@LordTheNightKnight: It's not worth it. MikeB will just keep talking in circles until everyone else goes to sleep. Just look at the most recent gem...

@ Entroper

So you honestly don't understand what I am talking about? If so, why cheapshots?

MikeB said: The EDRAM [in the 360] is really just special purpose memory [...] Apart for those crucial facts the PS3 has more than 512 MB memory to deal with, there are for example also high speed local memory stores for each SPE, very neat indepent processors with which you can create lots of effects and other complex calculations.

6 SPEs with 256 KB each (meaning 1.5 MB in total), which are all the SPEs can directly access... Wait, what were you saying about special purpose memory? :P

Oh by the way, if we're going to nitpick don't forget to subtract the memory taken up by PS3's bloated OS (what are they at right now? still more than 20% of the total RAM?). 360's OS takes up 32 MB (or 6.25%) only.

But let's not let facts stand in the way of your love for PS3's technical aspects.

 

Sqrl said: OriGin said: I play it at 1920x1200 4xAA on my PC I've played all versions, they hardly look much worse than my PC version. Complaining about this stuff is so lame. How does it even more a difference? As long as it looks good (which it does). Did you read my post? I answered all of this. 1) To a gamer there is little difference because the game is still going to look great regardless. So from a gamer's perspective there is little difference, no doubt. 2) To a customer there should be concern, you should want to know if the company lied. If they claimed to develope the game independantly but actually just ported the 360 version then there is a serious problem there from a customer perspective as you have been lied to. That shouldn't be hard to understand and I have absolutely no problem saying that if that doesn't concern you as a customer then you are kidding yourself. Yes the game looks great on all systems but what kind of person would continue to do business with someone who is clearly willing to lie to sell products. This isn't about one looking better or worse, this is about unethical corporate practices. Especially when you consider the line about "We programmed it.".

 Yeah sorry I just posted, didn't read the whole thread... probably should have done that :P

I agree with you whole heartedly though.

I just don't care about resolutions on TV's.

MikeB said: @ LordTheNightKnight The EDRAM may seem small, but you are forgetting that if the PS3 needs the same amount of texture memory as the 360, it has to eat into its fram buffer as well. Remember that the PS3 has 256MB+256MB=512MB, but the 360 has 512MB+10MB. So even assuming the EDRAM does not have speed to make up for its size, a PS3 game using about 256MB of texture memory would have just as small an amount for its frame buffer. The EDRAM is really just special purpose memory, but it's really too small to work with for high resolution graphics. The memory bandwidth is far more relevant as 512 MB is more than enough to work with despite what some may claim, regarding memory the PS3 has Blu-Ray to constantly stream new data (much more than would be possible with CD or DVD) and the PS3 has a harddrive by default, look at the harddrive as something similar to virtual memory on a PC being able to stream data much faster than a DVD or Blu-Ray disc. Apart for those crucial facts the PS3 has more than 512 MB memory to deal with, there are for example also high speed local memory stores for each SPE, very neat indepent processors with which you can create lots of effects and other complex calculations.

You many not think the EDRAM is enough for HD graphics, that that doesn't make it not so. Plus the blu-ray drive and HDD are for loading before the graphics are rendered. The frame buffer is for while the graphics are rendered. So they can't help the system get HD graphics. Finally, the memory on the SPEs are cache. They can't help the frame buffer. 

LOL at everyone who cares or thinks this matters!

Lost tears of Kain said: Wow mike b bringing his crap into this thread im outa here.

Totally.

Off-topic: Dramatic look squirrel rulz! 

MikeB said: @ Entroper So you honestly don't understand what I am talking about? If so, why cheapshots?

I understand full well what you're talking about.  I've wasted my time debating it with you before, I'm not going to continue to waste my time on it this time.

@ Lord TheNightKnight

 

 I will give you an example, the c64 had 64k of memory. That's a limitation for the amount of game engine, graphics & sound data you could produce if you loaded the game in one go as was usually the case during the system's early stages (lenghty tape loads). Later games broke up the game loading for the various levels, so they allowed for 64k max per level, you can look at games like Turrican 2 or Creatures 2 to see this approach allows for far more complex and diverse graphics and sound.

Now streaming is more advanced than that, you free up unneeded memory (previous areas, enemies, sounds, and such) and load new data into memory while actually playing the level. Resistance & Motorstorm for example performed music streaming, but loaded all the graphics data for the level into memory in one go, in this regard Ratchet and Clank: TOD is more advanced as the game also streams texture data.

Maybe now you understand the relationship between, system memory and storage memory with regard to streaming possibilities. You simply don't need to keep all that data in memory at once, thus a couple of hundred megabytes of combined system RAM is sufficient if take advantage of the PS3 hardware, the system has more than enough bandwidth, processing power and data storage capacity to take advantage of.

@ NJ5

I just wanted to point out that was stated was incomplete, reread the posting I was replying to.



The OS size seems to be shrinking with releases despite adding more features, maybe they used some inactive data as a placeholder to make sure games don't take up too much memory (for example resort to streaming instead) as they would like to use this memory for planned (or considered) OS features instead. Similar with regard to the OS reserved SPE (6 SPEs are really plenty for now nomatter what rival fanboys state, even Uncharted only uses about 30% of the processing power available and the developers are sure to get more efficient in course of time). IMO that would be good forward planning, of course rival fanboys wouldn't want to understand such a thing. The PS3 really has a lot of memory and processing power to deal with for a console, this combined with low latency RAM, high bandwidths and powerful storage media offers a lot of potential to developers who wish to explore the system's capabilities.