VF5 on PS3 thanks to NVIDIA?

Yeah but then PC3200 has a bandwidth of what, 3.2gb/s? (6.4 dual channel)
or does it matter?

 

It doesn't matter. The arcade version uses 1.5GB of RAM, the PS3 version will only have 1/3rd that amount to use. The bandwidth is pretty much irrelevent, the problem is the arcade version has a full Gig of data that will not fit into the PS3's RAM.

 

Tough to say. Is there some fat in the code that could be trimmed? I'm sure. Point is taking a game that was designed with 1gb/256mb in mind and porting it to 256/256 is not a snap your fingers kind of thing and I expect some pluses some minuses.

Kinda like a ps3 to 360 port or vice versa

 

Based on what?

Was it?

 

There, I just fixed that for you.

 

it's not about the code (it's a different architecture anyway, RISC ISA at that - code size will differ from that alone), it's the assets that'd take the trimming. one apporach they can (and possibly will) take is to make use of the big ALU advantage of both the RSX and cell and actually do some stuff procedurally and in-place, that was previously in pre-made assets and/or buffered in core mem. otherwise it's all draconian compression schemes and drops of individual assets and/or asset fidelity (if we assume sega were using the lindbergh to the max).

and welcome on-board, Angelcurio - nice 1st post!

 

How much data is needed? These are limited environments, fixed position, 2 character graphics. How are they filling up a gig of RAM with assets? From screenshots, they're not rendering even 720p. The need for lots of uber-highres textures doesn't seem to be there.

 

*shrug* you'd have to ask sega r&d about that. one thing i'd venture to guess is that the arcade original keeps as much stuff cached in core RAM as possible, stuff that otherwise would've been kept on the medium, thus allowing real snappy scene transitions.

the need for uber-highres textures depends entirely on the cameras setups - up close and remote views, fly-bys, well, you get the point. i'd again venture to guess (never done a fighter myself) that in a fighter you may often need textures of similar to viewpoirt resolution - often scene objects get up close and personal. factor in the little texture reuse (one of the things i love about fighters is that they can go full wild about scene details and nobody's gonna slap them across their wrists) and i'd say that a modern fighter is on the texture-res-heavy side. not in the same category as carmack's next uber textures but still.

 

That's something I was wondering. Is it as much to speed up gameplay and avoid loading, like having all characters loaded ready for selection and play, instead of loading them off disk as needed? Also, though there's a GB in there, is V5 using it all up, or is that for other bigger games and V5 gets away with using less?

Some of the screenies are pretty close-up on the people. I can see potential for big maps there especially with close-camera shots. Some of the other detail looks quite coarse to me though, like some of the ground textures. There's not a huge amount of geomtery either. The bump grounds look to be flat rectangles with parallax maps, and the size ofg the cracks looks really iffy when the character should obviously be losing their foot into them!

I'm not really sure how Arcade hardware is used relative to PC or console hardware, but I have a nagging feeling some of those resources are there to provide a smoother experience rather than throw more graphics and sounds at you. And I don't really know how to approximate memory usage looking at a screenshot either!

 

I apologize - by "code" I meant game "guts" in general.

Nesh - what is your point exactly? That vf5 is not scratching the surface of lindburgh and will be simple for ps3 to run? I never said it was pushing anything and in fact I think I said I expect more from both machines. My only point was that IF they coded the game for lindburgh it will take same adjusting to get it on ps3.

And to thenefariousone - I meant I expect some pluses and minuses in ps3-360 ports as well. Not a reference to ram usage just a general observation.

 

I think the most you could expect would be a conversion that is very close to the arcade, but not a perfect conversion.

edit: somewhat worse in some areas, somewhat better in other areas. Sega has claimed arcade perfect on arcade to home conversions that are vastly, vastly more downgraded than VF5 will be, so, Sega will be looking very good.

 

yes, my guess'd be that if the game core functionality left any memory resources vacant the guys eventually used that for extra speed caching.

it could be the case as well, but don't forget the arcade medium has a bit stricter requirements for load times - basically they're not tolerated much if any. simply because in the arcade/amusement business you can't allow your cabbinets to waste playtime by the bucketloads common for the their home counterparts.

well, i've seen only one video of the title and it was low res, so i have no memories of any distincitve visual flows/indicators that made an impression on me then.

yes, you're absolutely right about that. arcade games are about the smoothness of experience and addictivness of gameplay. a title that is nothing more than a dumb, pretty show has low chances to get to the arcade halls. whereas the home console business has its publishers, the arcades/amusemenet business has its arcade operators, who can be at least as picky as the home-side publishers, given that the former have the luxury to do their lineup filtering based on actual live arcade halls statistics, rather than on market predictions : )

no, don't get me wrong - i'm not sure anybody knows how to do that : ) surely one could tell many technical bits by looking at the visuals a title outputs but overall memory consumption is stretching it. if you have the experience from the field you may come up with a statistical guestimate of the order of magnitude of resources a given scene may be using but that's as good as a car mechanic trying to guess an unknown engine's fuel consumption simply judging by the looks of the car hosting the engine : )

 

Its a PC most likely with AGP, so my guess the graphic assets that are going to be render would need to be mostly in that 256 MB GPU memory for good performance. So the graphic assets for 2 characters and a stage need to mostly fit into that 256 MB minus what ever taken by buffers.

The 1 GB of memory is left for OS, sound, animation data, game related data, replay, other graphic assets that's not going to be rendered just to speedup loading.

They probably can get away with this because all the actions will take place inside a square ring no bigger than 20m x 20m.

 

...

There's a lot of incorrect speculations in this thread.

Concerning the RAM, there's some important factors to remember.
First of all, Arcade machine can't rely on visible long loadings, that's why the modern system, using optical based storage, have a lot of data, if not all, loaded into the main system RAM.
Secondly, as V3 pointed out, Lindbergh is nothing but a PC and as such all teh graphical data needed for the rendered scene has to be loaded into the video RAM (256MB in this case).

In fact and as a matter of concrete example, Naomi was the Arcade version of the Dreamcast, it had twice the main system RAM and twice teh video RAM the DC had.
Yet, the DC received perfect port of Arcade games. For the former reason I previously pointed. And given that Sega's AMs rarely, if ever, compress the textures they use on their Arcade games, the DC's lack of video RAM compared to Naomi was made a non issue by compressing the said textures (using SimonF's favorite: VTC) on the DC.

Also, second example, Chihiro, that is the Arcade version of the Xbox, do also boast more RAM than the Xbox, it said that the Outrun 2 board has 512MB of RAM, that's 8 time what the Xbox has, yet Outrun 2 on Xbox is Arcade perfect. The visible differnce being the loading times of the Xbox version.


Now, both Lindbergh and the PS3 shares the same amount of video RAM: 256MB. Add to that that the PS3 architecture can allow to use XDR for video related things if really needed (which is not in this case).

Concerning the CPU, simply put there's no way VF5 is CPU bound on Lindbergh, the game is still a two player fighter. The only way for the game to be CPU bound is if it's being used for graphical work, in which case Cell should do a better at it than a P3.


Therefore, in conclusion, I see no technical reasons, as far as the hardware is concerned, for anything else but a perfect port of VF5 on PS3. Actually, the PS3 version could be upgraded given that RSX has a lot more Shader processing capabilities than the 6800 found in Lindbergh, and at the minimum they could turn AA on on the PS3 version.
Now, of course, I precised "as far as the hardware is concerned", because there's still the possibilty that the coding part of the thing is not able to deliver an Arcade perfect version due to the possibility that the team doesn't have enough development time to master the PS3 programming environment. (Note that I don't cite the obligatory "Or maybe the devs just suck" because I refuse to think that the AM2 wouldn't be good enough, the guys are still up here, if something goes wrong it would be only because they did lack of time, and also because I'm still an AM2 fan ).

 

Lindbergh does have a higher VRAM bandwidth and greater pixel fillrate.

 

Yeah, Lindbergh has a barely better Pixel Fillrate and a 256bit bus @500MHz, nevertheless I don't see a 6800 game running in 1280x720 with no AA maximizing theses.

 

And it's likely that a smaller proportion of RSX's bandwidth will be occupied with non-framebuffer activity than on a 6800 - there's probably still a gap, but not necessarily one that a straight comparison of their paper bandwidth would suggest.

 

Generally speaking a developer would play to the system strenghts, and something that was targetted for 6800 would almost certainly have shorter shaders and be more reliant on pixel rate than something that was designed for RSX.

 

Thats actually not true VF3TB had a lot of graphical features missing, cloth physics and better textures to name a few.

It' wasn't obviously noticeable (especially if you hadn't played the arcade version), but i remember you could unlock video's from the arcade version and view them on the dreamcast version of the game.

 

Virtua Fighter 3 and VF3tb were not made on Naomi, they were on Model 3. hat's why an exact arcade conversion didn't happen.