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Sony Says Nobody Will Ever Use All the Power of a PS3
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Dec 20, 2006 10:00 AM
from the they-never-heard-of-the-robsort-algorithm dept.
from the they-never-heard-of-the-robsort-algorithm dept.
Tighthead Prop writes "Sony executive Phil Harrison has made some brash comments about the Cell processor and the PlayStation 3. Harrison says that the current PS3 game lineup is using less than half of the machines power, adding that 'nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capacity.' Is he right? 'The major reason Harrison wants to hype up the "unlimited" potential of the PS3's architecture is to downplay comparisons between games running on Sony's console and Microsoft's Xbox 360. The two systems are not completely dissimilar: they both contain a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz, both have similarly-clocked GPUs, and both come with 512 MB of RAM.'"
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Sony Says Nobody Will Ever Use All the Power of a PS3
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This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.electroblog.com/)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.otis.org/)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://insidewoodland.com/)
Will anyone use 100% of the CPU(s)?
AND 100% of the GPU?
AND 100% of the RAM?
If not, Sony can always say they aren't using 100% of the system- so they game didn't live up to its potential.
Show me a game on any system that uses 100% of the resources, and I'll show you a game that hangs like mad and runs like crap.
Once again Sony comes out with an idiotic statement that they think will impress the public.
(Admittedly, the article was
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Insightful)
Guess that means it's impossible for a game to "live up to it's full potential"...
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.router12.net/)
FYI (Score:5, Informative)
Think of it this way replacing 4mb L2 cash with 4 GB L2 cache would speed up most games, however spending that money on several components would be a better use for that same cash. The PS3 is designed to be flexible so you can use the cell to speed up rendering or AI as needed But that flexibility comes at the price of complexity, thus first gen games are using ~50% of the systems capabilities. However games will probably never use more than 80-90% of the systems resources at the same time so the graphics will get better they will not become twice as good.
PS: 3 games may all use 90% of the systems capabilities, but they will probably not use the same 90%.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.intelligentblogger.com/ | Last Journal: Monday August 27, @11:47AM)
4K of memory? Luxury! The Atari 2600 had only 128 bytes of memory! You're thinking of the 4K of ROM in the cartridge.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.ceyah.org/~jandrese/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 13, @11:11AM)
Even if you managed that, your game would require two joysticks to play and require constant input on both of them, otherwise you'd be wasting a joystick port. I'm not even going to get into the mode switches and whatnot. It's basically impossible to use 100% of any machine like that.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://sdk-1600.spatula-city.org/ | Last Journal: Monday October 01, @05:36PM)
Well, it seems like it'd be more a bottleneck for the PS3 and Xbox360 than for a lot of machines. I look at the CPU-speed/GPU-speed to RAM ratio on most desktops, and 512MB is just enough for the GPU, with another 1GB to 2GB sitting out there for the CPU. When compared to 3 x 3.2GHz PPC (Xbox360) or 3.2GHz PPC + 8 SPEs (PS3's Cell Broadband Engine), even a current AMD 4x4 system (4 Althon 64s) or a Core 2 Duo system has a run for its money in processing performance. So the ratio of compute to memory is quite a bit off compared to desktop boxes. Granted, the PS3 and Xobx360 don't have all the other miscellany running in the background that a desktop has, but is it really that big of a difference?
Granted, consoles have traditionally gotten by with much less RAM than their desktop counterparts. This was especially true in the cartridge days, where the entire game image lived in ROM, but it seems like it should be less so in the era of optical-media based devices.
About the only way I can see using up all those MIPS is to enable advanced physics and simulation in the game, and enable extra rendering passes to spiffy-up the images. Now that we have a larger deployment of HD-capable displays, spending the MIPS on rendering I guess makes sense. But where are you going to put all the additional textures and data required if you don't have enough RAM? You certainly aren't going to aggressively page it from optical media.
Unless a game specifically targets a console and doesn't bother targeting a desktop in tandem, I can't see the developer getting too excited about developing advanced engines that soak the console CPUs with physics/simulation and coding a cut-down version that keeps up on the desktop. That'd make the game behave noticeably differently on the two platforms. So, we're left with graphics enhancements which only change the quality of the visible output of the game, not the gameplay itself. So, until the desktop platforms get into the same raw-compute territory as the consoles, it's very easy to imagine many of those console MIPS will be left on the table or just spent on polishing the graphics output.
Now to those of you who say "It isn't pushed to its limits unless you're always using 100% of the CPU." Pshaw. I would say a system is pushed to its limits when no one thing is the sole bottleneck all the time, the overall playability of the game doesn't suffer for it, and increasing the depth of any given element would cause the game to lag or misbehave in such a way that playability or enjoyability does suffer. The notion that you have to use every byte of RAM, fill every sector of the disc and use every issue slot on every cycle of the CPU to say you're at 100% is a silly one. It might've made sense when games were measured in kilobytes, RAM was measured in bytes and CPU was measured in kHz or MHz, but not in the modern era.
--JoeRe:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Informative)
As far as optimizing for the memory system using prefetches and streamed processing et al., that's the future of performance coding. There's no avoiding these techniques as the gap between memory speed and processor speed looks destined to only get worse. It's a space in which the compiler really can't do much to help you; your algorithm design has to take into account how much slower memory is than compute, and either be able to set up its data transfers long in advance (as in streaming computation), or have something else to do while it waits (as in context switching).
Re:what do I win? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://alumni.imsa.edu/~mliu)
I'm filing a class action on behalf of all who were eating or drinking when reading your post.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with this 100%. Final Fantasy XII is one of the best looking games on the PS2 to date, but There's a good argument to be made that Gran Turismo 4 (which runs in 1080i in one way or another while FFXII is 480i only) surpasses it. But regardless- consoles arent like PC's. there will ALWAYS be an enterprising developer who comes up with some crazy coding method no one ever considered before and squeezes a little more performance out of the system.
Remember when Shadow of the Colossus was released, and everyone was saying things like "no one ever thought the PS2 was capable of things like this?" same principle. There's probably a lot of life left in the Ps2 that no one will ever get around to tapping, because with the existence of the PS3 it's no longer worth the effort to do so. By the time Developers REALLY know their way around the PS3 and are on the verge of squeezing every last ounce out of it, the Ps4 will be out and in the market and it simply won't make sense to bust one's ass trying to max out the PS3.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
That's okay. Nobody else commenting here read it either.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Base Pi?? (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday January 16 2007, @10:33AM)
Re:Base Pi?? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Well duh! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.hyperlogos.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 18, @08:19PM)
Unless it's a Honda... then it just sounds like you're breaking the law.
Is this a nice way of saying... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank You AC (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday October 26 2004, @09:56AM)
Re:Architecture (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.antiheroforhire.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 07 2003, @09:06AM)
Re:Architecture (Score:4, Interesting)
Brilliant plan, guys (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean that there won't be a PS4? (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux Performance (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/~eldavojohn/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @03:26PM)
But Harrison could be correct depending on how he defines 'capacity.' In the world of computer science, one must be careful with the absolute of "never ever" but he hasn't defined capacity sufficiently. Now if he means there will never be a PS3 game capable of using it to the full capacity then he's probably right.
Re:Linux Performance (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @05:12PM)
Console systems, on the other hand, are engineered for a very tight, very specific, set of tasks. This is why a console with comparatively crappy stats can walk all over a much beefier computer, and vice versa.
Kind of funny. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Kind of funny. (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.bludgeon.org/~darkfred/elk | Last Journal: Monday July 12 2004, @04:00AM)
I'm not a fanboy, I am a game graphics programmer. (but yes perhaps I am a little irritated over the difficulty level as well)
Regards,
Re:Kind of funny. (Score:4, Informative)
And how such a false statement of saying the PS3 will be limited to 256MB of video RAM has been modded as Interesting on Slashdot is absurd. Look at the top level diagram [impress.co.jp]. The RSX can access an additional 256MB of XDR through the Cell. The RSX was designed to work with the Cell, that is why it is different than the conventional console hardware setup.
It's hype all over again, for sure. Every company does it, but it looks like you are being lead into believing the Microsoft FUD-hype instead.