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Rainbird on 17 October 2011
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Booh! said:
Rainbird said:

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.

Not shared RAM (like on the ps3) is the best and more costly solution, especially if you have multiple busses (like on the ps3). I don't want to start a discussion about the strong points of such an architecture, since the problem is not there.

Megatexture is a very bad idea for a ps3 and that's a Carmack's fault. If you want to get the best performance out of your software, you have to adapt your software to the architecture, not the other way around. Instead firstly he conceived the megatexture thing (which is a good idea, theoretically) and then tried to implement it on different architectures, even where it could be (and it is) not the best solution.

As a side note: tiled textures =/= always the same texture; you can take a megatexture, split it in a myriad of files (GT5 style) and then seamlessly load those files (you can do it if your ram is fast enough and by coincidence the ps3's got fast ram).

I agree, you have to adapt the software to the hardware. And RAGE renders a highly detailed open world at 60 FPS, so I think they've done a very nice job of adapting. Certainly nothing else on consoles can quite compare to what id has achieved here. The PS3 version falls short only because there isn't quite enough RAM, and reading from the blu-ray/harddrive in the PS3 isn't quite fast enough. 

On a game that has been five years in the making, I think id made the right decision in building a system that is usable across all three HD platforms. What you're saying is that id should have spent possibly a lot more time and money making a slightly better version for the PS3, which would be pretty silly. Hence why Carmack replied as he did.

And I'm aware that tiled textures don't mean you have to use duplicate textures. Mega textures do however make a no-duplicate-textures policy technologically feasable in an open world game on consoles. Compare and contrast to what GT5 does, with a 40 minute install (an atrocity in user experience imo) and fairly long loading times before each race (not permitted in an open world game), and I think it's fair to say that RAGE uses a sensible, if not 100% optimal, solution.