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I think that Blender would need a hand-made port for PS3 to take advantage of the special features of Cell.
On common applications it is likely to perform very poorly compared to a regular x86 machine. To put to good use this kind of machine you need specialised software, for example it shows a lot of promise for ray-tracing:
http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~benthin/cellrt06.pdf
For real-time stuff it's also a no-go at the moment AFAIK as there is no documented way to access the GPU from Linux.
The thing is that, I find the PS3 interesting only for rendering. I guess that for 3D modelling it won't be so nice.
The setup would be a standard x86 workstation with an OpenGL optimized card for 3D modelling and a PS3 just for rendering, so no need for the GPU.
By the way, I just remembered that Indigo and probably Kerkythea wouldn't work since it is x86, but Yafray may be cool, and if there's a way to make it use more than one core on multiple core processors, then it mustn't be difficult to setup it in a PS3 for use as a render workstation taking advantage of the Cell processor which already demonstrated its power in aplications like Folding@home.
Edited 2007-07-09 12:04
I think the tesla solutions of nvidia aren't that bad either. http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html




Member since:
2006-01-04
I wonder how well would fare a PS3, with YDL running Blender and Yafray/Kerkythea/Indigo for 3D rendering... Anyone knows how does it compare to a current x86 workstation? Do you think the low amount of RAM might be a problem?
Edited 2007-07-09 10:54