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Adinnieken said:
ethomaz said:
Adinnieken said:
ethomaz said:
Adinnieken said:
curtisghall said:

the cross game voice chat is a issue, both consoles technically have close the same amount of ram it's just that sony made priorities to their ram, more ram goes to gaming than xmb, as with the xbox less ram for gaming then you got cross game voice chat, which means you have a choice between better looking games or cross game chat

Um...that's one way to spin it.

100MB of RAM is used for the XMB, when it's running.  Up to 32MB of RAM is used on the Xbox 360 for the dashboard when it's running.  The difference is, the Dashboard stays resident while a game is running.  On the PS3, the XMB shuts down completely.  That's why you don't have cross-game chat on the PS3, the OS shuts down when a game runs.  Would they if they could change it, but Sony can't.  If Sony were to make the XMB resident it would break every game currently available because those games assume they have 100% of the memory available to run.

Now, when you compare memory architectures the PS3 has 256MB of system ram available to it.  The PS3, however is much more rigid.  Where as the Xbox 360 has 512MB of unified memory.  The Xbox 360 has an extremely flexible memory archiecture making more memory available to either the CPU or GPU when needed.  It's OS requires less memory to run, and can stay resident so it can support things like cross-game chat.  So how does the PS3 offer more memory for games than the Xbox 360?

PS3 have 512MB too... just the sharring is different... to use all 512MB on PS3 the GPU needs to ask do CELL for 256MB... so the GPU in PS3 could use it 256MB and use more 256MB asking to CELL.... in 360 the GPU can use all memory (512MB) without asking to CPU.

Both consoles have the same amount of RAM.

And the XMB is running while playing in PS3 too... use eve receibe notifications or access the text chat... the XMB use 1 CELL SPE and 48MB of RAM... always.

360 uses up to 32MB of RAM.

So 360 have 16MB more RAM than PS3 free for games.

And I think the cross-game chat is not implemented due the old games... if that happen all released games needs some path to work


Um...no. 

If the developer codes the game to do so, the Cell can pre-render graphics before it sends them to the GPU, but the GPU doesn't have access to the 256MB reserved for the Cell processor.  This is how Multi-sample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) is done on the PS3.  The developer pre-renders graphic data in an SPU, then sends the data to the GPU.

The difference is that the availble memory for the Xbox 360 for either the GPU or CPU (obviously not both at the same time) is up to 512MB.  In the PS3, the Cell can do some graphic work for the GPU, but as far as I know there is no way for the obverse of that.

You are correct regarding the XMB's status and memory.  I wasn't aware that it dropped to 50MB in 2009.

The RSX have access to 256MB XDR system memory through the CELL with limited brandwidth (20 GB/s read ; 15 GB/s write).

Well... the CELL can't access the 256MB GDDR3 video memory.

So the RSX can use up to 464MB of PS3 memory.

The problem with that is accessing the XDR memory would be inefficient.  It's 60% of the local bandwidth to the GPU, therefore additional memory is needed for buffers.  You're wasting memory to use memory.

I'd be curious as to how often that's actually done.


Sony already stated cross game chat cannot be done on the PS3. The Vita will is getting it and the next playstation will most likely get it.