Rumor - ps3 2.0 fw will have 32MB reserved to OS

[Shifty Geezer]

In my view, there are a lot of details that aren't so obvious but still make sense that make it convincing.

We'll see. Many of the XMB rumors so far have been true. The timing is right also. Now that they are locking down on what they are doing with Home, they also know what basic support and functions they need in XMB in-game. And GT5 Prologue is coming soon with online (figure the connection out yourself).

I'm buying it. You can come back and taunt me here later.

Why do you think there's no need for GDDR?

Well, I'm thinking that it'll hold some FB(s) for the OS. Press the Home button and it'll switch in, composited with the game. In theory they could switch to it, and copy the XMB buffer from XDR. I was also thinking that you'd be using DDR to downscale PS3 output to PSP, but if you have Cell doing that job, you'd handle it in XDR. You don't need to go through RSX if you're beaming the frame to PSP.

It'd also be a smart move by Sony to appease developers. A major gripe with PS3 is the smaller VRAM available, and it's had repercussions. If Sony can remove the GDDR overhead, there'll be less work for devs, PS3 wouldn't suffer from inferior textures, and everyone would be happy. So I can see it as something they'd aim for.

 

[zed]

sounds to good to be true, but then i thought of sonys most important app/game by far, home (as others have i also see)
perhaps sony overestimated the amount of mem they require to have home ticking along

 

[DJ12]

I'm buying it. You can come back and taunt me here later.

They can taunt me too as I've bought it too

Does anyone care to speculate on the impact the extra SPU being available might have long term?

 

[deepbrown]

Only using 82mb at the mo anyway...could go down quite a bit

 

[Rainbow Man]

A large point of the reserved SPU was that SPUs can be "cut off" from the rest of the PS3 and run independently and their private memory remaining inaccessible from the rest of the system.

This was supposedly so that the reserved SPU could be an "unbreakable" copyright protection system monitor.

How would their copy protection scheme possibly work if Sony supposedly abandons this whole scheme?

I absolutely don't buy it.
Peace.

 

[DJ12]

Never heard anything about that to be honest with you, do you have a link to any info about that?

I thought CELL had some protection built in and there was a protection layer in place when running Linux, but I've heard nothing about it in "Game" mode.

 

[deepbrown]

Especially when the 7th spu is being used by game devs already.

 

[Qroach]

This was long since debunked as BS.

 

[inpHilltr8r]

Especially when the 7th spu is being used by game devs already.

I keep hearing this. Is there a source?

 

[phat]

Does there have to be any video memory really, or is that impossible?

Without seeing what an in-game XMB does, it's hard to say, but I think it's certainly possible. From a systems perspective, it doesn't seem all that desireable for a resident background service to use any video memory, given how it's essentially write-only for Cell. In the middle of a game, when RSX is busy rendering the game's graphics, you probably wouldn't want to interject with a request for the RSX to write out some data in video memory to XDR for the Cell to use.

 

[D3B]

Here is a vid of in-game XMB from before PS3 came out.

At 2:25 it is shown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VszZ_63Ap8I

I cant beleive it didnt ship with that feature

 

[Fox5]

I remember that they used a ton of memory for On Screen Keyboard module alone [around 10mb, or even more]

That's one wasteful keyboard, I hope it's a very high resolution bitmap.

 

[tuna]

That's one wasteful keyboard, I hope it's a very high resolution bitmap.

Isn't it possible to input all supported languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, English, other European languages from it?

 

[Arwin]

Without seeing what an in-game XMB does, it's hard to say, but I think it's certainly possible. From a systems perspective, it doesn't seem all that desireable for a resident background service to use any video memory, given how it's essentially write-only for Cell. In the middle of a game, when RSX is busy rendering the game's graphics, you probably wouldn't want to interject with a request for the RSX to write out some data in video memory to XDR for the Cell to use.

Can't you have the framebuffer in XDR in the first place? Personally I think that if the 360 can limit itself to 32mb, then why not PS3.

 

[Fox5]

Isn't it possible to input all supported languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, English, other European languages from it?

1. They shouldn't all be loaded into memory at the same time.

2. 10MB is still a lot of memory for a on screen keyboard!

 

[D3B]

1. They shouldn't all be loaded into memory at the same time.

2. 10MB is still a lot of memory for a on screen keyboard!

It has animated emoticons also if that matters

 

[Shifty Geezer]

An on-screen keyboard could be created in a few hundred KB using vector drawing. Perhaps a couple of megs for complex outline fonts for Chinese and Japanese - I don't know how their simplified forms have been adapted for keyboards. Animated emoticons can likewise be reduced to a few hundred KB. It'd be a moronic design decision so make them so richly animated you're gobbling up 10 MBs of system from, taking that from games, in order to have a nicely rendered happy smiley!

 

[Blade47167]

An on-screen keyboard could be created in a few hundred KB using vector drawing. Perhaps a couple of megs for complex outline fonts for Chinese and Japanese - I don't know how their simplified forms have been adapted for keyboards. Animated emoticons can likewise be reduced to a few hundred KB. It'd be a moronic design decision so make them so richly animated you're gobbling up 10 MBs of system from, taking that from games, in order to have a nicely rendered happy smiley!

The emotes are like brand new. Just came with the latest firmware update. So I doubt they are the culprit.

 

[one]

If that keyboard is built on the top of a shared library stack it has to load all the necessary modules on RAM.

 

[deepbrown]

I keep hearing this. Is there a source?

Deano Ninja Theory dev hinted at hit....they use it to decode the sound? (or some such)