The RSX ‘Reality Synthesizer’ is a proprietary graphics processing unit (GPU) codeveloped by Nvidia and Sony for the PlayStation 3 game console.
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.
Specifications:
500 MHz on 90 nm process (shrunk to 65 nm in 2008and to 40 nm in 2010)
Based on NV47 Chip (Nvidia GeForce 7800 Architecture)
300+ million transistors
Multi-way programmable parallel floating-point shader pipelines
Independent pixel/vertex shader architecture
24 parallel pixel-shader ALU pipes clocked @ 550 MHz
5 ALU operations per pipeline, per cycle (2 vector4 , 2 scalar/dual/co-issue and fog ALU, 1 Texture ALU)
16 floating-point operations per pipeline, per cycle
8 parallel vertex pipelines @500 MHz
2 ALU operations per pipeline, per cycle (1 vector4 and 1 scalar, dual issue)
10 FLOPS per pipeline, per cycle
Floating Point Operations: 251.2 Gigaflops [(24*16* 550)+(8*10*500)]
74 billion shader operations per second [(24 Pixel Shader Pipelines*5 ALUs*550 MHz) + (8 Vertex Shader Pipelines*2 ALUs*500 MHz)]
24 texture filtering units (TF) and 8 vertex texture addressing units (TA)
24 filtered samples per clock
Maximum texel fillrate: 12.0 GigaTexels per second (24 textures * 500 MHz)
32 unfiltered texture samples per clock, ( 8 TA x 4 texture samples )
8 Render Output units / pixel rendering pipelines
Peak pixel fillrate (theoretical): 4.0 Gigapixel per second
Maximum Z sample rate: 8.0 GigaSamples per second (2 Z-samples * 8 ROPs * 500 MHz)
Maximum Dot product operations: 28.6 billion per second
128-bit pixel precision offers rendering of scenes with High dynamic range rendering (HDR)
256 MB GDDR3 RAM at 650 MHz
Access to additional 256 MB XDR RAM
128-bit memory bus width
22.4 GB/s read and write bandwidth
Cell FlexIO bus interface
20 GB/s read to the Cell and XDR memory
15 GB/s write to the Cell and XDR memory
Support for PSGL (OpenGL ES 1.1 + Nvidia Cg)
Support for S3TC texture compression