PS3 OS Resources.

[Shifty Geezer]

I think that joker makes fair points. As the 360 continues to maintain its position as lead platform in most cases and the 360's online service's feature-set is considered the standard, the PS3 continues to suffer. It's very clear (at least to me) that when a game is designed for the PS3 from the ground up this memory deficiency isn't nearly as relevant.

I disagree. 24 MBs lost for Friend's list or whatever is still memory lost, even for 1st party titles. WH is missing how much extra space in order to have friend support and voice chat? The major reference to MS IMO is because they are demonstrating these features can be present and common in an effective manner with a small footprint. Why is a friend's list any megabytes at all?! It's a list of names and maybe some icons and some data downloaded from the servers. I can't think what other info they'd need. A friend list of 200 names in 20 MBs is 100kb of data. That's a hell of a lot of raw data if you haven't got pictures and sounds.

I would much rather Sony require less RAM for services freeing more for the game, regardless of what any other platforms do!

 

[Scott_Arm]

I disagree. 24 MBs lost for Friend's list or whatever is still memory lost, even for 1st party titles. WH is missing how much extra space in order to have friend support and voice chat? The major reference to MS IMO is because they are demonstrating these features can be present and common in an effective manner with a small footprint. Why is a friend's list any megabytes at all?! It's a list of names and maybe some icons and some data downloaded from the servers. I can't think what other info they'd need. A friend list of 200 names in 20 MBs is 100kb of data. That's a hell of a lot of raw data if you haven't got pictures and sounds.

I would much rather Sony require less RAM for services freeing more for the game, regardless of what any other platforms do!

I agree with cutting down memory requirements through optimization/efficiency, but not removing them.

 

[patsu]

I would much rather Sony require less RAM for services freeing more for the game, regardless of what any other platforms do!

Yap !

24 MBs lost for Friend's list or whatever is still memory lost, even for 1st party titles.

We have no idea whether it's still 24 Mb though. If they could shrink the base OS footprint, they should be able to shrink the optional packages too. Like you said, there is no good reason why such a large chunk is needed.

 

[Aeoniss]

It doesn't matter if it still is. The XMB now serves the purpose of the "Friend's list". the feature was incorporated...

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Rfom(1) had the universal friends list (24MB) and it was only active within a menu screen (not in-game) so the resource requirement was moot in those situations anyway- even less so now that you can do it via XMB.

Example:

Go back into those games. You can still boot up the "Universal Friends list" from the game- or you can still just press the PS button and bring it up.

24MB =/= In-Game absorption of memory which is taken from developers in this case- only within a menu screen where it was enabled so far as I can tell.

Now it's been nixed all together.

 

[inefficient]

I'm thinking that they should have just put in a memory expansion module into the PS3 like the N64. Memory is so cheap. Even if it was XDR I'm sure they could have worked out an affordable price.

It just seems to be a waste of time and R&D money to fuss over dozens of MBs of ram when memory is such a cheap commodity these days.

An additional $20 or something for an extra 512MB or ram. for example. That is cheap is enough that just like they N64 they could have forced gamers to buy it in order to play certain AAA games like Majora's Mask.

There were even some N64 games that would still run without the memory module but minus some features or a lower resolution or something.

 

[one]

Why is a friend's list any megabytes at all?!

I guess the data structure for a friend list itself is not so huge while modules it loads are huge and many. To maintain a friend list, you need network connection, synchronization, icon loader, etc. If all those modules loaded in a chain are not shared with other functions for some security reason, it gets worse. If these modules are shared with other features, subsequent loading of such a feature may not require its full memory requirement. For example, if the video chat feature already loads some of the modules the friend list uses, subsequent loading of the friend list feature may not require full 24MB. But it's not predictable for a user code. The safest figure in the spec sheet is 24MB.

If this is the case, they can optimize each feature by making it less generic in its structure, not using library modules that contain unused parts.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There are some good suggestions regards actual RAM usage of the optional modules. Sadly we'll get no answer and can only hypothesize on what the actual burden to developers is. And even more sadly, that range seems to lie from 30 MBs to 80 MBs, even more potentially. I don't see a way to get even a ballpark figure. Or even what league the ballpark is in!

 

[Aeoniss]

I most sincerely doubt it's anything close to 80MB at this point..

You guys do recall the Uncharted doc right?

That's how we got the "54MB OS" for last year. That's the only amount of memory that was left unused by Naughty Dog.

We also know it's been CUT since then. Some day 10MB others (such as myself) seem to think more along the lines of 20MB or so.

.. True we don't know how many "Modules" are being used in Uncharted, but it's safe to say that it was still within "That ballpark" last year. This year it's even smaller..

 

[Dargakis]

I most sincerely doubt it's anything close to 80MB at this point..

You guys do recall the Uncharted doc right?

That's how we got the "54MB OS" for last year. That's the only amount of memory that was left unused by Naughty Dog.

We also know it's been CUT since then. Some day 10MB others (such as myself) seem to think more along the lines of 20MB or so.

.. True we don't know how many "Modules" are being used in Uncharted, but it's safe to say that it was still within "That ballpark" last year. This year it's even smaller..

yeah but uncharted does not have online mode or any of that

 

[Aeoniss]

I was just using that as an example. You'd probably have to throw in 8MB for Voice Chat and etc (maybe that's cut down?).

So it would still (I would think) be in the 30-40MB range for a basic package.

 

[frostynugs]

We're below that now; the last reliable snapshot of the OS put it at 43MB for what I'm going to call the "default" size, and seemingly you can further abandon functionality if you choose to do so in order to bring it lower for your game's purposes.

More recent views of the footprint are available earlier in the thread. Newcomers to this thread are reading through it I hope!

I've always wondered what they had managed to trim the OS down to as of the latest updates. Glad to hear it isn't as bad as it used to be. What sort of features can they trim down at their will? I would imagine custom soundtracks being one, but do you know of any others?

BTW, XBD, haven't heard from you in forever! you should swing by the old site to say hi to everyone, we all miss you! so much has changed since you left. drop by when you get a chance and say hi to the old school regulars.

 

[patsu]

Welp, the last few days I saw xbd on XMB, he's stuck in Eye of Judgment defending his castle and Elven maidens. May have to wait a few more days for him to come out.

EDIT: Oh wait, I believe he's now in California near GDC for a friend's wedding. Here's hoping he got some dev interviews set up.

 

[JPT]

When are we getting game launching abilities for every multiplayer game in the PS3 library? Why is it that the most basic of features for both the XMB and HOME get prioritized and delivered before all the extra stuff?

1) XMB - Voice Chat across games
2) XMB - Voice messaging(30 sec clip)
3) HOME - Game Launching for all games

Deliver what the fans want first and foremost then surprise us with all this Xi stuff.

CydoniaX replied on March 23, 2009 at 12:32 pm

All that stuff is still in development, game launching started with Warhawk and should be supported by all future game spaces now. It takes time, but we haven’t forgotten about all the stuff that our users really want!

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/03/23/xi-has-begun/comment-page-1/#comment-193457

Which could indicate that Voice chat will not be an optional module anymore, but be a standard part of the OS.

 

[JardeL]

Uh-oh

CydoniaX replied on March 24, 2009 at 3:47 pm

Guys, some clarification seems to be needed on my above comment, apologies for being misleading. I was talking about voice chat for Home in general being worked on, not specifically about voice chat across games or voice messaging on the XMB. I can see how my quick answer was taken as a confirmation on all 3 items, but this is not the case.

...

 

[obonicus]

Uh-oh

...

Makes more sense, though. Sony wants folks to use HOME. Would they really undercut the few globally-appealing features it has?

 

[JardeL]

We know that PS3 OS works on a SPE ... And we also know that SPE is not a general purpose CPU , right ?.. I mean you cant run a Linux on a SPE ... So I wonder if this voice chat is too complicated for PS3 OS , which runs on a SPE , to handle ... Would it be possible if PS3 OS ran on PPU ?..

 

[scificube]

We know that PS3 OS works on a SPE ... And we also know that SPE is not a general purpose CPU , right ?.. I mean you cant run a Linux on a SPE ... So I wonder if this voice chat is too complicated for PS3 OS , which runs on a SPE , to handle ... Would it be possible if PS3 OS ran on PPU ?..

An SPU can do whatever you want it to except run the OS. It's a matter of speed about what you want to run on an SPE.

An SPU doesn't run the OS...the OS reserves SPU time for it sole use.

The PPU already *DOES* run the OS.

The problem with implementing voice chat has nothing to do with SPU time being reserved by the OS. The issue has little to do with the hardware itself at all.

 

[NeoTechni]

Everything I've read says PS3's OS runs on an SPU. Including official documents.

 

[DeanA]

Everything I've read says PS3's OS runs on an SPU. Including official documents.

You *really* need to find better reading material then.

The short answer is that it utilises both PPU and SPU resources based on what's going on.

Dean

p.s. The long answer (ie: exactly what the OS uses in terms of threads, PPU/SPU placement of code, memory etc) won't be forthcoming from me, for obvious reasons.

 

[NeoTechni]

You *really* need to find better reading material then.

You can't get any better than official documents. I've even spoken with developers, none of them ever mentioned it running on the PPU