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hduser on 18 June 2009
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dbot said:
hduser said:
dbot said:
hduser said:
Well I figured this would happen. When I first saw the specs of the PS3, I thought 256MB main memory would be a limiting factor someday even though the overhead for the OS than a typical windows OS. Sony should have ponied up to 512MB.

Really?  Explain Uncharted, MGS4, Killzone 2, GT5P, etc

You get where I'm going with this?

They're all great games.  I played all of the except for GT5P.  But sometimes I get the feeling that the levels are small because they won't fit into main memory easily or have to be streamed in from the hard drive or bluray thus you get a stutter when you progress to the next mini sublevel.  I don't know this for a fact, it could be just a limitation of the engine or design consideration.  But the levels feels compartmentalized.

The stutter you get in Killzone 2 is there because there are no loading screens.  I don't recall any stutter or loading screens at all in Uncharted.  The multiplatform games have the same level size and loading screens, some of these on the PS3 require installs but that is a limitation of the Blu-ray speed, not memory size.  As it has been pointed out numerous times, the PS3 has 512 of memory as well.  The only difference is 256 of it is extremely fast and dedicated to the GPU.  The 360 uses a unified memory approach similar to the approach used in cheaper pcs/laptops.

I wouldn't denegrate the 360's approach to memory since it is a consumer device that's meant to be low in cost.  You can still maximize the memory thats not being used by the GPU.  Yes, since it's unified, you do have to share bus cycles between CPU and GPU.

In multiplatform games, the games should be simlar in look and size but you wonder if any sacrifices had to be made for each implementation of it which is the main point of this thread that the PS3 doesn't look like the 360 version.  Why? it seems like main memory is the culprit.

I'm not saying you can't make great games with this limitaion as you cite Uncharted, MGS4 or KZ2.  But you can ask yourself how much better the games could have been if the designers had more memory.  Last I heard the Sony OS footprint is 90MB out of the 256MB, that's a large chunk of overhead.  If you had a unified memory approach, you can allocate more memory of instead of being fixed 256MB.  I hope someone can quote the 360 OS footprint for comparison sakes.