Biggest bottleneck for consoles - small RAM

[QUOTE="GTSaiyanjin2"]

the limited memory bandwidth is more of a bottleneck, though 1gb of ram would not hurt either.

imprezawrx500

[QUOTE="MK-Professor"]

If consoles had more RAM will be waste because the slow GPU and CPU will not be abele to utilize all the RAM.

So consoles have the right amount of RAM they need.

More will be wasted.
Less will be hurt performance.

imprezawrx500

They better have a minimum of 4GB next gen, i have seen notebooks with that kind of memory, cmon!

Sandvichman

[QUOTE="GTSaiyanjin2"]

the limited memory bandwidth is more of a bottleneck, though 1gb of ram would not hurt either.

imprezawrx500

The CPU may not able saturate the main memory e.g. the older K8 Athlon (with DDR1)'s SSE throughput is around 2 cycles. The game is not highly dependent on the CPU and main memory. Main memory's performance is important for IGP type systems.

Multi-threaded PhysX CPU hack would require beefy CPU and main memory setup.

[QUOTE="nameless12345"]

I was thinking - isn't the (very) limited RAM the biggest problem for consoles? Consoles always suffered from small amounts of RAM compared to computers and this is also the case in modern times. For example Doom 3 on the Xbox looked comparable to medium-end PC version, but they had to redesign/simplify the levels due to the small RAM. And Crytek said they couldn't bring Crysis over to the consoles because they had too little RAM. The small RAM also probably means that consoles can't handle RAM demanding games too well (if at all).

Maybe the next-gen consoles will put an end to the small RAM question with their gigabytes of fast RAM?

Doubtful. More electronics means more heat, and the consoles still have problems eliminating heat, don't they?

They might go up to 1 GB RAM, but for example if the PS4 goes to the next GPU series, it will generate more heat.

I was thinking - isn't the (very) limited RAM the biggest problem for consoles? Consoles always suffered from small amounts of RAM compared to computers and this is also the case in modern times. For example Doom 3 on the Xbox looked comparable to medium-end PC version, but they had to redesign/simplify the levels due to the small RAM. And Crytek said they couldn't bring Crysis over to the consoles because they had too little RAM. The small RAM also probably means that consoles can't handle RAM demanding games too well (if at all).

Maybe the next-gen consoles will put an end to the small RAM question with their gigabytes of fast RAM?

nameless12345

Mainstream AMD Radeon HD 5570/5650/5670/5730M/6550M(1) vs Mainstream AMD Radeon HD 4650/4670/560V/5165(2) vs AMD Xenos (3)

1. processes 400 instructions / 400 32bit data elementper cycle. PS; 6550M seems to be rebranded Madison GPU witrh 400 SPUs.

2. processes 320 instructions / 320 32bit data elementper cycle.

3. processes 96 instructions / 240 32bit data elementper cycle.

[QUOTE="racing1750"]I've always wondered why this generation of consoles had low ram. 512MB is nothing. I expected 1GB at the time.PBSnipes

Cost vs need. Even if going with 512MB over 1GB only saved Sony/MS a couple of bucks per console that still works out to multi-million dollar savings, whereas even if we accept the lack of RAM is a significant issue for consoles it would still rank pretty low on the list of "what's wrong with modern game development?".

Like you said earlier it doesn't really matter since a beefy gaming PC will have more memory than it knows what to do with, but typically a PC game will require much more physical memory to be present than its actual memory footprint. Console games are guaranteed a certain amount of memory from the OS: they allocate it, fill it up, and belongs to them for as long as the game is running. So if the OS takes up 32MB, the game can safely take up the other 224MB and never worry about it going away. The same is never true for a PC game. A PC game can only ask for virtual memory (up to a size determined by the OS version and whether the OS/app are 64-bit), and it's up to the OS to decide how it moves that virtual memory into actual physical memory and also what gets swapped out to the page file on the hard drive. This means that any moment some other concurrently-running process (virus scanner, media server, whatever) can decide to allocate some memory and do something with it, which can cause the OS to pull the rug out on the game and swap out its memory. And that means goodbye performance, and hello thrashing. So in reality you always need more available physical memory than the game actually uses if you want good performance.

Teufelhuhn

Given that I have 3GB of ram, I have never had a instance were my system required so much memory; that it affected my gaming experience.

Xbox 360 cant handle big maps (PS3 has shown it can) Hence why Crysis 2/Rage/New vegas/BC2 (and more) had to be gimped in one way or another to work BF3 will most likely have no jets and a 32 player limit, which is sadHaloinventedFPS

PS3 has the same total memory as 360, it is just as restricted to streaming as them.

The only arguable difference is PS3 has faster memory, which means they can swap in/out of memory more often than 360. If those games were PC/PS3 only; they would be exactly the same in design.

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]

Come on now.....

The 360 does not have 240.... 48 floating-point vector processors for shader execution, divided in three dynamically scheduled SIMD groups of 16 processors each. Whats 16x 3=? 48 , The 3870 has 5 ALU's each group has 64 shader clusters whats 64 x 5=? 320.

Teufelhuhn

lol, Your source even say the 360 gpu has 3 arrays of 16 which equals *48* shader processors. No matter how you twist it, the 3870 has 320 shader processors vs the Xenos's 48..... Which is 6x less , plus the fact that the 3870 can have 2x-4x the memory with a bandwidth of 72 GB/s vs 360's 22GB/s . Then the transistor count between the two is over 300 million difference being the 3870 having more .

I think you guys are PC gamers so naturally you would complain about a console's RAM.Mr_Cumberdale

Because integration issues aside, consoles are always memory light.

Which is particularly a problem for us PC gamers with this gen being so cross platform orientated. Console memory limitations; become our limitations.

Anything less than 4gb on the next gen of consoles will be a joke.

Hell I had 4gigs back in 2006.

Anything less than 4gb on the next gen of consoles will be a joke.

Hell I had 4gigs back in 2006.

htekemerald

In 2007 I had a 512 ram MB desktop and 256 MB ram laptop. I think you guys are PC gamers so naturally you would complain about a console's RAM.Mr_Cumberdale

What is your point? In 2007 I had a laptop with 2048MB RAM + 512MB VRAM.

I've always wondered why this generation of consoles had low ram. 512MB is nothing. I expected 1GB at the time.racing1750

Seeing how the ATI series 2XXX flopped big time, XBOX's gpu isnt all that great either, better than PS3, but not that much better, something similar to 2600PRO.

[QUOTE="Mr_Cumberdale"]I think you guys are PC gamers so naturally you would complain about a console's RAM.AnnoyedDragon

Because integration issues aside, consoles are always memory light.

Which is particularly a problem for us PC gamers with this gen being so cross platform orientated. Console memory limitations; become our limitations.

You need to complain about that to the game developers not b^& and moan about consoles bringing PC games "down to our standards"..its not us..its them. I would rather game makers make the games utilize the platform they are on that way people would quit crying about everything....."waits for MODs to delete my horrible reply that only speaks truth"...."taps toes to music in waiting"..."hums lil diddy"..."looks at watch"..

snip

VanDammFan

So I shouldn't complain about consoles, where the actual memory limitations exist, but instead complain about developers; who are simply restricted to working within the capabilities of that hardware?

Such a argument suggests developers can decided to not be held back by consoles, which is impossible so long as consoles are factored in.

[QUOTE="VanDammFan"]

snip

AnnoyedDragon

So I shouldn't complain about consoles, where the actual memory limitations exist, but instead complain about developers; who are simply restricted to working within the capabilities of that hardware?

Such a argument suggests developers can decided to not be held back by consoles, which is impossible so long as consoles are factored in.

You always have to factor in consoles. They are the driving force in videogames. Yes..thats right,..consoles are what makes our "gaming" popular and user friendly. SO why keep crying about it? Is it going to help anything?

Eventually we WILL 100% have ONE gaming platform. Its going to happen. No I dont need a time machine to see it happening. So eventually EVERYONE will be happy. They will make the "console/pc" able to play everthing equal. It WILL have all your favorite PC games and console games you love PLUS it will have games made for it daily to utilize its hardware and use. Its going to happen...

Im sorry that our pos consoles are holding you pc gamers back so far..what?..Like at least 10 years or so right?? Just hang in there guys and we'll catch up ok...eh, i dont know why i get so riled up and worry with this mess anymore..everyone on here pretty much gets on my last freakin nerve..buch of cry baby,non gaming,people....

[QUOTE="AnnoyedDragon"]

[QUOTE="VanDammFan"]

snip

So I shouldn't complain about consoles, where the actual memory limitations exist, but instead complain about developers; who are simply restricted to working within the capabilities of that hardware?

Such a argument suggests developers can decided to not be held back by consoles, which is impossible so long as consoles are factored in.

You always have to factor in consoles. They are the driving force in videogames. Yes..thats right,..consoles are what makes our "gaming" popular and user friendly. SO why keep crying about it? Is it going to help anything?

Eventually we WILL 100% have ONE gaming platform. Its going to happen. No I dont need a time machine to see it happening. So eventually EVERYONE will be happy. They will make the "console/pc" able to play everthing equal. It WILL have all your favorite PC games and console games you love PLUS it will have games made for it daily to utilize its hardware and use. Its going to happen...

Im sorry that our pos consoles are holding you pc gamers back so far..what?..Like at least 10 years or so right?? Just hang in there guys and we'll catch up ok...eh, i dont know why i get so riled up and worry with this mess anymore..everyone on here pretty much gets on my last freakin nerve..buch of cry baby,non gaming,people....

I was thinking - isn't the (very) limited RAM the biggest problem for consoles? Consoles always suffered from small amounts of RAM compared to computers and this is also the case in modern times. For example Doom 3 on the Xbox looked comparable to medium-end PC version, but they had to redesign/simplify the levels due to the small RAM. And Crytek said they couldn't bring Crysis over to the consoles because they had too little RAM. The small RAM also probably means that consoles can't handle RAM demanding games too well (if at all).

Maybe the next-gen consoles will put an end to the small RAM question with their gigabytes of fast RAM?

This bottleneck has allways been in consoles, and will also be there next gen. Next gen consoles will have more RAM that will be used for better graphics, because the console will be made with the games most people play in mind. This gen consoles did'nt need 1 GB RAM to have all the sports games running on them, or even the highly overrated COD games. Of course, there will allways be games that the developers could'nt do because of limitations, but the most popular games works fine on these consoles.

You always have to factor in consoles. They are the driving force in videogames. Yes..thats right,..consoles are what makes our "gaming" popular and user friendly. SO why keep crying about it? Is it going to help anything?

VanDammFan

The driving force of videogames? More developers make games for PC than any of the consoles. If however you want to claim more money is thrown around on consoles; then you would be right. But if something were to happen to them it would only impact their segment of the gaming market, not gaming as a whole; which can quite happily continue existing without them.

Eventually we WILL 100% have ONE gaming platform. Its going to happen. No I dont need a time machine to see it happening. So eventually EVERYONE will be happy. They will make the "console/pc" able to play everthing equal. It WILL have all your favorite PC games and console games you love PLUS it will have games made for it daily to utilize its hardware and use. Its going to happen...

VanDammFan

Console and PC are inherently incompatible, they are very different markets. A platform cannot be both open and closed, both fixed and upgradable. It is either a PC or it isn't, it can only match PC by becoming it.

What Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo choose to do with their platforms; is their own business. Though note I've been speaking about the inherent unsustainability of their business model for quite some time now.

Im sorry that our pos consoles are holding you pc gamers back so far..what?..Like at least 10 years or so right?? Just hang in there guys and we'll catch up ok...eh, i dont know why i get so riled up and worry with this mess anymore..everyone on here pretty much gets on my last freakin nerve..buch of cry baby,non gaming,people....

VanDammFan

Well keep that attitude up and you won't have to put up with the people here much longer.

Not really, I mean a good developer works around limits but a bad dev expects more power and never really gets enough, ok not a bad dev but you know what I mean. The thing is ones vision is always going to be out of reach so it's best to just work with limitations and optimise well. Im sure when next gen consoles come around 4 years from now devs will still want more power. With videogames graphics are not everyone, I know it's the wrong place for me to say this since 80% are most likely graphic hounds but gameplay means a lot more than the graphics, in fact story also means more to the game.

GIVE ME MOAR PWA! :P

But consoles aren't doing much processes are they?

[QUOTE="nameless12345"]

I was thinking - isn't the (very) limited RAM the biggest problem for consoles? Consoles always suffered from small amounts of RAM compared to computers and this is also the case in modern times. For example Doom 3 on the Xbox looked comparable to medium-end PC version, but they had to redesign/simplify the levels due to the small RAM. And Crytek said they couldn't bring Crysis over to the consoles because they had too little RAM. The small RAM also probably means that consoles can't handle RAM demanding games too well (if at all).

Maybe the next-gen consoles will put an end to the small RAM question with their gigabytes of fast RAM?

LastRambo341

Not all games need gigantic open worlds

[QUOTE="Teufelhuhn"]

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]

Come on now.....

The 360 does not have 240.... 48 floating-point vector processors for shader execution, divided in three dynamically scheduled SIMD groups of 16 processors each. Whats 16x 3=? 48 , The 3870 has 5 ALU's each group has 64 shader clusters whats 64 x 5=? 320.

04dcarraher

lol, Your source even say the 360 gpu has 3 arrays of 16 which equals *48* shader processors. No matter how you twist it, the 3870 has 320 shader processors vs the Xenos's 48..... Which is 6x less , plus the fact that the 3870 can have 2x-4x the memory with a bandwidth of 72 GB/s vs 360's 22GB/s . Then the transistor count between the two is over 300 million difference being the 3870 having more .

[QUOTE="Teufelhuhn"]

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]

Come on now.....

The 360 does not have 240.... 48 floating-point vector processors for shader execution, divided in three dynamically scheduled SIMD groups of 16 processors each. Whats 16x 3=? 48 , The 3870 has 5 ALU's each group has 64 shader clusters whats 64 x 5=? 320.

04dcarraher

lol, Your source even say the 360 gpu has 3 arrays of 16 which equals *48* shader processors. No matter how you twist it, the 3870 has 320 shader processors vs the Xenos's 48..... Which is 6x less , plus the fact that the 3870 can have 2x-4x the memory with a bandwidth of 72 GB/s vs 360's 22GB/s . Then the transistor count between the two is over 300 million difference being the 3870 having more .

Each Xenos SPU has 1 scalar (1 32bit data playload) + 1 vec 4 (4 32bit data) instruction issue, hence 5D. Do the math on 240 32bit data payload processing.

Each Radeon HD SPU (pre 69x0) has 5 scalar (5 32bit data playload) instruction issue, hence 5D = 5 data.

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]

[QUOTE="Teufelhuhn"]

Go ahead and read up yourself:

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/4/7

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/reviews/16/8

Teufelhuhn

lol, Your source even say the 360 gpu has 3 arrays of 16 which equals *48* shader processors. No matter how you twist it, the 3870 has 320 shader processors vs the Xenos's 48..... Which is 6x less , plus the fact that the 3870 can have 2x-4x the memory with a bandwidth of 72 GB/s vs 360's 22GB/s . Then the transistor count between the two is over 300 million difference being the 3870 having more .

Shader processors count have no meaning and is BS? I highly doubt that. because they talk about the Stream Processing Units which are thewhich are the those numbers come from

Xenos has 48 SPU's

ATI 3870 has 320 SPU's

Xenos has only a 22 GB/s memory bandwidth (dont count the bus between the sister die)

ATI 3870 has 72 GB/s of memory bandwidth

The Xenos does 240 GFLOPS

ATI 3870 does 497 GFLOPS

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]

[QUOTE="Teufelhuhn"]

Go ahead and read up yourself:

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/4/7

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/reviews/16/8

ronvalencia

lol, Your source even say the 360 gpu has 3 arrays of 16 which equals *48* shader processors. No matter how you twist it, the 3870 has 320 shader processors vs the Xenos's 48..... Which is 6x less , plus the fact that the 3870 can have 2x-4x the memory with a bandwidth of 72 GB/s vs 360's 22GB/s . Then the transistor count between the two is over 300 million difference being the 3870 having more .

Each Xenos SPU has 1 scalar (1 32bit data playload) + 1 vec 4 (4 32bit data) instruction issue, hence 5D = 5 data.Do the math on 240 32bit data payload processing.

Each Radeon HD SPU (pre 69x0) has 5 scalar (5 32bit data playload) instruction issue, hence 5D = 5 data.

But isnt there a limit to what they can assign to each shader processor on the 360?

They can only allocate so many. like 32 shader processors(or 2 arrays)for shader(pixel) work and 16(1 array)to do the vertex(vertices) workload.

In the Xenos thereare 3 parallel groups of 16 shader units each. Each of the three groups can either operate on vertex or pixel data. Each shader unit is able to perform one 4 wide vector operation and 1 scalar operation per clock cycle.2005 ATI hardware wasable to perform two 3 wide vector and two scalar operations per cycle in the pixel pipe alone. The vertex pipeline of R420 is 6 wide and can do one vector 4 and one scalar op per cycle.

Shader processors count have no meaning and is BS? I highly doubt that.

04dcarraher

Terms like "ALU" and "FLOPS" are consistently defined, and so it makes much more sense to compare using those instead.

But isnt there a limit to what they can assign to each shader processor on the 360?

They can only allocate so many. like 32 shader processors(or 2 arrays)for shader(pixel) work and 16(1 array)to do the vertex(vertices) workload.

04dcarraher

I dont think you can blame bottlenecks on just one thing with the current gen consoles. All the parts are interdependent & having more RAM wont neccessarly be benificial if the rest of the parts arent up to the job of properly utilizing the extra amount. Anyway next gen maybe we'll see 2GB of ram. i think 4GB is overkill. None of the games i've played on PC so far has taken more than 60% of my RAM.

Well I dont think even games on the PC take up that much ram. My PC ran games the same with 2gb of ran than with 6gb. Only difference I saw with 6Gb I was able to have more programs open all at the same time, without my pc wanting to crash. And on graphics cards 1gb to 2gb on the same card makes little difference in performance.

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]

Shader processors count have no meaning and is BS? I highly doubt that.

Teufelhuhn

Terms like "ALU" and "FLOPS" are consistently defined, and so it makes much more sense to compare using those instead.

They are talking about the Stream Processing Units for ATI which is the number execution per shader processor. Unlike Nvidia cards that use 1 shader processor for 1 shader.

So, Stream Processing Units arent like Nvidia's Shader processors and cant compare the two, which I was....

[QUOTE="Teufelhuhn"]

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]

Shader processors count have no meaning and is BS? I highly doubt that.

04dcarraher

Terms like "ALU" and "FLOPS" are consistently defined, and so it makes much more sense to compare using those instead.

They are talking about the Stream Processing Units for ATI which is the number execution per shader processor. Unlike Nvidia cards that use 1 shader processor for 1 shader.

So, Stream Processing Units arent like Nvidia's Shader processors and cant compare the two, which I was....

G80's SPU are co-issued scalar running nearly twice the core speed. IF we normalise the clock speed, G80's SPU is effectively 2 MAD scalar instructions, 2 MUL scalar instructions. It's basically like 4D VLIW SPU.

PS; There's special condition for G80's SPUMUL.

[QUOTE="ronvalencia"]

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]

lol, Your source even say the 360 gpu has 3 arrays of 16 which equals *48* shader processors. No matter how you twist it, the 3870 has 320 shader processors vs the Xenos's 48..... Which is 6x less , plus the fact that the 3870 can have 2x-4x the memory with a bandwidth of 72 GB/s vs 360's 22GB/s . Then the transistor count between the two is over 300 million difference being the 3870 having more .

Each Xenos SPU has 1 scalar (1 32bit data playload) + 1 vec 4 (4 32bit data) instruction issue, hence 5D = 5 data.Do the math on 240 32bit data payload processing.

Each Radeon HD SPU (pre 69x0) has 5 scalar (5 32bit data playload) instruction issue, hence 5D = 5 data.

But isnt there a limit to what they can assign to each shader processor on the 360?

They can only allocate so many. like 32 shader processors(or 2 arrays)for shader(pixel) work and 16(1 array)to do the vertex(vertices) workload.

In the Xenos thereare 3 parallel groups of 16 shader units each. Each of the three groups can either operate on vertex or pixel data. Each shader unit is able to perform one 4 wide vector operation and 1 scalar operation per clock cycle.2005 ATI hardware wasable to perform two 3 wide vector and two scalar operations per cycle in the pixel pipe alone. The vertex pipeline of R420 is 6 wide and can do one vector 4 and one scalar op per cycle.

Yeah, just look at the 360. Ever since gears of wars its been held back by its lack of general raam.

htekemerald

oh lol niceee :P

Ram is cheaper than dirt...

htekemerald

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]

But isnt there a limit to what they can assign to each shader processor on the 360?

They can only allocate so many. like 32 shader processors(or 2 arrays)for shader(pixel) work and 16(1 array)to do the vertex(vertices) workload.

Teufelhuhn

[QUOTE="htekemerald"]

Yeah, just look at the 360. Ever since gears of wars its been held back by its lack of general raam.

T_REX305

oh lol niceee :P

I remember when both, the N64 and Sega Saturn had memory expansions. Nintendo put the N64 memory expansion to great use in games like DK64, Perfect Dark and Majora's Mask. I was also quite confident that Kinect (Natal back then) will bring atleast some memory upgrade which would be used for higher res or more detail. But console hardware upgrades died with the N64.

The next-gen consoles will clearly need a lot more RAM if they want to run more complex games.