Is 256MB enough?

I

Iron Tiger

Regular
For next gen consoles, I don't think so. With world and model polygonal complexity looking to go up an order of magnitude, the necessity to use specular, normal, environment, diffuse, etc. maps to make a game that is graphically competitive, resolution and Z-depth increase, FSAA, and probably a whole bunch of memory munching stuff I can't think of (or be bothered to try to list), providing only a 4x increase in memory capacity over the previous generation seems like it'll present a huge obstical for developers to have to overcome. I was arguing with some people in another forum that cited current gen examples and tried to convince me that 256MB is more than enough. Does anyone here believe that?
 
nothing is enough . 1 gig wouldn't be enough . You can allways use more

That said i don't think any of the next gen consoles will have 256megs . they wlil all be around the 512 mark which should be fine . Even if you use a 128 megs for sound and other date you'd still have what 376 megs of textures with dxtc and 3Dc that should be more than enough
 
The maximum RAM a single Cell processor can access in the PS3 is 256MB. It's a hardware limitation, and the only way around that would be to include a second processor using a seperate bank of RAM.

With that in mind, MS could make Sony sweat by upping to 512 mb RAM.. even if PS3 edges xbox2 performance wise you may still see better looking games among other things on xbox2 by adding 512mb of ram.
 
text sony doesn't have to go with a umd set up. They can have the cell chip with its own ram and then have the nvidia gpu acess its own pool of ram too.
 
TexT said:
The maximum RAM a single Cell processor can access in the PS3 is 256MB. It's a hardware limitation, and the only way around that would be to include a second processor using a seperate bank of RAM.
Click to expand...
Okay, but does the GPU have to access memory through the CELL? If not, there's no reason to limit the system to 256MB total.
 
jvd said:
text sony doesn't have to go with a umd set up. They can have the cell chip with its own ram and then have the nvidia gpu acess its own pool of ram too.
Click to expand...

PS3 also uses XDR Rambus RAM. which is quite expensive!

512mb is just too expensive..we're talking about doubling the RAM price for millions of units
 
yes it is expensive , so is the blueray player . But we don't know what the cost is of each and how it affects anything
 
TexT said:
jvd said:
text sony doesn't have to go with a umd set up. They can have the cell chip with its own ram and then have the nvidia gpu acess its own pool of ram too.
Click to expand...

PS3 also uses XDR Rambus RAM. which is quite expensive!

512mb is just too expensive..we're talking about doubling the RAM price for millions of units
Click to expand...

XDR is said to cost a premium compared to GDDR3. Another factor is the size of the XDR chips currently available.

When you look at the PS3's parts: CELL (first one show was pretty big), high end nVidia GPU (with eDRAM?), BR, and XDR you get the feeling this is not a cheap venture. It is great for consumers that Sony is willing to put so many great items into a console, but all companies (including MS) get to an "OUCH!" point. 512MB XDR may be too much to ask for. You had analysts already making $500+ comments about PS3 and that would not sit well with consumers. If anything, if Sony is planning 512MB of XDR and it looked like the PS3 would come out at $500 I would expect them to cut down to 256MB to save some money.

It would be great if all the consoles had 512MB of memory, but I do not see it happening based on comments from people working on these things.
 
A single 2048x2048 texture will eat up 16mb. Mip-mapped, 21mb. DXTN compressed, ~5mb. That means in 256mb, you can fit a) 16 hi-res uncompress textures b) 12 mip-mapped version of same. c) ~50 compressed versions. If HDR is used, it gets worse.

You can't really stream these off disk effectively IMHO since the draw distance might be large and the distribution may be fairly even. Yes, you could use 1024x1024, which would multiple those numbers by 4: 200 compressed textures. That may be enough for a current generation game, but next-gen?

Anything less than 1gb seems like a crime to me, since 1gb is a commodity now on PCs. HD Era? Not if crappy 256x256 or 512x512 textures are all we can use.
 
DemoCoder said:
A single 2048x2048 texture will eat up 16mb. Mip-mapped, 21mb. DXTN compressed, ~5mb. That means in 256mb, you can fit a) 16 hi-res uncompress textures b) 12 mip-mapped version of same. c) ~50 compressed versions. If HDR is used, it gets worse.

You can't really stream these off disk effectively IMHO since the draw distance might be large and the distribution may be fairly even. Yes, you could use 1024x1024, which would multiple those numbers by 4: 200 compressed textures. That may be enough for a current generation game, but next-gen?
Click to expand...
How often will you really need such large textures? 2048x2048 seem like total overkill for 720P to me, you would get much better results with detailtexture, procedural textures, and clipmapping virtual textures to save on bandwidth.
 
I was arguing with some people in another forum that cited current gen examples and tried to convince me that 256MB is more than enough.
Click to expand...
Assuming all of that memory was free - it might do... but it won't be.
Question is, how much memory we'll have to give up for the kernel... we already have one example on the market of how this can become Quite large when OS services get more ambitious.
 
TexT said:
Are you sure? There been reports of developers requesting MS to add 512mb of ram..Perhaps the "HD Era" needs more than 256mb.
Click to expand...
Define "need."

And developers would request more RAM if they needed it or not. I know I would.
 
I think 256MB would be a major bottleneck in these new consoles where it concerns game quality and richness. I'm sure some types of games will look great, like games with controlled environments and limited on-screen characters, but RPG's and other games with richer enviroments will be totally limited by the lack of memory space. I'm not saying the games will look bad, but they will not live up to their potential had they had more RAM.

What I'm saying, is that I think there has to be a balance between CPU power, GPU power, memory bandwidth and memory size. I just think that with all the power that has been put in to all the former 3 elements, these machines would be able to deal with much more data then a meager 256MB will be able to store. Meshes with higher polygon count, higher resolution textures, all other elements included such as parallax mapping, FSAA, HDR, etc.. Maybe I'm putting to much faith on the processing power of these next-gen consoles.
 
Are we talking consoles or arcade games here, or what? o_O

Chihiro with it's 512RAM for titles like OutRun 2 is a rarity, most arcade boards don't even have 512RAM, so 256RAM is IMHO enough for consoles.
 
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