Yes, in fact the article quotes the next slide as saying "Don't read from local memory, but write to main memory with RSX(tm) and read it from there instead" which is exactly what you suggest.
Yes, basically the difference between the two is that by splitting the memory Sony have reduced the flexibility somewhat in exchange for higher total bandwidth.
It remains to be seen how this will perform with real games, but it should be pretty good. Of course, the Xbox 360 also has embedded RAM on the GPU to reduce the load on main memory.
Rather ironically, the graphics system of the PS3 seems to be much closer to a traditional PC graphics system than the Xbox 360 one is.
In the slide, the "Local Memory" refers to the RSX local memory, not the SPU local memory. The article says that the next slide is Sony telling devs to use the RSX to do the transfer instead, which only makes sense if it is talking about the RSX memory.
Your conclusion is right though, as this also is memory that the Cell doesn't need to read from.
Correct, this should have pretty much zero performance impact. This is how PC graphics cards work (except of course for some of the "integrated graphics" solutions).
The Inquirer article assumes that this makes "Local Memory" useless. This isn't the case at all, as you use it to store the graphics data that the Cell doesn't need to read.
There is no screw up. This is by design. This is exactly how PC graphics cards work. With the PS3 graphics system based closely on a PC one, it is no surprise that this is the case.
The "Local Memory" is the RSX memory. The Cell doesn't need to read from this.
Because they want to point out that developers shouldn't be reading from this memory from the Cell.
This is the graphics memory for the PS3. The Cell doesn't need to read this. There is nothing to fix. That is the point of the slide: to tell developers 'don't do this'.
"Local Memory" refers to the RSX memory. The Cell doesn't have direct access to this, which is why it's so slow at reading. This is also irrelevant as the Cell doesn't NEED to read this memory.
PC graphics cards have worked this way for years. Reading from graphics memory has always been slow as it isn't optimised for this.
Because the picture isn't the thing that matters. It's been misinterpreted.
The picture says that the read speed for the Cell from "Local Memory" is 16Mb a second. Assuming it is true (I've got no reason to doubt it), then it still doesn't matter.
The "Local Memory" is the RSX graphics memory. The Cell shouldn't need to read this. The PS3 would still work even if the Cell couldn't read this memory at all. This memory is where you store textures and other graphics data.
The "Local Memory" is the memory attached to the RSX.
That the read performance for the Cell from this memory is dreadful is no surprise. This is exactly the same architecture that has been traditionally used in PCs. Reading graphics memory from the main processor is usually really really slow.
This memory is where you store textures and other graphics data. The main processor will usually have little need to read from this memory. If it does, then, as apparently Sony says, you just get the RSX to write to main memory instead.
This is a non-story. People have dealt with this for PC games for a long time.
Massive back catalog of PS1 and PS2 games - this will be a major hook for existing PS owners. Still, it's a safe bet that the PS2 itself will be around for at least a couple more years to play the old games on while people wait for that price to fall.
It's still not clear just how good the backwards compatibility will be. As it has already been confirmed that it relies on software emulation, it is a fair bet that it won't be as seamless as the PS2->PS1 compatibility.
Also, I believe Sony have said that it won't take PS2 memory cards, which could mean that you can't transfer saved games from the PS2. The Xbox 360 has a similar problem (you can't transfer Xbox saves), which is one of the things that makes the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility laughably bad.
It seems almost certain that the backwards compatibility quality will be somewhere between the Xbox 360 at the dreaful end and PS2 at the nearly flawless end. Just where it comes has yet to be seen.
In the current FFXI economy 5 million gil isn't really a huge amount of money. At level 70 you really should be able to make 5 million in under a day's play. OK, so that is still quite a long time, but not compared to the time it will have taken you to get to 70. Grab some other black mages and mana-burn some burning circles. You should be able to make millions without too much trouble.
The economy seems fairly sane at the moment. Elite end game gear takes a significant amount of effort to acquire, but is certainly not unobtainable.
The econemy in FFXI really isn't very player controlled. Lets look at some of the hard limits on player control of the econemy in FFXI. Many goods and services can only be obtained from NPCs, many goods can only be 'produced' once per character, many cannot be traded and NPC buy prices, quest rewards, and mob drops are almost all inflexible.
It's true that there are constraints on pricing of items, but even that can add to the complexity. During the recent hyperinflation a number of crafting recipes became profitable that were previously not profitable, and some that used to be profitable were no longer so.
Now how about some things that you could technically do but that the game doesn't support? Such as comission something or in any other way illustrate the demand for something that's not currently being sold? There is no in-game support for buy orders.
Yeah, that is quite an annoying limitation (and one I've not really seen any other MMORPG have a sendible solution to). It's also a real pain trying to open up a market in a item that might be in demand, but is very rarely made so no one bothers to look for it.
Having said that, I have made quite a few items to order, but this has to be arranged via chat.
It wasn't true that you had to buy gil in FFXI. Yes, there was a period of hyperinflation, but that didn't really make a huge amount of difference as the price of farmed items went up as well, as did the profit from crafting. I never bought gil, and never had a problem with affording high-end gear.
Prices seem to have largely stabilised now.
People keep complaining about the economy in FFXI, but they are usually missing the point. The FFXI economy is much more player driven than, for instance, WoW. This means that you get price fluctuations and other economic problems, but that is what makes it interesting to play a MMORPG. If you want fixed prices, then single player rpgs may satisfy you more.
DVDs didn't replace CDs. DVDs replaced VHS. That was a huge jump in both image quality and features.
HD-DVD or Blu-Ray is nowhere near as large a jump over DVD.
OK, 1080i (or p) images are much higher resolution than SD, but few people have TVs that can really take advantage of that, and 720p is not much of a step up from SD (particularly when compared to PAL).
The features that the new disc formats offer are almost identical to DVD.
I suspect the new formats will struggle in a similar way the way SACD and DVD-Audio have failed to replace CD. They just are not enough of an upgrade to make it worth the cost of changing format.
The reason that good deinterlacing kit costs real money is that it has to cope with video sourced interlaced images. With images that come from a video camera (or console games where the frame rate is at 60Hz), then the interlaced frames are not just halves of a single still frame but represent images where time has advanced by a 60th of a second. This is a complete nightmare to deinterlace properly as to do a good job you need to combine slow moving parts to form a high resolution image, but separate out the fast moving parts so you don't get streaking.
Film sourced material however has a base 24 frames per second. The interlaced frames are just parts of the original image. This is trivial to deinterlace, as you just need to combine the correct two interlace frames by taking alternate lines.
In fact, my current TV has a 'film mode' that does exactly that. Selecting film mode disables most of the intelligence in the deinterlacer and just combines the frames. This looks fantastic for DVDs, and as would be expected looks dreadful for broadcast TV.
The backwards compatibility of the 360 is still a complete joke as there is no way to move save games from the original xbox to the 360. This makes it pretty useless for any of the longer games.
I hope the PS3 doesn't make the same mistake. I would assume it would work, but I've not yet seen anything that actually says that the PS3 will take memory cards from the PS2.
it can play most formats people care about (MP3, unprotected AAC, MPEG2 and most graphic formats)
A quick clarification: The Xbox 360 does not play AAC at all, even if it is unprotected. I can plug my iPod Nano into it, and all the mp3 tracks play fine, but all the self-ripped AAC tracks have a red forbidden icon by them.
The worst part with new laptops is you can't drop to full screen 800x600 to run faster.
This isn't really true.
I use a Dell D810 for gaming. This is configured with an ATI X600. This certainly isn't the fastest card around, but it's perfectly playable with current games.
The native screen resolution is 1920x1200, which is a little high for some games. However, the ATI graphics chip has configuration options for how to scale the image. It's perfectly fine running games full screen at a lower resolution than the panel's native resolution. The filtered scaling by the graphics card is far better than used to be the case with the built in scaling of LCD monitors.
What they don't advertise is that Quicktime 7 will break a Quicktime 6 Pro installation.
Yes, that means if you want the Pro features (such as playing in full screen) then you will have to pay for the Pro upgrade yet again.
This is particularly infuriating as they have a family pack deal for the OS, but not Quicktime Pro it seems.
When I get around to installing it on my Macs I'm going to see if there is an option to not install Quicktime 7. If not I'm going to raise hell on thier support line.
The best case government is a benevolent dictatorship
This is commonly quoted as a truism. However, I don't think it is true.
Even if the ruler had the best interests of the people in mind, they may not be able to make the best decisions due to lack of information about local situations, and limited time to consider the information. Also one person (or a limited number) cannot be an expert on all topics and so may not be able to make the best decisions in all areas.
Thus, it is possible that a distributed system could be inherently better.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, in fact the article quotes the next slide as saying "Don't read from local memory, but write to main memory with RSX(tm) and read it from there instead" which is exactly what you suggest.
Yes, basically the difference between the two is that by splitting the memory Sony have reduced the flexibility somewhat in exchange for higher total bandwidth.
It remains to be seen how this will perform with real games, but it should be pretty good. Of course, the Xbox 360 also has embedded RAM on the GPU to reduce the load on main memory.
Rather ironically, the graphics system of the PS3 seems to be much closer to a traditional PC graphics system than the Xbox 360 one is.
Sadly, you are also wrong.
In the slide, the "Local Memory" refers to the RSX local memory, not the SPU local memory. The article says that the next slide is Sony telling devs to use the RSX to do the transfer instead, which only makes sense if it is talking about the RSX memory.
Your conclusion is right though, as this also is memory that the Cell doesn't need to read from.
Correct, this should have pretty much zero performance impact. This is how PC graphics cards work (except of course for some of the "integrated graphics" solutions).
The Inquirer article assumes that this makes "Local Memory" useless. This isn't the case at all, as you use it to store the graphics data that the Cell doesn't need to read.
Informative, yes (and with a good link), but not relevant to this discussion.
In the slide attached to the article, the "Local Memory" is the memory local to the RSX graphics system, NOT the Cell local memory.
There is no screw up. This is by design. This is exactly how PC graphics cards work. With the PS3 graphics system based closely on a PC one, it is no surprise that this is the case.
The "Local Memory" is the RSX memory. The Cell doesn't need to read from this.
Because they want to point out that developers shouldn't be reading from this memory from the Cell.
This is the graphics memory for the PS3. The Cell doesn't need to read this. There is nothing to fix. That is the point of the slide: to tell developers 'don't do this'.
No, Sony are telling developers not to read from "local memory" using the Cell. This is not the same thing at all.
There is nothing to fix. This is by design.
The "Local Memory" is the RSX graphics memory. The Cell has no need to read from this.
"Local Memory" refers to the RSX memory. The Cell doesn't have direct access to this, which is why it's so slow at reading. This is also irrelevant as the Cell doesn't NEED to read this memory.
PC graphics cards have worked this way for years. Reading from graphics memory has always been slow as it isn't optimised for this.
Because the picture isn't the thing that matters. It's been misinterpreted.
The picture says that the read speed for the Cell from "Local Memory" is 16Mb a second. Assuming it is true (I've got no reason to doubt it), then it still doesn't matter.
The "Local Memory" is the RSX graphics memory. The Cell shouldn't need to read this. The PS3 would still work even if the Cell couldn't read this memory at all. This memory is where you store textures and other graphics data.
The "Local Memory" is the memory attached to the RSX.
That the read performance for the Cell from this memory is dreadful is no surprise. This is exactly the same architecture that has been traditionally used in PCs. Reading graphics memory from the main processor is usually really really slow.
This memory is where you store textures and other graphics data. The main processor will usually have little need to read from this memory. If it does, then, as apparently Sony says, you just get the RSX to write to main memory instead.
This is a non-story. People have dealt with this for PC games for a long time.
It's still not clear just how good the backwards compatibility will be. As it has already been confirmed that it relies on software emulation, it is a fair bet that it won't be as seamless as the PS2->PS1 compatibility.
Also, I believe Sony have said that it won't take PS2 memory cards, which could mean that you can't transfer saved games from the PS2. The Xbox 360 has a similar problem (you can't transfer Xbox saves), which is one of the things that makes the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility laughably bad.
It seems almost certain that the backwards compatibility quality will be somewhere between the Xbox 360 at the dreaful end and PS2 at the nearly flawless end. Just where it comes has yet to be seen.
In the current FFXI economy 5 million gil isn't really a huge amount of money. At level 70 you really should be able to make 5 million in under a day's play. OK, so that is still quite a long time, but not compared to the time it will have taken you to get to 70. Grab some other black mages and mana-burn some burning circles. You should be able to make millions without too much trouble.
The economy seems fairly sane at the moment. Elite end game gear takes a significant amount of effort to acquire, but is certainly not unobtainable.
It's true that there are constraints on pricing of items, but even that can add to the complexity. During the recent hyperinflation a number of crafting recipes became profitable that were previously not profitable, and some that used to be profitable were no longer so.
Now how about some things that you could technically do but that the game doesn't support? Such as comission something or in any other way illustrate the demand for something that's not currently being sold? There is no in-game support for buy orders.
Yeah, that is quite an annoying limitation (and one I've not really seen any other MMORPG have a sendible solution to). It's also a real pain trying to open up a market in a item that might be in demand, but is very rarely made so no one bothers to look for it.
Having said that, I have made quite a few items to order, but this has to be arranged via chat.
It wasn't true that you had to buy gil in FFXI. Yes, there was a period of hyperinflation, but that didn't really make a huge amount of difference as the price of farmed items went up as well, as did the profit from crafting. I never bought gil, and never had a problem with affording high-end gear.
Prices seem to have largely stabilised now.
People keep complaining about the economy in FFXI, but they are usually missing the point. The FFXI economy is much more player driven than, for instance, WoW. This means that you get price fluctuations and other economic problems, but that is what makes it interesting to play a MMORPG. If you want fixed prices, then single player rpgs may satisfy you more.
DVDs didn't replace CDs. DVDs replaced VHS. That was a huge jump in both image quality and features.
HD-DVD or Blu-Ray is nowhere near as large a jump over DVD.
OK, 1080i (or p) images are much higher resolution than SD, but few people have TVs that can really take advantage of that, and 720p is not much of a step up from SD (particularly when compared to PAL).
The features that the new disc formats offer are almost identical to DVD.
I suspect the new formats will struggle in a similar way the way SACD and DVD-Audio have failed to replace CD. They just are not enough of an upgrade to make it worth the cost of changing format.
It isn't as hard as you think.
The reason that good deinterlacing kit costs real money is that it has to cope with video sourced interlaced images. With images that come from a video camera (or console games where the frame rate is at 60Hz), then the interlaced frames are not just halves of a single still frame but represent images where time has advanced by a 60th of a second. This is a complete nightmare to deinterlace properly as to do a good job you need to combine slow moving parts to form a high resolution image, but separate out the fast moving parts so you don't get streaking.
Film sourced material however has a base 24 frames per second. The interlaced frames are just parts of the original image. This is trivial to deinterlace, as you just need to combine the correct two interlace frames by taking alternate lines.
In fact, my current TV has a 'film mode' that does exactly that. Selecting film mode disables most of the intelligence in the deinterlacer and just combines the frames. This looks fantastic for DVDs, and as would be expected looks dreadful for broadcast TV.
The backwards compatibility of the 360 is still a complete joke as there is no way to move save games from the original xbox to the 360. This makes it pretty useless for any of the longer games.
I hope the PS3 doesn't make the same mistake. I would assume it would work, but I've not yet seen anything that actually says that the PS3 will take memory cards from the PS2.
Odd. I've had no trouble going the other way. My Mac is R2, and R1 discs play fine with VLC.
A quick clarification: The Xbox 360 does not play AAC at all, even if it is unprotected. I can plug my iPod Nano into it, and all the mp3 tracks play fine, but all the self-ripped AAC tracks have a red forbidden icon by them.
The worst part with new laptops is you can't drop to full screen 800x600 to run faster.
This isn't really true.
I use a Dell D810 for gaming. This is configured with an ATI X600. This certainly isn't the fastest card around, but it's perfectly playable with current games.
The native screen resolution is 1920x1200, which is a little high for some games. However, the ATI graphics chip has configuration options for how to scale the image. It's perfectly fine running games full screen at a lower resolution than the panel's native resolution. The filtered scaling by the graphics card is far better than used to be the case with the built in scaling of LCD monitors.
Probably not, as the link you provided goes to a login page.
What they don't advertise is that Quicktime 7 will break a Quicktime 6 Pro installation.
Yes, that means if you want the Pro features (such as playing in full screen) then you will have to pay for the Pro upgrade yet again.
This is particularly infuriating as they have a family pack deal for the OS, but not Quicktime Pro it seems.
When I get around to installing it on my Macs I'm going to see if there is an option to not install Quicktime 7. If not I'm going to raise hell on thier support line.
This is commonly quoted as a truism. However, I don't think it is true.
Even if the ruler had the best interests of the people in mind, they may not be able to make the best decisions due to lack of information about local situations, and limited time to consider the information. Also one person (or a limited number) cannot be an expert on all topics and so may not be able to make the best decisions in all areas.
Thus, it is possible that a distributed system could be inherently better.
True, but there are plenty of USB digital audio adaptors available.