The last comment from Carmack I saw had him saying the PS3's CPU was the more more powerful of the two but offset by having a weaker GPU , now this one says equal CPU weaker GPU, looks like he was down playing things either unconsciously or deliberately , What I got from playing Rage isit has a nice 60fps framerate but was a very linear game that gave the illusion of freedom with open vistas let down by hidden barriers , flat lo-res textures and lacking gun play, as a showcase for their mega texture tech it is poor and seeing it will never be used as a first party engine we we will never know for sure how much blame to lay at who's ever door.

I generally choose to not lower myself arguing with known trolls these days.  Kind of short on people you can actually debate with anymore it seem sometimes.  Such a shame really as you used to be able to have a civilized adult discussion without insults flying in the forums.

OT - Everyone knows the PS3 is a pain in the ass to get working well with multiplatform engines, this is hardly surprising.  It took Epic a couple of years to get parity close to the 360 with their engine, same with Rockstar's engine, Ubisoft's engine, Crytek's.  The list is quite comprehensive that proves the architecture isn't particularly versatile and is heavily reliant upon optimisation to get the best from it.  I doubt those people who wil play only the PS3 version of Rage will have too many complaints though so it really isn't a big deal.  I seem to recall a thread a while ago when Carmack criticized the 360 for it's DVD storage that a lot of Sony fans had a new found love for the guy, guess he's Mr Scum again now.  Who cares, it's just one mans opinion.

The blame lays between the nature of megatextures and the limitations of the hardware. Virtual texturing does one thing well and that is allowing every inch of the game world to be uniquely textured so no 2 areas look the same. Unfortunatly that come with several dissadvantages vs traditional methods the first is that as every inch of the world has it's own texture you have to load in the texture data for every inch of the world and also store unique texture data for the entire world which leads to very large texture data which is why the game is 22GB now as RAM on consoles is very limited you can't keep a lot of that data in memory so you have to load each section of the world as you look at it.

This makes IO performance veery imortant for RAGE now the PS3 is known to use 2 main weaknesses which is the slow read times of the Blu ray and also some issues with the HDD formating which limits the advantages of the HDD and also the limitations of the partitioned RAM which makes memory mangagement an issue when you have very large data sets. This leads to texture pop in being a slightly bigger issue on PS3 than a fully installed 360 version which can use the faster HDD IO and full install to reduce texture load times. Now RAGE on PS3 does use something to mitigate these issues by using the CELL to transcode textures faster but there is only so much difference that can make.

It will be interesting to see how the tech performs in the 30fps enviroment of Doom 4 as that will give the engine twice as long to load in texture before rendering the next frame so there should be far less pop in in that game. Alternatively if you used an SSD in the PS3 that could improve the pop in issues a lot, but they are expensive.

As for the PC version well that is just a bad port as by default the game only uses 600MB of RAM to cache textures even if you have a system with 4GB+ RAM. Add in the generally poor OpenGL drivers compaired to Direct X and you get basically the same performance as the consoles at a higher resolution which to a PC gamer is horrible. The fact that AMD put out the wrong driver at launch didn't help ether. The next patch should make the PC version much better looking tho with the new texture upscalling which will aliviate the blurry textures.

yeah but I do, I gave up with the civilized debates on this site seeing as I bearly got one, most of the time I got the this is my opinion and it's fact becasue I said so, will not prove my point in no way but it's fact deal with it

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=135523&page=7#8 <--being the lastest facepalm completely ambused with irrelevant bullshit from the same people in here no less

your second however part I agree with completely

Wow /thread

Interesting read, one of the things that troubles me is people forget that in the case of 360 the HDD is not universal and it would also be interesting to know what percentage of people on 360 actually install the game , but the tech reviews are never undertaken on say , one with no HDD ,one installed ,one uninstalled , I understand why but it would be nice  to see the differences. Concerning the HDD there shouldn't be a major difference after all the PS3 uses standard 2. 5"  laptop drives, I remember Sony talking about lack of memory for PS2 not being so big an issue  because it could swap memory in and out real fast because it had big fat pipes and used that same mantra again with the PS3, if this was true you would think mega texturing would be right up it's ally ,then again we live in the real world, I like many had high expectations for this tech especially it's low memory benefits, Simply put Rage was probably the wrong type of game to show it off apart from the Framerate side, and yes your right bring on Doom 4  at 30fps , I wonder what the people on here who  think that 60fps on console and it's attended short comings is better than 30fps and cleaner graphics think of that decision , looking back I have come to the conclusion  that like many Multiplats you can get to your baseline easier on the 360 and end up good across the board with PS3 you can get results in certain areas that equal or better the 360 but not across the board and not so easy and not when you have to maintain a certain parity not just game wise but time and resources wise after all its a multi platform engine, if you wanted the best outcome especially for the PS3 you would have them make two separate dedicated engines each built from the ground up for the  two platforms.

The trouble with 2 seprate engines is the fact that you then also have to tune your assets to each engine and in the end you are basically making 2 seperate games which defeats the advantages of going multiplatform which is being able to use the same work to sell to a larger potential audience.

The HDD issues on PS3 isn't so much bandwidth but latency due to file fragmentation as explained by digital foundry

"The PlayStation 3 doesn't do this: when a game or demo installs to your HDD, there can be thousands of smaller files (in the case of GT5, up to 44,000 files) which does mean that over time your drive can fragment and drive performance will degrade a lot faster. In a recent discussion with a game developer who developed a data-heavy open world game, their extreme stress tests on the PS3 HDD actually reduced performance to lower than that of streaming in the same assets from Blu-ray. In order to show Rage running at its best, we formatted our HDD and gave the game a best case scenario from which to run - a completely empty drive - but it was still found wanting compared to the 360 full install, and wasn't orders of magnitude better than the 360 running from disc with HDD cache. "

As most people won't go to the trouble of formatting their drives to play RAGE at it's best most PS3 gamers will have significant issues especially if they have a large drive with a lot of games installed.

As for the faster RAM that doesn't really help if the source of the files is slow and you need to load textures as quckly as possible constantly. And while swapping between main and VRAM is very fast on PS3 it is still an added latency over a unified RAM pool which doesn't have to swap at all. Also while assets are swapped between the 2 RAM pools on PS3 the assets are basically taking up twice as much memory as at least part of the file will be in both pools further exaserbating the fact that the PS3 has 10MB less total RAM and a slightly larger OS and the added overhead of having 2 seperate RAM page tables. Th bottom line is that the PS3 is really hamstrung by it's RAM ironically it's probably the only thing they skimped on and it's come to bite them in the arse when combined with the higher latency and slower average read speed of blu-ray. If they had gone with more RAM vertually every multiplatform game would look and run better on PS3. They seem to have recognised the mistake as the Vita has 256+512MB of RAM, and from the sound of things the Wii U also has a lot more RAM which will likely be it's key advantage against the current generation. It will be interesting to see what happens next gen with MS and Sony just about every dev is asking for 4GB+ RAM for next gen, every time a dev is asked what they want from the next gen more RAM tops the list, some devs like Crytek and CCP want 8GB of RAM and I think they would be wise to follow devs wishes.

Anyway I should probably quit my (know just enough to get me into trouble) techno nerd rants.

Wow this thread ended well, I learned a lot about ram, thanks guys.

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.

There is nothing you can do about peoples perception Kynes

I swear most people under 30 these days consider themselves super tech savvy but havent got the first clue as to how the machines actually work.

Just to read some of the comments on these boards makes me scared for the future of the human race.