PS3 OS Resources.

I can definitively answer that they have enough memory to do what they did. :p

Ok so that was a joke of course (though true!), but I don't know... I mean I myself haven't followed the topic as closely in the last couple of months, but wasn't around the turn of the year the last time we got a clear flag on some movement with the mem allocation on the dev kits? First when the MP3 playback thing occurred and/or shortly thereafter, I believe there was a cost one could incur to support certain new 'optionals' in-game, and it was near concurrent with a slight reduction in the overall set-aside.

I mean I guess I could search this stuff and find the specific references, but honestly I'm sure there are others who have this stuff on 'speed-dial' so to speak. I should archive myself actually when I know there's interesting info in a thread, but with being lazy and all... :)

(Uh, nevermid, I just did a search and my memories are from late 2007 vs 2008 - man the last year just flew by! Hell, things must be much better now.)
 
Yeah the optional features (e.g., YouTube video record, in-game MP3) require even more memory. But something like concurrent PlayTV record is supposed to work with all games. Even though it may not take up much memory in the final product (I don't know), I wonder if Sony needed to reserve more earlier while looking for the final solution.

Similarly, in-game XMB was introduced later as the Game OS memory footprint shrank. It's hard to see from outside whether Sony devs reserved a chunk "just in case" (or simply a development/debug version took up more space, or none of the above).
 
Somewhere on a thread recently, a respected contributor said " about 40 megs, now" and there was no backlash or claims he was off base. So I operate with that assumption.
 
patsu said:
Similarly, in-game XMB was introduced later as the Game OS memory footprint shrank. It's hard to see from outside whether Sony devs reserved a chunk "just in case" (or simply a development/debug version took up more space).
Click to expand...

Oh definitely, and I'm sure there's still some buffer in the OS yet. But as for the devs the required OS footprint can only go one way, so I don't think they need worry about a set-aside within game; they'll just not be beneficiaries of the additional later on. Stuff like in-game XMB was part of the reason for the original massive size; luckily, Sony managed to get it a little better than they gave themselves room for.

damienw said:
Somewhere on a thread recently, a respected contributor said " about 40 megs, now" and there was no backlash or claims he was off base. So I operate with that assumption.
Click to expand...

Damienw reading some of this older stuff now I see you've been a pretty steady follower of the story; anyway thanks for the reference, found the thread and I'll link it here:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=51889&page=2

(Patsu this is gonna be deja vu all over again for you I feel! :p )
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Carl B said:
(Patsu this is gonna be deja vu all over again for you I feel! :p )
Click to expand...

:LOL:

Carl B said:
But as for the devs the required OS footprint can only go one way, so I don't think they need worry about a set-aside within game; they'll just not be beneficiaries of the additional later on.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's why knowing the context together with the stated OS memory footprint is more interesting because it allows us to understand the past, present and predict what's next.
 
DeanA said:
You mean background recording? There's no application-side memory used for that at all..

Dean
Click to expand...

I guess PlayTV basically just streams the compressed TV-signal to the HD (maybe re-coding it?) while recording so it doesn´t need to go via the main memory.

It should be mentioned that playback of PS2 games does not work with PlayTV background recording, so obviously PS2 BC software of the 60 GB PAL skus makes heavy use of all 7 SPEs.

And Dean could you please pass on a request to the PlayTV devs?

I would love to get fully working TV schedules for the Swedish broadcasts. I know that you are not actively marketing PlayTV in the Scandinavian countries, but PlayTV is already fully translated into Swedish and it can´t be that much job making it work. I mean my new Bravia TV displays a far more complete TV schedule for the free channels than what PlayTV does at the moment. Pretty annoying.
 
Crossbar said:
I guess PlayTV basically just streams the compressed TV-signal to the HD (maybe re-coding it?) while recording so it doesn´t need to go via the main memory.

It should be mentioned that playback of PS2 games does not work with PlayTV background recording, so obviously PS2 BC software of the 60 GB PAL skus makes heavy use of all 7 SPEs.

And Dean could you please pass on a request to the PlayTV devs?

I would love to get fully working TV schedules for the Swedish broadcasts. I know that you are not actively marketing PlayTV in the Scandinavian countries, but PlayTV is already fully translated into Swedish and it can´t be that much job making it work. I mean my new Bravia TV displays a far more complete TV schedule for the free channels than what PlayTV does at the moment. Pretty annoying.
Click to expand...

It happens for Italy too and Italy is a supported country...
 
I believe the ps3 goes in a different mode when playing ps2 hardware, the same as with playback of dvd discs. So it's not really about the spu usage. Should also not record when playing ps1 software for that matter. Is this true? Because you should not be able to record while playing back a dvd in that case. Can anyone confirm this?
 
DeanA said:
You mean background recording? There's no application-side memory used for that at all..

Dean
Click to expand...

Cool ! I always want to know if it consumed memory bandwidth in any major way ? How does Sony and the devs accommodate it ? (If you can talk).


EDIT: Don't know why the KZ2 tech discussion thread get locked (instead of clearing out the dubious posts). But what is KDTree used for in KZ2 ?
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1274782&postcount=104

The only "tree" I saw is the bonsai in Radec's office.
 
I wonder how much of Sony's OS bloat is due to the underlying software they are leveraging, how much is due to Sony's design choices, and how much is due to compiler inefficiencies.

My impression is that the PS3's OS is based on the TRON operating system, as is common with many Japanese products. If it's Hypervisor->TRON->PS3 specific bits, that could perhaps take up a fair amount of room right there.

If it were just a matter of the operating system having unnecessarily large static allocations reserved to it, I'd think Sony would have squeezed that out by now.

GCC has improved a lot in the last 3 years, I wonder if Sony has been able to take advantage of the increasingly sophisticated optimizations that it can do now.

</content-free speculation>
 
[Smack forehead] Of course ! :LOL: I kept thinking about procedural trees.

Now it make sense. 20% SPU time for KD tree traversal and update in that scene (physics).
 
patsu said:
Cool ! I always want to know if it consumed memory bandwidth in any major way ? How does Sony and the devs accommodate it ? (If you can talk).
Click to expand...

All it's doing it transferring a raw MPEG2 stream from over the USB cable and dumping it onto the hard disk. No re-encoding is being done and even a really generous DVD quality MPEG2 transfer rate would be 1MB/s - hardly taxing for either USB or HDD bandwidth. BBC transmissions are around half that.

I'm sure I remember that initially PlayTV wouldn't record programs while you play games (a bit of a deal breaker when you think about it). Maybe at that point it actually was re-encoding the signal - perhaps producing a PSP compatible encode.
 
What kind of spu usage would encoding incur? The way I understand it, the SPUs are beasts at that type of job and I've always wanted that Tivo functionality that we thought we would get after that deal Sony made with them a few years back.

In fact, I've been thinking of putting Linux on my PS3 mainly for improving the speeds of my ripping/encoding. My main PC is a 2 gHz laptop Core 2 duo and it takes me a few hours to make a decent sd encode for an hour and a half movie or hour long sd tv show.

I'd like to speed it up and it also gives me another reason to pick up a new PS3 and HDTV by year's end.
 
damienw said:
What kind of spu usage would encoding incur? The way I understand it, the SPUs are beasts at that type of job and I've always wanted that Tivo functionality that we thought we would get after that deal Sony made with them a few years back.

In fact, I've been thinking of putting Linux on my PS3 mainly for improving the speeds of my ripping/encoding. My main PC is a 2 gHz laptop Core 2 duo and it takes me a few hours to make a decent sd encode for an hour and a half movie or hour long sd tv show.

I'd like to speed it up and it also gives me another reason to pick up a new PS3 and HDTV by year's end.
Click to expand...

It depends on too much to give you a simple answer... I don't know how advanced commercial codecs for CELL are yet, so I don't know how fast they are.

Encoding via Linux is still a chore, because no meaningful codec has any SPU support yet. x264 will get it some time (given that CELL will be around for a few years), but other than that, I doubt it (Mpeg2 is already fast enough on old PCs). There is however a project for Mplayer, which accelerates decoding of h264 streams, but that's playback, not recording, which is a different thing altogether.

And, I don't know how you set up your encoder, but with conservative settings (nothing fancy, because you won't need it mostly), my X2 3800+ can reencode SD PAL at a 1:1 ratio (1hr of material takes 1hr to encode) in dualpass mode with x264 with Handbrake in Linux. The same video takes 10 minutes for an encode into a PSP compatible format (single pass though).
 
patsu said:
Is that HD ? (i.e. is PlayTV HD aware or ready ?)
Click to expand...

It's SD. PlayTV is SD only as far as I know. I believe that PlayTV itself is simply a repackaged USB receiver - I seem to recall reading that people have got it running on PC using readily available drivers.
 
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