PS3 Has “Tight memory, Poor IO Performance” – John Carmack

[Rainbird]

Booh! said:

Rainbird said:

He was asked why the PS3 version didn't perform better than it does and he answered the question. It's got nothing to do with whining. Not to mention that the move to focus on consoles is userbase-related rather than technology related.

No. He was requested to let us know if he could improve the game performance on ps3 or not. He was clearly pissed off and gave this harsh answer, that sounds a lot like an excuse. Q. : "Be professional and speak clearly: can you do something better?" A.: "The hardware is shit, it's not my fault".

It's an excuse. He could have simply answered that he had not enough experience on that kind of hardware, that he had not enough time to optimize the performances, that he miscalculated the tasks for those hardware capabilities. But saying that is just an excuse, 8Gb is not the largest install, and RAM is not that tight (it's even on a double bus, a feature that common pcs have not)...

Pissed off? Harsh answer? The only thing he said that might sound like that is "poor".

"we don’t know of anything we can do to improve ps3 performance much, especially on wasteland. Tight memory, poor IO performance."

And even then, what he said is true. Sony only allows a 5 GB install normally, so RAGE is definitely an anomaly, and RAM is tight. There is only 512 MB in total, but the RAM is split, so you have to spend ressources transfering data between the two parts, not to mention the OS takes up space.

Compared to the 360, the 360 doesn't need to transfer data between two RAM parts, it has the 10 MB additional RAM for the currect frame, and the OS generally takes up less space than the XMB.