S.T.A.G.E. said: Legend11 said: S.T.A.G.E. said: Rainbird said: S.T.A.G.E. said: Rainbird said: SpartanFX said: red fraction looks worse than gears 2 to me ,,,so how do they think they maxed it out? off topic: I wish some devs would focus a little bit more on cell,,,if we can get uncharted ,killzone 2 ,lbp,MGS4 with cell and only 256 mb of ram and graphic card ,,,imagine what it can do if the graphic card and ram were above 1 gig.Hopefully we'll see in PS4 He did say they were having trouble with the memory. Not the GPU. They maxed it out because everything in RFG is destructible, closer to real world physics than any console game before it, maybe even surpassing Crysis. Exactly. Something that the PS3 definitely beats the 360 at is memory. The 360 will not reach its graphical peak against the PS3 anytime soon.   Uhm, no? And the article doesn't say anything about the graphics being the problem here, nor does it mention the PS3. Why did you even reply? I was agreeing with you that it was a memory issue. The 360's memory was maxed out with the game. The PS3's memory hasn't been broken yet, or the dev would've mentioned it.   The 360 has more available memory for it than the PS3.  If the 360 is having problems like this you can bet the PS3 version (if they haven't cancelled it or something) will as well.   Their memory capacity is equal. However the 360 shares all 512 MB between the CPU and the GPU, while the PS3's runs 256 MB's seperately. The question is doesn't the Blu Rays supposed "superior" disc capacity give it a boost? Couldn't the game could be compressed to one disc for the PS3 easier than the 360?

The PS3's OS footprint is larger than the 360's.  On top of that additional RAM is reserved by the PS3 for some network functions.  So no the memory available to game developers for both systems is not equal.

 

Anyone who thinks the 360 is maxed out in terms of graphics/performance is kidding themselves.

Legend11 said: S.T.A.G.E. said: Legend11 said: S.T.A.G.E. said: Rainbird said: S.T.A.G.E. said: Rainbird said: SpartanFX said: red fraction looks worse than gears 2 to me ,,,so how do they think they maxed it out? off topic: I wish some devs would focus a little bit more on cell,,,if we can get uncharted ,killzone 2 ,lbp,MGS4 with cell and only 256 mb of ram and graphic card ,,,imagine what it can do if the graphic card and ram were above 1 gig.Hopefully we'll see in PS4 He did say they were having trouble with the memory. Not the GPU. They maxed it out because everything in RFG is destructible, closer to real world physics than any console game before it, maybe even surpassing Crysis. Exactly. Something that the PS3 definitely beats the 360 at is memory. The 360 will not reach its graphical peak against the PS3 anytime soon.   Uhm, no? And the article doesn't say anything about the graphics being the problem here, nor does it mention the PS3. Why did you even reply? I was agreeing with you that it was a memory issue. The 360's memory was maxed out with the game. The PS3's memory hasn't been broken yet, or the dev would've mentioned it.   The 360 has more available memory for it than the PS3.  If the 360 is having problems like this you can bet the PS3 version (if they haven't cancelled it or something) will as well.   Their memory capacity is equal. However the 360 shares all 512 MB between the CPU and the GPU, while the PS3's runs 256 MB's seperately. The question is doesn't the Blu Rays supposed "superior" disc capacity give it a boost? Couldn't the game could be compressed to one disc for the PS3 easier than the 360?   The PS3's OS footprint is larger than the 360's.  On top of that additional RAM is reserved by the PS3 for some network functions.  So no the memory available to game developers for both systems is not equal.

I do recall the xmb's ram usage being decreased a while ago , it's likely the OS has been made even more efficient since then.

 

Systems are only as good as their best developers, and there are always new ways of doing things that come to the fore. I dont doubt developers today could get a lot more out of the PS1 now than the best developers at the time were doing.

I remember once a company wrote ray tracing algorithms for graphic rendering that cut down the number of calculations by something like a factor of 25 without compromising the graphics at all.

In other words, systems probably never reach the full theoretical potential, but in the lifecycle of the system it is certainly very easy to 'max out' the system, probably the first thing the devs do when they get their hands on it, otherwise they wouldnt have a starting point.

S.T.A.G.E. said: shams said: megaman2 said: Gameplayer: So you’re saying that RFG is pushing the hardware as far as it can go? Squeezing every drop of juice out of the Xbox 360? Rick White: Yeah, we’ve got it to the point where we can’t even put an extra vehicle into a world, because it’ll blow the memory. Every little change we make we have to be hyper-critical about it because it could just bring the whole system down. We evaluate every little change in the game, and then we run our tools on it to make sure it isn’t going to break the game and then we move forward, so it really is about pushing the engine as far as we can, and pushing the hardware as far as we can, and then looking at what is the next set of hardware that’s going to come out. Where can we take it then? You know we’re already thinking about if we had XYZ X number of years from now, what would we do with our engine? That sounds a little wanky to me, to be honest. Saying that they used 100% of the 512MB of RAM that the 360 has available is just excessive - they should cut back on some of their textures, and add extra content to the game if its important. Unless they have balanced their textures/RAM usage to 50:50, its going to make a PS3 port much, much harder as well - as the memory is more segmented. ... They should be using more compression (i.e. for game/mesh/sound data) if they have RAM issues - I just don't believe that everything is compressed and perfectly optimised (for RAM use) - and they have used the entire 512MB. Or setup a local RAM texture cache, and stream textures into the cache as needed. That could save them 100MB... If they used the entire 512 MB of RAM wouldn't that mean the PS3 version will turn out graphically superior since the 360 shares the 512 MB of RAM between the GPU and the CPU? If the game was done evenly it would've turned out the same, but the PS3 can compress files better right?

The PS3 has the same amount of RAM as the 360 (apart from 'system' use, where the 360 reserves 32MB and the PS3 potentially a lot more on both VRAM & system RAM). The difference is that the PS3 'forces' developers to use half for VRAM, and half for system RAM - potentially in exchange for better performance.

So, if Red Faction has roughly split half RAM into meshes/textures & half into game data/application use - it should be "pretty much" fine on the PS3.

But if it needs say 400MB for textures/meshes (i.e. meshes generated on the fly), then its going to suffer on the PS3. Might need a system that caches meshes in system RAM, and streams them into a smaller VRAM block as they are needed.

There are always solutions - its just about performance, development time/difficulty & optimisation.

...

These days, compression is relatively CPU low - depending on the algo's used. GPUs may support compressed vertex lists, compressed (lossy) textures and more.

 

From a development POV, one of their issues with the PS3 may be the "uncertainty" about available RAM. On the 360 you know MS never use more than 32MB - on the PS3 Sony gives a more vague limit (not sure about the numbers). You might not be able to guarantee more than 400MB of RAM available (for example) and just use the rest as a cache when its there.

Sound like Red Faction need to work on their engine a little more, I hardly consider the developers who made Saints Row 2 being the pinnacle of technical brilliance.

If Gears of War 2 could be made on an Engine that hasn't been completely optimised for the 360, then I'm pretty confident that there's more grunt to get out of it. Didn't Microsoft only recently update their middleware to get more out of the 3 cores?

If the developer is really good it wouldn't make a difference. 256mb VRAM is enough to texture a 720p image roughly a 100 times at optimal resolution. Of course devs will not be able to always have the correct textures needed at a specific view in a specific view angle, so they often put everything they need for a whole level in the RAM. In this case more RAM and VRAM is sensible. But for really good developers the RAM/VRAM is more like a cache and the bandwidth the consoles have is amazing compared with for example PCs. And in this case its more than enough for everything you can throw against it. We will see much better games in the second half of this generation.

S.T.A.G.E. said: gavind5uk said: S.T.A.G.E. said: ROBOTECHHEAVEN said: their is no way they maxed out the 360 with their game, it looks worse than gears1 i think. if epic thinks the 360 has more room left in it, then thq doesnt know the 360 well enough.    I agree with this. It doesn't make sense to me at all.   Its fairly simple really, looking at the video, they have turned what are normally fairly primitive objects, a wall, a glass pane etc into complex objects. Which means in memory, rather being refered to as a simple graphic and collision model, they create an instance of a object that encapsulates all of the complex traits. Then they have calculations running against attributes of these objects every time the code loops. So, even if your not interacting with the object, and even if its fairly mundane to look at, a complex interpretation of the object will stay in memory and the calculations will continue in the background just incase you do start interacting with it. The question is though, what seperates the 360's memory from the PS3's.

 

Half of the ps3s memory is XDR memory, and much faster.

shams said: S.T.A.G.E. said: shams said: The PS3 has the same amount of RAM as the 360 (apart from 'system' use, where the 360 reserves 32MB and the PS3 potentially a lot more on both VRAM & system RAM). The difference is that the PS3 'forces' developers to use half for VRAM, and half for system RAM - potentially in exchange for better performance. So, if Red Faction has roughly split half RAM into meshes/textures & half into game data/application use - it should be "pretty much" fine on the PS3. But if it needs say 400MB for textures/meshes (i.e. meshes generated on the fly), then its going to suffer on the PS3. Might need a system that caches meshes in system RAM, and streams them into a smaller VRAM block as they are needed. There are always solutions - its just about performance, development time/difficulty & optimisation. ... These days, compression is relatively CPU low - depending on the algo's used. GPUs may support compressed vertex lists, compressed (lossy) textures and more.   From a development POV, one of their issues with the PS3 may be the "uncertainty" about available RAM. On the 360 you know MS never use more than 32MB - on the PS3 Sony gives a more vague limit (not sure about the numbers). You might not be able to guarantee more than 400MB of RAM available (for example) and just use the rest as a cache when its there.

 

Ive been having a read up as the subject piqued my interest, i read that as of v2.01 of the PS3 firmware, the XMB now holds onto the same amount as the 360, i.e. 32MB.

The most noticable difference i have been able to find between the two systems ram is the system ram for the PS3 was redesigned specifically for working with the CELL and is XDR @ 3.2ghz - compared to 700mhz for both the PS3's VRam & 360's 512mb shared.

That i was suprised about, 3.2ghz is pretty meaty by anyones standards, so apparently it is quite flexable for use with the GPU when required, as accesssing information is much faster.

On the 360 side, it actually has a seperate 10mb embedded ram for frame buffering, on top of that the shared ram system was entirely developed by ATI, so this isnt some cobbled together pseudo-sharing nonsense, they developed the system controller and GPU alike. So as stated the 360 excels at ram -> gpu bandwidth. Though i think due to system ram being GDDR3, its performance working with the main cpu isnt as zippy as the XDR/CELL integration.

It seems to be the case that the ram in the PS3 kicks butt at working with the cpu & the ram in the 360 kicks butt when working with the gpu.

 

So my conclusion would be that if the ps3 isnt struggling from the same issues in red faction as the 360, then the likely cause would be from the game being more CPU intensive than GPU intensive, this may also explain alot to those who mentioned their confusion considering the lack of visual prowess in the video... does that make any sense? lol

Ps3 use's swap file from hard drive for more ram the 360 could if MS allowed it and just say this game requires a hard drive to play. but system memory is not a problem when you have a hard dive and a swap file.