Unfortunately it's the latter
Normally I'd just suggest designing it out, but the user controlled camera doesn't allow that alas.
RSX architecture and cost...
- Thread starter SOcean2forever
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Unfortunately it's the latter
Normally I'd just suggest designing it out, but the user controlled camera doesn't allow that alas.The two custom aspects I have heard about are larger texture and post transform cache. Do you know of any others?
.Melchiah.
Regular
Why?
To my knowledge PSP's CPU clock speed was increased and the developers utilized it for God of War.
Then what happened to all the people with older PSP's that wanted to play the game?
inefficient
Veteran
The PSP's CPU was always designed for 333 mhz operation. The only reason why they down clocked it to 222mhz was for battery life reasons.
RSX running at 500mhz is most likely for yeild reasons. And even if they could increase the clock speed and still have a lower failure rate than the 360, doesn't mean they should.
.Melchiah.
Regular
AFAIK, the increase was done via a software update.
TheBlackLodge
Newcomer
They have to wait for it to come out.
With the PSP it's a software restriction thats capping the CPU speed. All PSP's will be able to run it with v3.5 + firmware.
With the PSP it's a software restriction thats capping the CPU speed. All PSP's will be able to run it with v3.5 + firmware.
inefficient
Veteran
All PSP can run at 333mhz since FW 3.0. In fact the PS1 emulator already runs in 333mhz mode.
.Melchiah.
Regular
It would perhaps be unlikely, but impossible? After all, RSX was supposed to be running at 550MHz before the launch.
Then I guess it depends on whether RSX is software restricted to 500Mhz (which I find extremely unlikley).
If its hardware limited to 500Mhz then the only option would be to have 2 versions of the PS3 on the market. And since developers can't alienate the users with the slower version, they would always develop based on the slower performance. Thus the faster PS3 would be wasted, as well as costing Sony more money.
Is it mainly down to particles/flares/other screenspace fiends or your volume scene shadows?joker454 said:Unfortunately it's the latter
There's room for considering lower-resolution rendering with most of this stuff (unless it's already done, and this is inspite of it), artifacts can be minimal or in some cases(like volumes) even visually pleasing.
But IIRC you mentioned softening volumes before, so you may be doing this already?
I find this a bit fishy, why isn´t the battery life no longer an issue on the older PSPs. Are the owners supposed to upgrade their batteries for these new games or don´t they care about the battery life any longer?
Some rumour at the time of when the down-clock was revealed claimed it was for heat/noise reasons, the high fan speed that was required generated to much noise. i.e. they wanted a quiet console, not really surprising if you want to use it as a blu-ray player. It may just have been smoke and mirrors and it was a yield issue as you suggest.
I am pretty sure the GPU and Video RAM clock is all setup by software, just like its PC counterpart. It´s also possible they test the GPU and RAM at higher speeds in the manufacturing tests, i.e. the console may be higher speced than its current use. As they released the Folding@home client which runs 24/7 on many thousands of units, Sony must be extremely confident in the quality of the PS3 hardware.
Only Sony knows if there is some performance head room left and if there is, we will not know until they decide to reveal it.
Im sure it was for manufacturing yeilds. The cooler inside the PS3 should be able to handle a RSX at 550MHz without to much added noise. I think (not sure) around that time the yields for a 550MHz 7800GTX (G70) was quite low compared to lower clocked versions of the same chip, hence the prices.
Yes. Or no. Ummm, they don't care. The option for higher performance, shorter battery life has now been made available. In the early days the cap made some sense to keep spec sheets up. Now PSP can sell itself on brand awareness and features, battery drain when playing games isn't such an important consideration. There's also the option of longer life batteries.
And the new PSP's are no better off. Although they are less power hungry overall, they have a smaller battery with less charge, so don't offer longer play-time than the old PSP.
As mentioned, RSX won't be upclocked. If it's not hardware locked and the timing can be changed in older systems, you'd still have to worry about system stability the same overclocking a GPU. Splitting the user base is pointless. That extra 10% tops increase isn't going to fetch much notable gains in game to make it worth bothering with as a developer, when the vast majority of install base can't see those benefits.
The G70 in the 7800GTX was on 110 nm.
The RSX (the first one) was on 90 nm.
Whatever that may mean to your theory.
However, the G71 in the 7900GTX was on 90 nm.
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I believe developers will be allowed to take advantage of the extra DRAM to cache some data from the disk so future games may have better battery life on the new PSPs.
That is a valid argument, but in the end it comes down to what spec it was manufactured to. If it is really down-clocked from some higher clock frequencies that it has passed during manufacturing tests then I don´t see the problem.
Given the fact that some graphic cards are bundled with over-clocking software to be used by happy amateurs, this is not really dangerous business, it rarely damages the hardware even when the happy amateur runs amok. Of course that is not same the type of "over"-clocking we are talking about for the PS3, but I hope you get my point.
The cooling system of the PS3 seems to have a few notches left, i.e. the fan speed can be significantly increased from the current level. People may of course find it annoying if their quite PS3 suddenly starts making more noise when playing certain games, but that may not be more annoying than the PSP owners that suddenly drain their batteries faster when playing certain games.
inefficient
Veteran
They care less about battery life now.
If all early games were running at 333mhz mode the PSP would have become notorious as the handheld you could not play more more than 2 hours at a time without a recharge. It would have really hurt the repuation of the system.
The orginal only lasted for about 3hrs max of heavy gaming and people complained about that. If it was only 2 hours it would have been a tougher sale.
Now that there is a sizeable library of 222mhz PSP games, I think it is pretty safe for Sony to start releasing 333mhz games. People who have launch model PSPs from 3 years back can only be overjoyed to see games like GOW coming out that push the system 33% harder than the previous limit.
Minor correction, that was G71 in the 79xx series.
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