L. Scofield
Veteran
How much RAM is in the devkits for the PS3, PS2, Wii, GCN, etc...? Does anybody know?
Microsoft develops '' X-Engine '' tools for first party developers
- Thread starter bagofsuck
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You know wrong.
Xenos can only access 512MB of physical memory.
grandmaster
Veteran
Surely you are simply adding to your budget and development effort by creating a 1GB version that will never be released?
PC version.
The extra memory will at least prevent some crashing with loading up over-budget items (besides other debug utilities).Interesting...why are all reports stating that the Xbox 360's 1GB debugs are now matching the PS3 debugs in RAM? Why can't you tell us Deano?
PS3 tools (and the newer debug machines) have 512MB of XDR, and 256MB of VRAM.
Older debug machines have the same memory as retail boxes (256MB of XDR, 256MB of VRAM).
If reports are saying otherwise, then those reports are obviously incorrect.
Dean
Prophecy2k
Veteran
Most of these devkits have double system memory compared to retail and identical amount of graphics memory. Having extra system memory is critical for debugging purposes as debug binary takes more memory and debug classes usually use some extra memory (validity counters for data structures, buffer overflow check bytes for data arrays, etc). Having extra memory also speeds up the game development at the beginning of the project, as memory optimizations can be done at the end of the project when there is much better knowledge how much each game level is taking memory.
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L. Scofield
Veteran
So as expected, most if not all devkits utilize more RAM than the retail consoles. Just to confirm Statix overreaction is silly.
The new model (DECR-1400A) was introduced in March this year.Excellent
Cheers,
Dean
Oh so quite late...almost as late as Microsoft's new debugs.
Wait, how does that confirm that my "overreaction" is silly? I never said that the devkits for other past platforms didn't have extra memory. In fact, I referenced how an Xbox 1 game apparently took advantage of its devkit's beefed-up hardware also.
My point is, maybe a quarter or a half extra RAM would be useful for debug and crash-prevention purposes, but when you double the amount of RAM on production units, it just opens to door for developer abuse in terms of showing off their games in the best possible light.
I think doubling the RAM density is usually the simplest way to increase the memory for debugging purposes. It's not that it being double is important it's that it would be harder to add a smaller amount from a hardware perspective.
Bingo... not much to change on the motherboard itself. There were some 360s picture with 1Gb density chips awhile back too (4x1Gb vs 8x512Mb), so bumping that to 8x1Gb would be fairly trivial at that point.
I'm not saying that original INTENT of the hardware maker is necessarily to deceive audiences from a presentational/marketing perspective. I'm just saying it's going to end up being done that way on the developers' side. I'm sure there are many good technical reasons for having double the amount of extra memory on a dev unit.
So they have to balance the benefits of an enhanced development environment with the risk that extra RAM may be abused by unscrupulous developers. My solution: give them the RAM and don't buy games based on previews.
512 MB of extra memory is not that much. You might for example want to store some gameplay log in the system memory to track some difficult bugs. Your memory leak tracker likely stores the filenames and call stack of each memory allocation to help you analyze the title memory leaks and memory usage in different scenarios (this takes lots of memory, but speeds up the leak tracking considerably). The more memory you have the more detailed info you can store. It would be silly not to have the extra memory, as it would both mean longer development times and worse game quality (you cannot have so much debug checks and you cannot use the retail kit memory 100% as your devkit libraries take some extra memory, so testing would be hard).
After title optimization it will run at retail memory configuration and there will always be around half the memory free in devkits. This is true for all the devkits, not just for the recent consoles. This has been a standard since I remember (with some exceptions of course).
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