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."

Comments

Could someone explain what the hell this means?

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

the next-gen interactive console will share entire set of raw materials and content production environment in it, unlike current pre-rendered content playback machines.

Re:Could someone explain what the hell this means?

[simoniker]

I went and Babelfish-ed the article and have changed that sentence - as another commenter suggested, it was just suggesting that next-gen consoles like the PS2 can do real-time rendering, so there should be no (or less) need for pre-rendered intro sequences and suchlike.

Re:Could someone explain what the hell this means?

[Jahf]

Yep ... PS2 advertised real-time cut scene rendering VERY heavily but it didn't provide the capabilities the story tellers wanted.

Something tells me the PS3 will be the same story ... 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.

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.

Re:Could someone explain what the hell this means?

[Jahf]

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.

Additionally I'm not convinced that raytracing will always be the best looking solution. For the next 10 years? Sure ... but advancements are constantly being made and Raytracing itself can have quality issues unless you spend a LOT of time tweaking a scene.

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 ... someday yes, but probably so far off in the future that the Sony marketing reps need to quit crying wolf :)

Re:realtime rendering?

[CaptMonkeyDLuffy]

Errr... One problem with your theory. The big propoganda push for the Playstation 2 worked.
While it would certainly be amusing if your theory were valid, somehow I have the feeling it's more likely a case of things getting lost in translation, and this will be the same old Sony hype machine we saw rolled out for the PS2.

Re:Umm, help?

[noselasd]

Uhm, it's not a theory, its already done. Many, many times, in many games.

Developers' point of view

[News for nerds]

Thanks Simoniker for changing my offensive line of techno-babble Engrish to simple "realtime-rendering", but the original sentence "share entire set of raw materials and content production environment in it" is meant for developers (naturally, because it's Rambus Developers Forum), explaining recyclability of objects, not promising higher image quality to consumers. It suggests the standardized protocol to share the same model/scene/animation/programming data between feature film, game, and other domains, without losing (programming) control, not only suggesting shift to in-game real-time rendering. But I couldn't crunch that nuance well into the short article.

Anyway the juicy part of this news is not SCEI hype, but memory bandwidth and expected shipping schedule of PS3 itself.