Yes, you can. But you will have to write a software renderer in Linux almost from scratch, or you can write separate demos to take advantage of the SPEs in the PS3. The CPU is Power-PC based, with some restrictions... and the SPEs are literally number crunching monsters, so you can pretty much throw all of the arithmetics to those SPEs (vector calculations, mesh transformation, etc...). Well, no sense in trying to describe it. Try it out yourself.

[animator]

i know nothing about writing render engines , what about rendering with maya software renderer or mental ray

[TheSpiral]

Originally Posted by animator

i know nothing about writing render engines , what about rendering with maya software renderer or mental ray

I doubt it, but it's worth a shot. No current linux distro has access to the GPU, which means, as Runaway said, you must hand-code your own.

[RunawayPrisoner]

Originally Posted by animator

i know nothing about writing render engines , what about rendering with maya software renderer or mental ray

Those things don't work on the Linux distros of the PS3. I don't even think they have a PowerPC version to begin with. And you're better off with your own codes, anyway, since generic PowerPC codes don't run so well on the PS3. At most you'll feel like you're using a Mac with a 3GHz PowerPC processor... running on 256MB of RAM or something. In reality, using the SPE of the Cell BE to calculate mesh transformations and such will give a significant speed boost (like from 1-4fps to 135fps)... as opposed to when you use only the main core. Most applications on any Linux distro on the PS3 only use the main core... which is not any faster on its own.