modrobert writes: "The Mesa 7.5 development release includes a new architecture for OS-independent and API-independent 3D drivers called Gallium3D which has a driver for the Cell processor. To use the driver you'll need a PS3 running Linux. Quote from the release notes: 'Rasterization is parallelized across the SPUs in a tiled-based manner. Batches of transformed triangles are sent to the SPUs (actually, pulled by from main memory by the SPUs). Each SPU loops over a set of 32x32-pixel screen tiles, rendering the triangles into each tile. Because of the limited SPU memory, framebuffer tiles are paged in/out of SPU local store as needed. Similarly, textures are tiled and brought into local store as needed.

As of October 2008, the driver runs quite a few OpenGL demos. Features that work include:

* Point/line/triangle rendering, glDrawPixels
* 2D, NPOT and cube texture maps with nearest/linear/mipmap filtering
* Dynamic SPU code generation for fragment shaders, but not complete
* Dynamic SPU code generation for fragment ops (blend, Z-test, etc), but not complete
* Dynamic PPU/PPC code generation for vertex shaders, but not complete'"

http://mesa3d.org/relnotes-7.5.html
http://mesa3d.org/cell.html

What a lot of people FORGOT, or do not know, was: Originally, the CELL was supposed to double as the GPU, as it can handle the load.  Later, they added the GPU to the architecture, and was another reason the PS3 was delayed a year.  What was or IS needed to have the Cell double as GPU?  Hardware? Software?  No one knows for sure, but, unlock that, and Emulation is around the corner Do we have full access to the CPU?  If so, then using two SPEs for the GPU would be fine, as just about any previous console could be emulated with four of the SPEs.