CoD4 is 600P?!?!?

[MikeB]

@ Lord TheNightKnight

 

You many not think the EDRAM is enough for HD graphics, that that doesn't make it not so. Plus the blu-ray drive and HDD are for loading before the graphics are rendered. The frame buffer is for while the graphics are rendered. So they can't help the system get HD graphics. Finally, the memory on the SPEs are cache. They can't help the frame buffer. 

 I will give you an example, the c64 had 64k of memory. That's a limitation for the amount of game engine, graphics & sound data you could produce if you loaded the game in one go as was usually the case during the system's early stages (lenghty tape loads). Later games broke up the game loading for the various levels, so they allowed for 64k max per level, you can look at games like Turrican 2 or Creatures 2 to see this approach allows for far more complex and diverse graphics and sound.

Now streaming is more advanced than that, you free up unneeded memory (previous areas, enemies, sounds, and such) and load new data into memory while actually playing the level. Resistance & Motorstorm for example performed music streaming, but loaded all the graphics data for the level into memory in one go, in this regard Ratchet and Clank: TOD is more advanced as the game also streams texture data.

Maybe now you understand the relationship between, system memory and storage memory with regard to streaming possibilities. You simply don't need to keep all that data in memory at once, thus a couple of hundred megabytes of combined system RAM is sufficient if take advantage of the PS3 hardware, the system has more than enough bandwidth, processing power and data storage capacity to take advantage of.