Can you jerry rig ps3s to get amazing value as a Linux gaming machine

[Dkaloger]

Can you jerry rig ps3s to get amazing value as a Linux gaming machine 

[Zodiark1593]

A Raspberry Pi 4 would be far stronger on the CPU side. The primary cpu on the PS3 (the PPE of the Cell chip) is a dual-issue, in-order cpu core, somewhat reminisce of an old Atom, though at higher clocks, with a longer pipeline (reducing IPC) and use of SMT. You probably won't get very far with that alone, and good luck finding someone that can code applications to use the SPEs on Cell if you get the idea to use those.

 

By comparison, the Cortex A72s on the Pi 4 are 3 issue, out-of-order cores, and you get four of them. This doesn't account for the massive increase in RAM with the Pi as well, and power consumption.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

Just use a Raspberry Pi.

[AndreiArgeanu]

3 hours ago, Dkaloger said:

Can you jerry rig ps3s to get amazing value as a Linux gaming machine 

I don't think you looked at the specs of the PS3.

Here's a quick rundown

256mb of XDR ram

256mb of GDDR3 ram

Single Core 3.2-GHz Cell Broadband Engine

SX “Reality Synthesizer” @ 500MHz, 400 GFLOPS floating point performance

 

So the answer is no, even if you could make them into a linux gaming machine, it would probably make the PS3 less valuable and it would run very slowly.

I know you may be wondering how did the actual games which actually looked good ran on it? Well it's all down to optimization, that's how it works on consoles, you can have mediocre hardware by todays standards in a console but with optimization you would still be able to run new titles. Why don't they do that on PC? Because PC's have all kinds of specs like from a 1st gen i5 to ryzen 9 and all kinds of gpus while a console have a set CPU and GPU so it is much easier to optimize the game.

[wasab]

Nice idea but no

[Guest]

10 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

A Raspberry Pi 4 would be far stronger on the CPU side. The primary cpu on the PS3 (the PPE of the Cell chip) is a dual-issue, in-order cpu core, somewhat reminisce of an old Atom, though at higher clocks, with a longer pipeline (reducing IPC) and use of SMT. You probably won't get very far with that alone, and good luck finding someone that can code applications to use the SPEs on Cell if you get the idea to use those.

 

By comparison, the Cortex A72s on the Pi 4 are 3 issue, out-of-order cores, and you get four of them. This doesn't account for the massive increase in RAM with the Pi as well, and power consumption.

you're right, but the Atoms had HT just want to say. 

[Zodiark1593]

21 minutes ago, floofer said:

you're right, but the Atoms had HT just want to say. 

Not all of them did, though I couldn't figure another way to mention SMT without rewriting some stuff. The Jaguar cores in the newer consoles are a lot more flexible.

 

8 hours ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

I don't think you looked at the specs of the PS3.

Here's a quick rundown

256mb of XDR ram

256mb of GDDR3 ram

Single Core 3.2-GHz Cell Broadband Engine

SX “Reality Synthesizer” @ 500MHz, 400 GFLOPS floating point performance

 

Pretty sure the Adreno 530 in my phone is rated at above 500 Gflops.

 

The Cell processor had the SIMD units that provided a lot of more general purpose compute. Post effects and other niceties like Ambient Occlusion were handled by the SPEs. The RSX GPU still relied on the old split Pixel/Vertex shader design which is fairly inflexible, so I'd imagine the SPEs were a godsend once developers figured them out. Nowadays, compute shaders do pretty much the same things that the SPEs were used for.

[Dkaloger]

What about the ps4 or an Xbox

 

[Lukyp]

The last time I used RR Linux distro on my PS3 it was utterly broken because the repos are 404 in 2019, also is complicated to manage and install, you need to mess with the NOR/NAND memory to set up a partition, (oh obviously mod your console first) and without even video drivers with video acceleration avaiable, in 2019 people are still working on it and is not yet available for public use, and I don't even know if there are currently any supported distributions at all since Sony decided to remove OtherOS
 

Basically it's like using a normal, old computer with a decent CPU for 2007 standards, 256MB of RAM with VESA video mode. Pretty much useless I would say? 

For instance, using a modded PS4 with Linux is insanely better it's similar to a modern x86 computer and the already-existing Linux AMD drivers worked after some small tweaks

 

[RoseTech]

I have a fat PS3 that used to have the Install Other OS feature before Sony patched it out, ugh

 

Never got to try it out. It would definitely not be an amazing gaming machine but would be fairly decent for small projects.

[GoldenLag]

5 hours ago, Dkaloger said:

What about the ps4 or an Xbox

 

if you take the xbox one you are looking at sub fx 8350 performance with quite a bit lower clockspeed and sub hd 7850 performance. 

 

which puts you pretty low in performance, but almost good enough value, tho you can get a better Xeon + hd 7850 gaming machine. 

 

and a xeon + hd 7850 machine would go for about 130$ if i were to guess. if you buy all of the components and no prebuilds allowed. 

[Sauron]

On 10/12/2019 at 7:13 PM, WikiForce said:

i don't think 256mb ram on a ps3 is even enough for a linux distro

It is, I've tweaked distros to run in under 20 and that's without custom built kernels and corelibs, but you definitely wouldn't get decent performance in a game (assuming you can even find one that was built for Linux on that hardware).

 

Better to just get a raspi 4 as others said.