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PS3 Production Starts In 2005 With XDR DRAM
News for nerds writes "According to Mr. Goto @ Impress PC Watch (Japanese article), Rambus Developers Forum Japan 2004 was held this week in Tokyo to show the roadmap of XDR DRAM, the memory chip in the Sony PlayStation 3 console, and SCEI did the keynote speech; the next-gen interactive console will be able to render in real-time, unlike current pre-rendered content playback machines. XDR DRAM production start deadline is still set at mid-2005 by Toshiba, Elpida and Samsung, which means that production of PS3 itself starts in 2005 and the console will be shipped in late 2005 or early 2006, as Cell is already sampled. Mr. Goto has revealed another insider news; single XDR DRAM chip in PS3 was changed to 256Mbit from expected 512Mbit. It means either of the 2 scenarios - (1) Total memory in PS3 was reduced from 256MB to 128MB (2) Memory bandwidth in PS3 was raised from 25.6GB/sec to 51.2GB/sec (RADEON X800 XT has 35.8GB/sec). Since Toshiba put the same potential market forecast per bits at RDFJ 2004 as in 2003, (2) is likely."
Yep ... PS2 advertised real-time cut scene rendering VERY heavily but it didn't provide the capabilities the story tellers wanted.
... give a graphic artist an inch in realtime and they will still ALWAYS want more (that's a good thing, I'm not complaining). You'll likely still see rendered cut scenes to some degree for a very long time.
Something tells me the PS3 will be the same story
If you get the PS3 to be able to render in realtime what 3 years ago was rendered longtime you still haven't made it look as good as what you see in, say, Spiderman 2. I don't see a console getting to the "realtime looks as good as longtime rendering" anytime in the near future, if ever, as longtime rendering will constantly be improving as well.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I disagree with 5X better for raytracing. Better? Yes, but not 5X. There are a larger number of tricks that can be done to make it look acceptable in realtime on today's fastest workstations (non-clustered). However the step from console to "today's fastest workstation" is probably of the same magnitude as "today's fastest workstation" is to a rendering cluster.
... but advancements are constantly being made and Raytracing itself can have quality issues unless you spend a LOT of time tweaking a scene.
... someday yes, but probably so far off in the future that the Sony marketing reps need to quit crying wolf :)
Additionally I'm not convinced that raytracing will always be the best looking solution. For the next 10 years? Sure
Last, I'm not saying that the realtime render has to look as good a humanly possible to be acceptable, only that it has to be a lot farther along. Realtime renders 1/5th as good as cluster rendered is going to be perfectly adequate for most folks, but consoles are a LONG way from that.
So I hold the middle ground on this
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.