Graphics
RSX Reality Synthesizer
The PlayStation 3's graphics processor, and the part of the console Sony described least: a clock and a floating-point figure in the 2005 announcement, and neither in the 2006 launch specification.
- Manufacturer
- NVIDIA / Sony Computer Entertainment
- Architecture
- Programmable parallel shader pipelines
- Introduced
- 2005
- Frequency
- 550 MHz
- Rate
- 1.84 TFLOP/s
- Record status
- approved
Figures
provisional A figure marked provisional is recorded but not accepted: its evidence is unsettled. It may rely on one source, an unconfirmed announcement, or a digit read from a damaged scan. The reason appears under the figure. The catalog shows the figure but never uses it in a multiplier. How records are judged.
| Metric | Value | Evidence | Basis | Method | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peak FP32 rate gpu provisional | 1.8 TFLOP/s | Confirmed | Vendor-rated | Theoretical peak Stated by the vendor, before the hardware shipped "Floating point performance" of the RSX, per the announcement of May 2005. The weakest figure on this record. No precision, no shader-unit count and no operations-per-cycle are stated, so it cannot be reconciled with the 550 MHz quoted beside it, and no later Sony document repeats it. It is recorded because the source states it and withheld from every automatic multiplier because nothing about it can be checked. Reviewed again against the instruction manual printed for the console that shipped (CECHA01, 2006): its specification table names the Cell and the RSX without a frequency for either and both memories without a transfer rate, so no post-launch Sony document corroborates this figure and it stays provisional. It also cannot be read as the same claim as the PlayStation 4's 1.84 TFLOP/s: the PlayStation 4's reconstructs exactly from the compute units its own source names, counting the fused multiply-add each shader lane issues per cycle, and this one reconstructs from nothing. They share a comparability group because both are a vendor's theoretical peak for a graphics processor, which is as far as the group can see: it cannot tell that the two are counting different operations. A search for a checkable figure to set against this one found nothing usable: the rates that circulate for the RSX disagree with each other by more than a factor of two and every one of them traces back to a wiki or a forum, so there is no A source and no pair of agreeing B sources to record a conflict against. |
Fitted to
Editorial notes
Sony gives no shader-unit count and no operations-per-cycle figure, so its 1.8 TFLOPS claim cannot be checked against the clock it is quoted beside. Both figures are held provisional for that reason.