Final-Fan said:
Cypher1980 said:
Final-Fan said:
I think you are overstating the constraints. Instead of 512 unified it's 256 and 256, it's not like NONE of the 360's 512 is going to the CPU. I'd guess (and I admit it's a guess) it only feels like a "straitjacket" to those who carelessly wrote for the 360 without even considering that they would have to port it to the PS3 later. Cry moar, I'm sure there are some problems if people do the opposite as well.
Anyway, back when this debate was raging originally, I'd gotten the impression that the Cell processor (with its kind-of-independent SPUs) was the biggest problem going from 360 to PS3. Not so, or not anymore?
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I believe that most of the learning curve regarding the Cell has been understood and adopted into Modern Game Engines. Its still a bit of a pain and its hard to extract every last bit of power but the Cell is powerful enough to match strides with the more conventional architectures.
The big problem now is indeed the memory constraints on the PS3. 256 MB is simply way too small for graphics nowadays. Imagine being a multiplat developer applying textures to your game on the PC dev kit (They nearly all are for multiplat) and constantly having a PS3 Texture limit reached warning crop up.
I honestly think the PS3 is a great machine held back by some terrible design choices. I expect the PS4 to have all these problems rectified.
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OK, but how much of the 360's memory (over 256) can really be counted on? (Honest question -- I'm curious and don't know.) It's not like the CPU doesn't take any. Definitely there is advantage to the 360 there, but it's not like the 360's memory is impressive compared to PC memory either.
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as much as the developer wants to allocate rather than being constrained to up to 256 for CPU and 256 for GPU* like the PS3, on the 360 if the developer wants to allocate 400MB to graphics then they can do that as long as they don't need the memory for something else and if the game needs more for CPU tasks then they can do that as well and the changes can can be made on the fly as well so if one level needs extra textures but has less physics then the system can do that. Which is one of the reasons why the 360 is easier to develop on.
* On the PS3 it is actually possible for the Cell to access VRAM and the GPU to access main RAM so devs can use the CELL for rendering tasks but it incurs a performance penalty from what I have read.
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