Red Falcon
[H]ard DCOTM December 2023
- Joined
- May 7, 2007
- Messages
- 12,455
The PS3 hypervisor (OtherOS) does not allow direct hardware acceleration to the RSX GPU, and instead simply uses it as a framebuffer (the CPU [specifically the PPE] does all the graphical work).I thought the lack of direct memory access was an intentional "feature" added by Sony for the PS3 Linux in order to keep people from playing pirated/homebrew games. If you were in the native console OS, then the software running through that DID have DMA.
Stretching back a lot of years to remember that.
However, VRAM is still accessible as a RAMdisk and, in YDL 6.x and above, is auto-mounted by default as a fast SWAP partition, thus allowing 256MB of system RAM and 256MB of fast SWAP (plus whatever SWAP partition was assigned from the disk itself).
The RSX GPU in the PS3 is from the NVIDIA Series 7, which is right before the Series 8 G80 which featured the first programmable unified-shader architecture, so GPGPU applications, GPU compute, and OpenCL/CUDA will not operate with it.
There has been work in recent years to get hardware acceleration working on the PS3's GPU when in Linux, though, which is good news.