@BigD

Quote:

BigD wrote: @Lou Quote: The gpu was their achilles heel...well, that and the 2x256MB issue... True, did they limit RAM for any particular reason? I heard it was a fairly exotic type of RAM which was quite expensive. It really has backfired thoughas developers complain it's not worth putting better (and hence larger) textures on the bigger Blu-Ray discs (compared to the XBox360's DVD) if the PS3 can't copy enough of them into RAM at a given time! They shot themselves in the foot. Ghostbusters was much better on the 360 with awesome textures and the PS3 didn't match it! Let's hope 'Uncharted 2' raises the bar!

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Recall that Epic's Gears of War is the reason the 360 came with 512MB instead of 256MB. Mark Rein begged for more memory and MS obliged.

It's not so much the quality of the textures, but the quantity. As I tried explaining to MikeB...

Game engines generally aren't too big compared to video and sound from a memory footprint. With the 360, a game engine can be 100MB and a/v can have 412MB of memory. On the PS3 you are limited to 256MB and if you dip into the Cell's 256MB then you lose fps because of bandwidth. In addition, the faster average seek times of 12xDVD means you can buffer or stream faster as well when you have to.

This is a problem the Wii has as well with it's 24MB of on-die gpu RAM and 64MB main ram.

With NVidia bowing out of the high-end gpu race...one wonders what will be in the PS4... If a PS4 simply has the last high end gpu from Nvidia with 2x or 4x the dedicated RAM then you'll still see a graphical improvement over the PS3...but TV's aren't going to get better than 1080p for a while so it will be about maximizing 1080p with solid framerates and realistic lighting and rich textures. Also, linear games like Uncharted 2 can become more wide-open game like GTA4 but with Uncharted 2's visual fidelity.

Other than that, I don't think 3D capable TV's will penetrate the market enough to see that taken advantage of for some time. Controls are where innovation is going, not graphics.

Last edited by Lou on 15-Oct-2009 at 03:17 PM.