Official PSP Thread

[jvd]

Let's look at the Requirements for the PC development tool:

CPU: Pentium 4 at 3 GHz or more ( well, it has to emulate the PSP CPU, etc... )

GPU: Radeon 9800 or nVIDIA GeForce FX5900.

Now, why put for GPU requirement two DirectX 9 GPUs ?

HOS tessellation might be one reason ( I have to check the support on those two GPUs.. how many types of HOS they support and all )...

What else could be the reason for DirectX9 GPUs for the emulator ?

For the emulation to run faster ? It is after all emulation which is allways slower than the actual hardware. I'm sure they can run the emulation on a p200 with a tnt card. IT will just take a long ass time to run anything.

Just because its emulated on a 9800 with a 3 ghz p4 does not mean the graphics will match up to that system .

 

[McFly]

If PSP can display 33M tesselated polygons, then I'm highly impressed:

33M of such polygons would defenitly look better then PS2 gfx. Even if it only could display 1M of such polygons.

Fredi

 

[V3]

Is the tessellation like ATI Trueform ?

Looking at that pic, what algo did they used to convert the polygon model into the tesselated one ?

 

[jvd]

Anyone else having problems with this thread . Last post I see is panja and the last post the forum says should be there is from v3

 

[Dave Baumann]

GPU: Radeon 9800 or nVIDIA GeForce FX5900.

Now, why put for GPU requirement two DirectX 9 GPUs ?

HOS tessellation might be one reason ( I have to check the support on those two GPUs.. how many types of HOS they support and all )...

CPU assisted N-Patches for one and none for the other.

What else could be the reason for DirectX9 GPUs for the emulator ?

Because they are both quite high powered?

 

[Legion]

hmmmm maybe we'll see a use for Truform after all...

 

[DeanoC]

Let's look at the Requirements for the PC development tool:

CPU: Pentium 4 at 3 GHz or more ( well, it has to emulate the PSP CPU, etc... )

GPU: Radeon 9800 or nVIDIA GeForce FX5900.

Now, why put for GPU requirement two DirectX 9 GPUs ?

HOS tessellation might be one reason ( I have to check the support on those two GPUs.. how many types of HOS they support and all )...

What else could be the reason for DirectX9 GPUs for the emulator ?

Read nothing into it, it almost certainly compatibility testing. The way the emulator is probably written is that the library thunks through to Dx9 to actually draw stuff. They will have written a library and only tested on those 2 cards (whats the point of going through the hell to make it work on lots of cards).

Dreamcast dev kits required sepecific SCSI cards for the same reason. Its was tested with 1 make, and wasn't guarenteed to work on any other.

 

[Squeak]

If PSP can display 33M tesselated polygons, then I'm highly impressed:

33M of such polygons would defenitly look better then PS2 gfx. Even if it only could display 1M of such polygons.

Fredi

In the patents posted some time ago, there was also talk about hardware support for bounding volumes, and other early geometry culling techniques.
If those features are in the final spec, then 33Mps is very impressive indeed.

 

[marconelly!]

If PSP can display 33M tesselated polygons, then I'm highly impressed:

33 is obviously a theoretical number, much like 66M is on the PS2. Most games on PS2 are lucky if they can achieve 1/5 of that, so by the same logic, PSP might be capable of 6-7MP/s in-game.

 

[nondescript]

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?section_name=dev&aid=2675

More PSP details emerge as Sony ponders spec change

Rob Fahey 16:57 08/12/2003
Japanese giant listening to developers over RAM concerns?


A presentation from the SCEE Technology Group has revealed further details of how the PlayStation Portable will work, but developers claim that Sony is considering changing the spec of the device to add more memory.

The presentation (slides are available [here] in PDF format) gave developers an introduction to the PSP concept and hardware, explaining the specifications and inner workings of the system to prospective game creators.

However, the apparently "final" spec of the PSP, as announced earlier this year, may now be in question - with development sources in teams working on early software for the handheld device indicating that Sony may be planning to increase the amount of memory in the system.

While the PSP compares very favourably to the PS2 in terms of processing and graphics power, several developers have expressed worries over the system's 8mb of main system RAM - only a quarter of that available to PS2 games. Now it appears that Sony may be considering addressing their concerns by adding extra RAM to the PSP specification.

"The PSP is a much more impressive console than we'd expected, but the amount of RAM is definitely causing us headaches, even in these early planning stages," one developer working on a project at a large Japanese studio explained. "If they don't change the amount, I'm sure we'll find ways around it - by streaming more data off the disc maybe - there are always other ways to try. But it would definitely make developing much easier if there were just a few more megabytes available."

If a decision has not yet been made about the amount of RAM the device will have, this could help to explain why developers have not yet seen physical development kits for the PSP - and even large studios which generally get preferred treatment from Sony are left working with PC emulation kits.

"The emulation stuff is fine for basic tool and engine development," according to a source at a UK development studio, "since the whole system is based on standard libraries and our access to the underlying hardware is restricted. It's tougher on the designers though - it's quite a challenge designing games for hardware you've never seen."

Sony has apparently given no date to developers regarding when they can expect to see PSP hardware, but development on early titles is already well underway at several studios using the PC emulation kits. The first public showing of the PSP is set for May of next year, at the E3 trade show in Los Angeles.

 

[passerby]

Since information is starting to come to light, one question, which is probably the most important question:

Any information about the battery life yet?

 

[V3]

Japanese giant listening to developers over RAM concerns?

Seriously how much more RAM can they fit in there ? IMO they can fit another 8-16 MB. But that will test their process. And might lower initial shipment.

Any information about the battery life yet?

If you look into it, under PSP for Movies, the UMD can do 4 hours for Standard quality, so I expect the battery life is at least 4 hours. I think music will gives the longest life, most likely > 12 hours. Gaming will probably be in between.

 

[marconelly!]

Seriously how much more RAM can they fit in there ? IMO they can fit another 8-16 MB. But that will test their process. And might lower initial shipment.

12M is really not much, though. Low/Mid-range Pocket PCs ship with 64MB RAM standard, and that's today, not one year in the future. Many games on Pocket PC require 8MB of free memory to work, and those are rather simplistic games, like Rayman and such. GBA at least has that big-ass cartridge that essentially works as an extra RAM because the access to it is so fast.

There would be a huge difference if they managed to put just 8MB more in there, btw. Difference that would mean we would get DC (maybe even PS2) quality looking scenes in games, compared to improved-N64 looking scenes. What good is the capability to render so many polys that PSP can, if there's not enough memory to store a scene nearly as complex to utilize that rendering power?

 

[jvd]

Seriously how much more RAM can they fit in there ? IMO they can fit another 8-16 MB. But that will test their process. And might lower initial shipment.

12M is really not much, though. Low/Mid-range Pocket PCs ship with 64MB RAM standard, and that's today, not one year in the future. Many games on Pocket PC require 8MB of free memory to work, and those are rather simplistic games, like Rayman and such. GBA at least has that big-ass cartridge that essentially works as an extra RAM because the access to it is so fast.

There would be a huge difference if they managed to put just 8MB more in there, btw. Difference that would mean we would get DC (maybe even PS2) quality looking scenes in games, compared to improved-N64 looking scenes. What good is the capability to render so many polys that PSP can, if there's not enough memory to store a scene nearly as complex to utilize that rendering power?

I thought pocket pcs have the memory like a laptop a small dimm you can put in ?

 

[Panajev2001a]

Marconelly... at 480x272 you need lower resolution textures and can pass with a bit less detail on environments without people noticing the difference in quality from DC and PS2 kind of graphics too much: also we have texture compression and support for HOS in HW ( and we have triangle strips and geometry compression for vertex data )... tons of things that the Nintendo 64 could not enjoy.

8 MB is half the main RAM of the Dreamcast and we are also working with data sets optimized for rendering at a ~2x lower resolution and a smaller screen ( not a 27'' CRT, but a 4.5'' TFT LCD ).

If HOS can be used decently for characters and parts of the environments ( I hope PSP supports subdivision-surfaces ) you would reduce by a good amount the space you need in main RAM evening the odds with the Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2 even more.

I see them pushing main RAM to 12 MB and leaving the MEdia Engine's RAM at 2 MB and the GPU's VRAM at 2 MB: this would make for a total of 16 MB of e-DRAM for the whole chipset.

I think there is a reason why Sony has given emulator out, but not hardware kits and I think this reason is because they really did listen to developers asking for more RAM ( before they asked for WiFi to be embedded wiht every PSP and something else about PSP's buttons set-up: Sony did please them by satisfying their requests both times ).

 

[Dave Baumann]

"Reliable sources" inform me that the earlier report of a memory secification has changed is now the case: eDRAM goes down, external RAM goes up. Although I've not heard actual figures the likely scenario is the eDRAM is halved while the off chip RAM is doubled.

 

[Paul]

"Reliable sources" inform me that the earlier report of a memory secification has changed is now the case: eDRAM goes down, external RAM goes up. Although I've not heard actual figures the likely scenario is the eDRAM is halved while the off chip RAM is doubled.

PSP has no External Memory to begin with.

It is all e-DRAM.

 

[Paul]

I thought pocket pcs have the memory like a laptop a small dimm you can put in ?

With Sony CLIE's you can insert a memory stick to expand your current memory as most of the programs can be loaded from a MS.

 

[marconelly!]

Dave, I am not aware PSP had any off-chip RAM in it's specs? It was supposed to have 8MB of EDRAM, 2MB VRAM, and 2MB of RAM for media procesor (not sure what that part of RAM really does)

I am also not sure how would the machine would work with three separate layers of RAM, each slower than the other? I thought the point was to keep all the textures and geometry in that 8MB EDRAM so that they can be quickly fed to buffer at VRAM many times per frame, much like it's done on the PS2 (although it would be automated this time around). Now if we have an off-chip RAM, is the smaller EDRAM some kind of interim? Do we need to upload textures and geometry to it so that it can pass them on to VRAM? How is that supposed to work? How do you decide what to keep in the main RAM and what in EDRAM?

I thought pocket pcs have the memory like a laptop a small dimm you can put in ?

Nope, they com pre-packaged with memory that is soldered to their motherboards (or otherwise provided on the user-inaccessible module inside the device) You can add memory by insterting CF and SD cards, and you can even install applications to that added memory, but that memory is generaly a lot slower than the integrated RAM.

 

[MfA]

2MB of RAM for media procesor (not sure what that part of RAM really does)

They might want to make it impossible for third party developers to snoop on the workings of the media processor.