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PS3 games list & SPE usages
- Thread starter MikeB
- Start date
Leidenfrost
Member
BrainZEROX said:
To be fair, a bunch of Ratchet cutscenes actually were produced on-the-fly. Sort of randomly, actually.
Not quite. MOST of Ratchet's cutscenes are realtime. If the framerate wasn't enough to clue you in, go ahead and check out the cutscene viewer from the menu. It only allows you to view pre-rendered scenes. The majority of the story scenes in Ratchet are not available in there and are realtime.
The pre-renders were captured at 30 fps and have slightly artifacting while the realtime cutscenes look exactly the same as the game and run at 60 fps (with occasional slowdown).
BrainZEROX
Member
Yes, I'm sure. If you finished Uncharted, check the gallery and play some cutscenes. You'll find compression artifacts around various edges in the picture. There aren't many of them because Naughty Dog made a wise use of the storage available on a bluray disc, but they exist. I think it's a smart approch from Naughty Dog because we win on every level: few loading times, cutscenes are consistant with ingame scenes, etc...bluheim said:
Edit> Dark 10x explained it better than I did
BrainZEROX
Member
Realtime cutscene are often very static so the PS3 does not need to load more data (except sound of course).MikeB said:
I think MGS4 will use the same technique and that's the reason why Kojima may need a dual layer bluray disk. Lots of veeeeeery long HD cutscene will easily consume gigabytes of data... And I'm fine with that!
MikeB> great work with this thread, I subscribed a while ago and it's always a pleasure to read. ***Bow***
DeathWasHere
Banned
will read in future.
Reading about how so many things that can be off loaded to the SPUs for parallel processing, freeing up the general Cell CPU and RSX GPU for other tasks the question is begged... Where are my 60fps PS3 games? Ridge Racer? GT5 sometimes? R&C? What else? MGS4? Now that the hardware has been out for a while and Sony continues to update their SDK and developers gain more and more experience... there should be no excuses.
SolidSnakex
Member
BrainZEROX said:
No, MGS4's cutscenes are entirely real time. If you catch some of the playthroughs you'll notice that Snake will have the same octocam pattern on during the cutscene as he did during the gameplay.
MrNyarlathotep
Banned
Grayman said:
I don't think 2 did, given you could substitute different character models at a whim in the theatre mode... I played 2 more recently than 3, but didn't 3 have you wearing the same camo in its scenes as you were ingame?
I'm pretty sure I did a bunch of cutsccenes in the raiden mask...
An older quote from Volatile Games (working on Eagle King for 360/PS3):
"The graphics capabilities of PS3 will, I think, be slightly above the absolutely top-end graphics cards on the PC, but you've got much more processing power in the box so you're going to see a lot more physics, a lot more generated geometry. With water ripples, for example - they're pretty much algorithms, you have a flat plane of triangles and you run some sort of mathematical algorithm over it to generate a surface rippling effect - well, you will have the processing power to do these sorts of generated geometry effects On PS3. You could actually put one chip aside just to do that..."
Source: Guardian Unlimited (January 2006)
"The graphics capabilities of PS3 will, I think, be slightly above the absolutely top-end graphics cards on the PC, but you've got much more processing power in the box so you're going to see a lot more physics, a lot more generated geometry. With water ripples, for example - they're pretty much algorithms, you have a flat plane of triangles and you run some sort of mathematical algorithm over it to generate a surface rippling effect - well, you will have the processing power to do these sorts of generated geometry effects On PS3. You could actually put one chip aside just to do that..."
Source: Guardian Unlimited (January 2006)
Regarding DiRT on the PS3, mostly audio related:
"The PS3 is so fast - tens of GigaFLOPs on each of seven CPUs available to us - that high-order Ambisonics suits it very well. Most of the optimisation effort went into the trigonometry needed to go from game-style orthogonal vectors and matrices to the azimuth and elevation model now standard for Ambisonics. After that, the encoder and decoder are very fast, especially as they parallelise well, without pipeline bottlenecks like division and tight operand dependencies.
Overall Ambisonics complements other aspects of nextGen PS3 game audio, like good quality sample-rate-conversion - rather than the noisy LERPs still sadly common on PCs - plus modern psychoacoustically-modelled decompression, and phase-coherent 512 band filtering on each voice. Theres so much CPU power on PS3 that all this, and multiple reverbs, can run on a single SPU (Synergistic Processing Element, an eighth of the PS3s Cell processor array) with time to spare.
There are six independent reverb units running in the PS3 version, versus two stereo ones on Xbox360. These are not just for reflections in tunnels or when you get close to trackside objects - they works beautifully for reflections from other vehicles too, and give exciting effects when the car goes out of control - the sort of emergent behaviour you look forward to getting when you combine several advanced systems in one game!"
"The HDMI 7.1 on PS3 already allows us to have six speakers in a regular hexagon, ideal for Ambisonics, without breaking the Blumlein stereo panning rules or Dolby cinema guidelines (so the front centre and sub are available for audio conceptually outside the soundfield, like co-driver calls, checkpoint notifications and front-end sounds)."
"Your best bet for the time being is to find a well-configured PS3 with HDMI in 7.1 on matched speakers, and hear the game respond to you directly. Its a lot of fun, especially if youre a good listener."
Source: Ambisonia.com
"The PS3 is so fast - tens of GigaFLOPs on each of seven CPUs available to us - that high-order Ambisonics suits it very well. Most of the optimisation effort went into the trigonometry needed to go from game-style orthogonal vectors and matrices to the azimuth and elevation model now standard for Ambisonics. After that, the encoder and decoder are very fast, especially as they parallelise well, without pipeline bottlenecks like division and tight operand dependencies.
Overall Ambisonics complements other aspects of nextGen PS3 game audio, like good quality sample-rate-conversion - rather than the noisy LERPs still sadly common on PCs - plus modern psychoacoustically-modelled decompression, and phase-coherent 512 band filtering on each voice. Theres so much CPU power on PS3 that all this, and multiple reverbs, can run on a single SPU (Synergistic Processing Element, an eighth of the PS3s Cell processor array) with time to spare.
There are six independent reverb units running in the PS3 version, versus two stereo ones on Xbox360. These are not just for reflections in tunnels or when you get close to trackside objects - they works beautifully for reflections from other vehicles too, and give exciting effects when the car goes out of control - the sort of emergent behaviour you look forward to getting when you combine several advanced systems in one game!"
"The HDMI 7.1 on PS3 already allows us to have six speakers in a regular hexagon, ideal for Ambisonics, without breaking the Blumlein stereo panning rules or Dolby cinema guidelines (so the front centre and sub are available for audio conceptually outside the soundfield, like co-driver calls, checkpoint notifications and front-end sounds)."
"Your best bet for the time being is to find a well-configured PS3 with HDMI in 7.1 on matched speakers, and hear the game respond to you directly. Its a lot of fun, especially if youre a good listener."
Source: Ambisonia.com
test_account
XP-39C²
This isnt exactly about SPE usage, but anyone knows how much RAM the PS OS uses when you play the games? All i can find is this page:
http://www.innerbits.com/blog/2007/08/21/ps3-180-sdk
But its for 1.80 (i guess the SDK versions follow the firmware versions, or?).
http://www.innerbits.com/blog/2007/08/21/ps3-180-sdk
But its for 1.80 (i guess the SDK versions follow the firmware versions, or?).
test_account said:
There have been rumours of dramatic reductions of reserved memory for version 2.0, but IMO they are likely fake as Sony is still planning on adding many crucial features to the PS3's GameOS. Every bit of reserved RAM you give to developers you cannot suddenly take back later on without breaking games with future firmware updates.
Although note every PS3 comes with a default harddrive which helps with regard to memory usage for games, similar like a harddrive can be used as virtual memory for other systems and like Insomniac pointed out streaming game engines (from Blu-Ray disc) reduce system memory requirements as well.
With regard to memory usage for the current version of the SDK, devs so far have been tight-lipped.
MikeB said:
I bet that as soon as (if) Sony can get the memory usage down to 360 levels no one will shut them up about it.
For what it's worth, "Surfer girl" "reported" 54MB total mem usage in recent SDK's, if i remember correctly. So there you have it, an uncertain hearsay of a rumour.
test_account
XP-39C²
MikeB said:
Ok, thanks for the info
I wondered because i know that Xbox 360's OS uses 32MB RAM, but still the multiplatorm games looks relatively identical on both PS3 and 360. Is the 360 version gimped to be able to be on PS3 or is PS3 more powerful that it can preform so to say the same gfx with less RAM?test_account said:Ok, thanks for the info
Both systems have different memory architectures. The 360 uses a shared bank of 512 memory while the PS3 has a split bank of 256/256. There are advantages and disadvantages to both implementations.
That's a simplified explanation, since it does not take into account things such as bandwidth and so on.
test_account
XP-39C²
SRG01 said:
True, but still, PS3 should have less RAM overall to work with overall. I also though that the way 360 uses the RAM was better than how the PS3 does it since on 360 you (as you mentioned) shared RAM.
test_account said:
No, like I said, both have their advantages and disadvantages.
The advantage of the 360 is that you can easily bump yourself up beyond the 256 limit, allowing for larger textures if your CPU doesn't need much memory. On the other hand, having a unified memory bank means you cannot access memory by the CPU and GPU simutaneously.
Also note that typical computing also relies on split architecture to work. (And of course, there are other things I'm glossing over, such as cross-bank access, latencies, and so forth.)
test_account
XP-39C²
Ok, so the 360's cant access both system and GPU RAM at the same time? I'm not so into this, but how does that work?
commariodore64
Member
What was this thread about? :lol
test_account
XP-39C²
commariodore64
Member
oh what the hell....I'll bite.
I think it's been pretty well known that most devs state the 360 has more ram available and this directly relates to the higher-level of texture quality in many games.
I think it's been pretty well known that most devs state the 360 has more ram available and this directly relates to the higher-level of texture quality in many games.
test_account said:
Let me try explaining it again:
Code:
360:
CPU GPU
| |
\/ \/
|---------------------------------------------|
PS3:
CPU GPU
| |
\/ \/
|---------------------| |----------------------|Sorry for the horrible ASCII art, but I hope that makes the point clear.
commariodore64 said:
Past 360 games had better textures because of technology implementations. When your CPU only uses around 100MB of data, then of course there is going to be more room for texture memory.
On the other hand, high bandwidth on the PS3 allows for texture streaming (see: Uncharted and many future games). It's a solution that is more technologically difficult to implement, but the tradeoff is worth it.
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
Uncharted has a few (but very few) fully realtime rendered cutscenes as well. For example, one when Drake gets the spyglass and looks across the sea to the ruined building. There's few short scenes like that which are realtime, you can tell easily if you change to a different outfit/character, while you play.dark10x said:
I think he was commenting about "loading and decompression" part, which the game does pretty transparently, even if you skip the cutscene instantly. I think the game streams, decompresses and caches data (to a 2GB swap file) constantly, no matter if it's playing cutscene or not. Of course, having videofiles for cutscenes helps, as it's probably a more condensed read from the disc than if it was realtime rendered.BrainZEROX said:
commariodore64
Member
SRG01 said:
At what cost? Also - having textures stored in RAM is MUCH quicker and has no hit on the CPU, correct? So, while texture streaming is a great thing (Many current 360 and PS3 engines implement it to varying degrees) it is not as efficient or as desirable as having physical RAM to spare due to the hits taken elsewhere in engine performance (where the spe's come in handy - but require RAM as well to use)
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I've made my share of mistakes) but The PS3 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and 25.6 GB/s of RDRAM bandwidth for a total system bandwidth of 48 GB/s where Xbox 360 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and a 256 GB/s of EDRAM bandwidth for a total of 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth.
commariodore64 said:
The superhigh bandwidth of the PS3 pretty much ensures that the streaming performance hit is negligible. (ie. with respect to the number of cycles needed to do a job) Note that each of the SPUs have local stores, which means it is much faster than DMA and, combined with streaming, it's pretty much a monster.
not all RAM usage is textures and 360 engines are very limited by what they can in terms of streaming do due to some 360's not having HDD's and inconsistent DVD speed/seek rates.
SPE's are ideal for texture streaming without taking up PPU time.
the ps3's main RAM problem is the amount the OS requires (50mb i hear) although this is rumoured to be improving, coupled with VRAM (equivalent to 170mb extra according to insomniac) then this should be becoming less of a issue.
sadly it seems some 3rd party devs just aren't interesting in pushing things in the same way devs like insomniac are, i really hope R2 embarrasses many of the 3rd party port companies purely to get them to buck there ideas up and improve for everyone's sake.
SPE's are ideal for texture streaming without taking up PPU time.
the ps3's main RAM problem is the amount the OS requires (50mb i hear) although this is rumoured to be improving, coupled with VRAM (equivalent to 170mb extra according to insomniac) then this should be becoming less of a issue.
sadly it seems some 3rd party devs just aren't interesting in pushing things in the same way devs like insomniac are, i really hope R2 embarrasses many of the 3rd party port companies purely to get them to buck there ideas up and improve for everyone's sake.
Zabka said:
You can stream either from the HDD or the BD. I don't see why you would do the latter though, since it is better to cache to the HDD for faster seek/access times.
But really, it's not really a bottleneck. If the PS3 is capable of outputting 1080p video bitrates, then I'm not too worried. And besides, the BD and DVD drives are comparable in speeds too.
Zabka said:
In and of itself, or compared to the 360?
For dual-layered 360 titles (basically all titles at this point), it runs at 8x DVD (not 16x). The average transfer rate isn't dramatically higher than that of BD.
Regardless, most devs cache on the HDD since its included on all PS3's ... so its kind of moot.
If anything, texture streaming is more complicated on the 360 (at least getting it into RAM) ... since the engine must contend with variable rate transfers from the optical drive, as well as a non-mandatory HDD.
On the PS3 side of things, BD supports constant transfer rates and always has an HDD.
commariodore64
Member
SRG01 said:
RSX only has a 22.4GB/s link to its local memory bandwidth, which is less than 60% of the memory bandwidth of the GeForce 7800 GTX. In other words, it needs that additional memory bandwidth from the Cells memory controller to be able to handle more texture-bound games. If a good portion of the 15GB/s downstream link from the Cell processor is used for bandwidth between the Cells SPEs and the RSX, the GPU will be texture bandwidth limited...
I always took from this that the bandwidth issue was a catch22? Please explain how this is not?
commariodore64
Member
Onix said:
Can you give me the correct info on this?