Sony's Next Generation Portable unveiling - PSP2 in disguise

[Aeoniss]

I posted this in the other thread mistakenly, so I will ask it here (I'm going through the older posts now too..)

Did we ever reach a consensus as to where the Vita stands vis a vis the consoles in terms of performance?

It's Cortex A9 Quad and SGX543MP4+ (x4)? It can seemingly push out games that are very close to PS3 quality.. And looking over the specs of the SGX it seems that it is a very close match if not slightly superior to the RSX.. And that's assuming the frequency is only 200Mhz base and not higher.

The machine also targets a considerably lower resolution and has 25% more RAM*.. And should have smaller buffers all around. Using the carts probably helps a good deal too- I cannot imagine the read speeds are anywhere close to as slow as DVD/BD-ROM.


*Of course, the actual OS resource levels are still an unknown apart from taking one of the cores away from the A9 Cortex Quad.

 

[see colon]

Using the carts probably helps a good deal too- I cannot imagine the read speeds are anywhere close to as slow as DVD/BD-ROM.

I wouldn't bet that the games sold have better read speed than common PC DVD/BR drives, and I'd also guess that they don't have better read speed than the current consoles. If memory serves, PS3 has a 2x BR drive, and 360 has a 12x (variable) DVD drive, which would give you something like 8MBps for PS3 and 8-16MBps for 360.

I could be wrong, it's been a while since I looked at the specs or the numbers. I'm also going off the assumption that the "carts" are really just some sort of read only flash memory. If all of my assumptions are correct, this would mean that the games would have to be on media that's as fast as class 10 SD cards to exceed current console read speeds.

They should have an advantage in access time, though.

 

[Helmore]

Just a small correction guys, but we're talking about 'cards' here, not 'carts'. Small difference in spelling, but it makes quite a difference in meaning. Yeah yeah, I know, I'm being a spelling nazi.

As for the kind of memory on those cards, I do believe they can also be written to by the PS Vita and that most cards will probably have some extra storage space just to allow save games to be stored on the card.

 

[Aeoniss]

Just a small correction guys, but we're talking about 'cards' here, not 'carts'. Small difference in spelling, but it makes quite a difference in meaning. Yeah yeah, I know, I'm being a spelling nazi.

As for the kind of memory on those cards, I do believe they can also be written to by the PS Vita and that most cards will probably have some extra storage space just to allow save games to be stored on the card.

This has been confirmed. They are read and write, using a set aside space (like 10%) for saves or what not is optional though- up to the developer.


Also the comments about the read speeds are waaaay off. Cards are much, much faster than optical media. Here's a table of all of Sony's previous memory cards and their read speeds:

Standard 2.5 MB/s (Megabyte, not bit)
PRO 20 MB/s
PRO Duo 20 MB/s
PRO-HG Duo 30 MB/s
Micro (M2) 20 MB/s
xC 60 MB/s


^ "xC" was their latest format (co-developed with sandisk) and the design is 'old'- it was announced in 2009.

It is likely the Vita cards are these type of cards or something a bit newer. So a read speed of some 60MB/s is probable.

Picture of the xC:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Memory_Stick_Micro.JPG

 

[Exophase]

Also the comments about the read speeds are waaaay off. Cards are much, much faster than optical media. Here's a table of all of Sony's previous memory cards and their read speeds:

Standard 2.5 MB/s (Megabyte, not bit)
PRO 20 MB/s
PRO Duo 20 MB/s
PRO-HG Duo 30 MB/s
Micro (M2) 20 MB/s
xC 60 MB/s


^ "xC" was their latest format (co-developed with sandisk) and the design is 'old'- it was announced in 2009.

It is likely the Vita cards are these type of cards or something a bit newer. So a read speed of some 60MB/s is probable.

Picture of the xC:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Memory_Stick_Micro.JPG

The problem with this speculation is that xC has an 8-bit interface, where PSVita's gamecards are clearly still 4-bit like Memory Stick Pro et al. You can tell this from both having 10 pins.

So you'd expect around 30MB/s still.

And your picture is of an M2 card, not xC. As evidenced by the "M2" printed on it and the "Memory Stick Micro" filename.

 

[Aeoniss]

The problem with this speculation is that xC has an 8-bit interface, where PSVita's gamecards are clearly still 4-bit like Memory Stick Pro et al. You can tell this from both having 10 pins.

So you'd expect around 30MB/s still.

And your picture is of an M2 card, not xC. As evidenced by the "M2" printed on it and the "Memory Stick Micro" filename.

Meh, I was just posting the image that was linked to that particular card type from Wikipedia. My bad.

30MB/s read speed is still very good, though. Well beyond what either console can do with their optical drive.

 

[Arwin]

Running Rayman on Vita's 16GB stick gives longer loadtimes than running Rayman on my PS3's 160GB HDD though. Not sure what to make of that ...

 

[Exophase]

Running Rayman on Vita's 16GB stick gives longer loadtimes than running Rayman on my PS3's 160GB HDD though. Not sure what to make of that ...

Just that harddrives are much faster than NAND chips, and why you need a bunch of NAND chips running in parallel to start competing with them.

 

[Aeoniss]

^yep

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Standard 2.5 MB/s (Megabyte, not bit)
PRO 20 MB/s
PRO Duo 20 MB/s
PRO-HG Duo 30 MB/s
Micro (M2) 20 MB/s
xC 60 MB/s

I stand partially corrected! I didn't realise base MemStick performance was that good. Stupidly excessive, as HD video needed now is only consuming 5 MB/s tops, so anything short of a pro-DSLR (which would use the fast CF) is unlikely to want such high speeds making the added cost redundant. But still, if Vita cards are 2x or more the performance of a C10 SD, Sony should be telling people as a justification. Put some numbers on and suddenly people won't mind so much. "How much did you pay for that 16 GBs?" asks the smug Class 4 SD card buyer with his cheap 16 GBs. "Three times what you paid, but it's ten times faster," replies the smugger Vita card buyer.

Of course that transfer speed is still probably useless, but owners would feel better having a justifiable, explained benefit. It's a shame a game load from SD card isn't a straight measure of transfer speed. The same game on different devices (Android and Vita) read from different cards might give a general idea of Vita memory card performance.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Grandmaster has released an investigation. Doesn't look good, and once again Sony are making things complicated and confused. As I mention in the comments, their PC software can cripple transfer rates in their HD camcorders, so it's not conclusive, but the performance in a game load is curious.

I'm not seeing 30+ megabytes a second really happening though.

 

[Arwin]

Grandmaster has released an investigation. Doesn't look good, and once again Sony are making things complicated and confused. As I mention in the comments, their PC software can cripple transfer rates in their HD camcorders, so it's not conclusive, but the performance in a game load is curious.

I'm not seeing 30+ megabytes a second really happening though.

Yeah, I didn't expect big speeds, because the HDD in the PS3 simply isn't that fast either (doubt that even gets 30+) and the Vita memstick just seems significantly slower than that.


Can't agree with this though:

where almost everyone else seems to get by just fine using SD cards

All of those other systems are hacked.

 

[Aeoniss]

Wipeout, for whatever reason, is notoriously slow on loads on Vita. I'd like to see other games tested- like Dynasty Warriors Next or Uncharted.

I know for a fact that Dynasty Warriors loads very, very promptly. It's also a fairy solid looking game as well.

Also, I wouldn't put it past the very poorly designed Content Manager for being a big part of the issue here either.

 

[Exophase]

Grandmaster has released an investigation. Doesn't look good, and once again Sony are making things complicated and confused. As I mention in the comments, their PC software can cripple transfer rates in their HD camcorders, so it's not conclusive, but the performance in a game load is curious.

I'm not seeing 30+ megabytes a second really happening though.

To be fair, game cards and memory cards are two different things. Not saying one actually performs differently than the other on Vita, but it's not impossible.

 

[Aeoniss]

Actually that's true. The memory cards and the Vita game cards are completely different looking- Grandmaster's analysis is probably being taken out of context here.

 

[Gitaroo]

I think on PSP, there a CFW that can actually unlock the memory card read speed. Sony might be doing the same to limit the speed on Vita?

 

[Npl]

I think on PSP, there a CFW that can actually unlock the memory card read speed. Sony might be doing the same to limit the speed on Vita?

thats actually using a driver from an early Sony firmware, which is faster but doesnt reliably work with bigger cards (>=8GB I think).
Why would it benefit Sony to artificially limit read speed anyway?

 

[Exophase]

thats actually using a driver from an early Sony firmware, which is faster but doesnt reliably work with bigger cards (>=8GB I think).
Why would it benefit Sony to artificially limit read speed anyway?

Power consumption, maybe they get much worse perf/W on higher speeds.

 

[Helmore]

Power consumption, maybe they get much worse perf/W on higher speeds.

Is the power consumption of these data cards that big compared to say the screen and/or the SoC? Another thing, how much would you gain in efficiency by artificially limiting transfer speeds?

That said, I can't really imagine that Sony would really limit transfer speeds on their memory cards, at least not without a very good reason.

 

[Gitaroo]

might have something to do with streaming, they want to make sure the all devs know the fixed range of speed the card can hit or they can audio syncing problem or something with different combination of cards. Think capcom said that megaman power up doesnt have a psn version because they cant get the game to work properly on the system. Ppl that rip the iso and dump it on their memory stick also said that the audio is out of sync.