Need 2 Know
Regular
PS3 OS Resources.
- Thread starter Aeoniss
- Start date
But is it 24MB of 512MB, or 24MB of 256MB + (?)MB of 256MB? That (?) could be a significant amount. and 24MB of 256 is almost 10% of the available memory, so that's quite a bit.
It seems disingenuous to talk about the OS reserved space in RAM without also taking into account the OS reserved space in the GPU RAM, and then comparing it to the 360 and saying the one is less than the other.
They're two quite different platforms, with different advantages and tradeoffs. Development companies will essentially do what they have to to make something they can ship. If they need voice chat, they will find 8MB somewhere they can free up to make it work. Farm some work off on a SPU instead of using a precomputed table or whatever.
Here's a recent report stating that according to a Naughty Dog producer firmware 2.80 freed more memory for developers:
http://www.gamezine.co.uk/news/games/u/uncharted-2/the-real-secret-in-ps3-firmware-2-80-$1314390.htm
http://www.gamezine.co.uk/news/games/u/uncharted-2/the-real-secret-in-ps3-firmware-2-80-$1314390.htm
Last edited by a moderator:
grandmaster
Veteran
Ummmmmm... seems to be some interesting jumps going on in that statement... more memory means a lot more utilisation of the SPUs? More stuff streamed in from BD, held in RAM and processed by the SPU? Does the SPU work like that?
Well the update did happen in-between the Beta and ComicCon...and the update didn't include much on the outside, meaning that it most likely gave back a little bit of memory to developers. And the source agrees that it could be a coincidence, but probably isn't:
"It's presumed that the 2.80 engine update Thompson refers to is Naughty Dog's improvements after the PS3's 2.80 firmware update, with the coincidence being too significant to ignore (though we're sure Naughty Dog has also gained back memory from their own engine optimisation)."
Anyway...regardless, the OS footprint must be much smaller since 1.8...I wonder what it is now.
grandmaster said:
Sam Thompson is a producer. He may not be able to explain intricate system design and implementation cohesively. For all we know, he may be listing tasks in past project meetings.
It sounds like NaughtyDog is still improving the engine (e.g., better textures due to more memory allocated, better SPU utilization, larger BD streaming cache). If Sony frees up more OS memory, then we'll see improvements for other games in the future as well.
I'm more curious how they do this when PlayTV is running. Those guys want to add HD recording too.
Exactly. Interpret the statement with consderation for the source's likely like of technical knowledge. Thus I doubt better SPE utilisation comes from more RAM. Probably ND have improved the way they are doing things with SPEs independent of memory, and Thompson has mixed all the improvements together into a single statement launched from a 2.80 update.
I'd have thought that shouldn't make any difference apart from HDD BW.
That's the most common response, but I'd like to see how it works end-to-end. e.g., Doesn't the PlayTV image take up any memory and memory bandwidth at all ? And for HDD bandwidth, NaughtyDog and Insomniac use HDD streaming. There's got to be a hit somewhere. Too bad, we don't get to talk about PlayTV much. Would love to give it a try.
Well, the stream'll come in through the USB at a few megabits a second. Isn't HD something like 4? 8Mb at a push?? There'll need to be a buffer and there'll be the write to HDD. Bandwidth wise, it should be something like a megabyte per second from RAM and HDD access, which in a system of gigabytes a second is negligable. The real impact will be HDD access when accessing HDD though, you're right. Head thrashing could be an issue with seak times taking a serious knock. This would be reduced with a larger RAM buffer. At the end of the day though, if you get slightly rougher texture pop-in when recording, it's a penalty you'd expect.
Though it may not be accurate in case of Uncharted 2, it still makes sense because SPUs are terrible at reading from VRAM.
Also, there is this thing called memory-speed tradeoff.
Someone from Naughty Dog commented on Sam's remarks:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=16859069&postcount=601
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=16859069&postcount=601
This was just a typical blunder with all the info and people coming up to us constantly at the PS booth at SDCC. I feel bad for Sam.
He was actually referring to Naughty Dog Engine 2.0 updates we made. we had just been making sure at the event that all the PS3s brought in were on FW2.8 since that is what that build needed to run on, so I have no doubt it was top of mind
That fits in with expectations! I do wish people wouldn't try to squeeze info from unlikely places. Generally it doesn't work. Unless its an engineer or coder talking, no statements regarding hardware utilisation can be trusted to mean what they appear to mean.
It probably does. It's just we don't know what from Sam's comments.
Hmm, a correction to my above comment about people not trying to guess. One upshot is when people make crazy assumptions, often it annoys developers enough that they speak out in correction, which means it does do its job in the end!
Hmm, a correction to my above comment about people not trying to guess. One upshot is when people make crazy assumptions, often it annoys developers enough that they speak out in correction, which means it does do its job in the end!
It probably does. It's just we don't know what from Sam's comments.
Hmm, a correction to my above comment about people not trying to guess. One upshot is when people make crazy assumptions, often it annoys developers enough that they speak out in correction, which means it does do its job in the end!
Yep
Works like a charm.grandmaster
Veteran
Perhaps it is simply a case that the latest build of the game is based on SDK 2.8 and therefore it wouldn't run if the PS3 was not updated to the corresponding firmware.
Similar threads
- Sticky