PSX5Central
Playstation/Gaming Discussions => PS3 Discussion => Topic started by: RamonGTP on May 20, 2001, 11:43:24 AM
-
I heard that the version 4 PS2 has 32MB of VRAM compared to 4MB on the previous versions. Unfortunatly I have not been able to confirm that. I even emailed sony about the rumor and their reply neither confirmed nor denied it. Can anyone shed any light on the subject? One reason I ask is because I was playing Starwars Starfighter, and I read a few reviews complaining of slowdown, particular mission 7... But when I played it I didn\'t notice any slowdown at all, maybe I was just too caught up in the game to notice though... I don\'t know.
Thanks in advance for any info.
-Ramon
-
Well I don\'t have any info but I can tell you for sure that rumor is completely false. Sony would never do something that stupid. If they were to go and make an upgraded version of the PS2 they would lose tons of customers. People would be so p1ssed at them.
Trust me, that rumor is fake.
-
Who ever said that probably thought the new version of namcos arcade board which uses the PS2 architecture but with 32mb of memory. The arcade board has a version number of some sort so somebody probably just misread or mistyped or something.
-
Ah the wose of E3 it brings the Rumours out you See......
NO there wont be a Version with more memory , and Yeah Starwars Starfighter dose slowdown.
the only "Up Grades" will be
Hard Disk Drive and the Internet Adaptor.
-
Won\'t happen.If Sony we\'re to do this.It would go against they way the PS.2 is designed.Developers would store the textures instead of streaming them.
And new games wouldn\'t work on older PS.2\'s
-
Originally posted by nO-One
Won\'t happen.If Sony we\'re to do this.It would go against they way the PS.2 is designed.Developers would store the textures instead of streaming them.
And new games wouldn\'t work on older PS.2\'s
Yeah What he Said too :D.
PS2 dose not need more memory, it needs a nice HDD and Internet Adaptor :D.
-
Originally posted by dbv23
Who ever said that probably thought the new version of namcos arcade board which uses the PS2 architecture but with 32mb of memory. The arcade board has a version number of some sort so somebody probably just misread or mistyped or something.
Yes, I remember there was another thread a few weeks ago.People said the news were about a new arcade board.
-
I actually heard about this before E3... Have any of you seen this article???
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/17528.html
-Ramon
-
I was the one that started the thread awhile back.
The 32 meg as far as I can tell is for the arcade board.
They have just changed the new version to 0.18 micron or something whatever that means.
I think its just cheaper production costs for them. Shouldn\'t effect the home user in anyway.
-
if they did this,,, i would personally walk over to sony corporate offices and start smacking some stuff DOWN!... makes no sense....why in the world would they leave millions of ps2 owners with 4megs and some with 32?
-
Yeap, I have to agree that is the system 246 arcade board which was often use by namco and I heard about it use the same ps2 graphic chips and cpu except more vram. Can\'t remember how many but probably 32mb. ps2 have only 4 and will stay 4 mb of vram. yep, it was very hard for any games run higher than 640 x 480p @ 60hz at 32bits of color with some texture storage and other graphic effects dued to 4 mb of vram. I still can\'t understand why 32 bits of color, i am pretty sure it a waste of memory of vram. 24 bits is the best it can get, 32 just waster some more memory. Hopefully, programmers know that and please use 24 bits...yep, i am whinning. streaming textures is another thing I have no clue about. Does it really work really keep me skeptical. If only Sony have included some more mb of vram than their graphic could have been far much better and easier for programmer with a fraction of a time to makes game. Also, ps2 can do like what seems to be 2.4 megapixel fill rates or something like that. I am not sure. then it drop to 1.2 and xbox said something about .6 pixel fillrate is what ps2 can do. It really confuse me. oh yeah, i heard something about swapping 32mb of the main ram to the 4mb of the vram could be possible but really hard to dued. something to do with keep track and not to mess it up...
-
Well here is the article I was talking about for anyone who\'s interested....
"Sony and Toshiba are migrating the PlayStation 2\'s Emotion Engine CPU over to 0.13 micron fabrication process. The shift will also be applied to the console\'s Graphics Synthesiser (GS) chip.
Last month, Simplex Solutions, which developed the GS for Sony, unveiled the next generation of the part, fabbed at 0.18 micron. The reduction in size from 0.25 micron enabled Simplex to increase the chip\'s on-board video RAM from 4MB to 32MB.
Simplex Solutions representative, VP Aurangzeb Khan, said that Sony was happy with the yields of the 0.18 micron part. Despite changing the process, the second version of the GS is twice the size of its predecessor. The shift to 0.13 micron should allow Sony and Simplex to get the size back down again.
It should also allow it to increase the Emotion Engine\'s clock speed, boosting the PlayStation 2\'s performance. That will be essential to help keep Microsoft\'s Xbox at bay, particularly since Sony wants to ship 20 million PS2s during its next fiscal year, beginning 1 April. Xbox is expected to ship with a 733MHz CPU. Emotion Engine currently runs at 300MHz. ® "
-Ramon
-
the article is old and full of half truths
the PS2 specs you see now will not change besides chip size which just makes it cheaper to manufacture
-
I think the 32mb vram you are talking about is a developer\'s version. Because i remember browsing through a website somewhere in ign and it was talking about some news on a developers version of the ps2 with the same kit as the new online kit that\'s coming out accept that it is alot larger than normal ps2 from the screenshot and the with extra softwares and stuffs. I don\'t think you have to worry about it because if you are talking about that version of the ps2 then you will never see it at the public heh. well also on the side note that ps2 i saw on the news has 64 mb ram too heh.
-
Having 32mb of embedded memory would probably make the price of the console sky rocket, its definately not cheap to make - also if that is done it removes quite alot of the desire for the developers to go and find ways to push the hardware in the way it was designed instead of sticking all the textures theyll ever need in the synthesisers memory.
They cant up the clock speed either since that would break alot of the timing critical tricks used when software is coded to the metal, infact it all sounds like theyre looking at fabricating workable GSCube components, werent they meant to have a 32mb frame buffer?
- http://ps2.ign.com/news/22490.html
-bd
-
the rumor is partly false, the PS2 will NOT recieve a memory upgrade, the PS2\'s used for arcades WILL be upgraded for arcade purposes only
-
Originally posted by know-it-all-wanna-be
streaming textures is another thing I have no clue about. Does it really work really keep me skeptical.
It does work,and the PS.2 can stream a heck of alot of textures around.
The biggest drawback is that the scene needs to be redrawn with every frame because it\'s not stored.This is what is bugging programmers they don\'t like to have to constantly redraw the scene,when they could just buffer it.And those 4megs weren\'t intended as Vram (I can\'t remember why it\'s there).
But because Sony didn\'t include any code library like they did with the psx the developers had to figure this out by themselves.Their solution was to lower the textures resolution from 640x480 to something like 640x240 and use this little 4 megs as Vram.
As you can see with the newest games they seem to be implementing texture streaming thus the graphical quality is improving :)
-
"And those 4megs weren\'t intended as Vram (I can\'t remember why it\'s there)." - nO-One
This is the way I understand it. The 4mb Vram is a cache for the instruction set. Instead of storing Textures in the ram and running the instructions over them (which tells them where to go) like a PC does, it stores the instruction set for the level in there and streams the textures over them. This is only possible since the PS2 has a much much larger bandwith for textures than x86 archetecture.
The full explanation is over at http://www.arstechnica.com somewhere if you wanna look over it.
-
to no-One
since you said streaming texture is possible on ps2, does that means it will be possible on xbox? If I am not mistaken, the designer of the ps2 probably added the extra 4 mb of vram because it was getting cheaper...it wasn\'t meant to be there, he just added 4mb of vram as an extra for ps2 since it was cheaper than before...or something like that.
another curious question, which is easier, streaming texture or just use the damn vram memory? and is swapping memory from 4 mb of vram to 32 of main ram hard?
-
The X-Box is designed more like a PC,but is uses the memory more efficently.It has a UMA (unified memory architecture),64 megs of shared ram.It\'s designed to store the data,whereas the PS.2 was designed from the ground up to stream data.
It is easier to use those 4megs as vram,but it\'s not designed to be used as vram.Read SonyFan\'s post.
And the bus between the EE and the GS on the PS.2 is 3,2gbps and once in the GS the data has a massive 48gbps to move around in.
But all the components in the X-Box use the same memory with a 6,4gbps bandwith (more than enough to move data)
And the PS.2 uses rdram memory running at 800Mhz,while the X-Box uses standard sdram memory (I\'m not sure what kind of memory the X-Box uses,so correct me if I\'m wrong)
And read my first post about changing thise 4megs for 32
SonyFan,are you an Ars reader? I haven\'t read that article for a long time,so I need to brush up.
Know-it-all-wannabe read the Ars article.It explains alot.
-
Naw, I\'m not really an Ars reader, but I\'ve browsed over a couple of articals they put up about the PS2\'s archetecture. I\'m just trying to dredge up what I can remember of those articals.
And yeah, at peak preformance the PS2 can transfer textures in the Gigabyte range. But that amount is severly limited by the access speed at which the PS2 can read the textures off the DVD. The guys at Volition said you can improve that preformance by using the MPEG2 compression which can compress at ratios as high as 80:1. But then again, since the PS2 is designed to stream data the realistic ratios at which data can be decompressed on the fly is around 6:1 or 8:1.
So really, if used really effeciently, the PS2 can theoretically push more textures than ANY console in this generation. The bad thing is, the Xbox and GC still beat the PS2 since they can multilayer textures and (as far as I know) the PS2 can\'t.
-
Sonyfan says:
The bad thing is, the Xbox and GC still beat the PS2 since they can multilayer textures and (as far as I know) the PS2 can\'t.
that right, the PS cant do multitexturing, so theoretically, if the GameCube and XBox were only using one layer techniques, then PS2 could easily outperform (if used at capacity). But seeing as GC and XB can do up to about 8 layers in one go, it makes things much easier. PS2 can do this, but it has to be done seperately, using up 8x as much power in the EE. However, even with the MASSIVE power of the EE compared to the GC CPU and the PIII, its bandwidth is extremely inefficient, and might not be able to handle that much texturing. (sorry if i explained it incorrectly)
but the funny thing is, developers keep surprising us with the PS2
-
Originally posted by SonyFan
And yeah, at peak preformance the PS2 can transfer textures in the Gigabyte range. But that amount is severly limited by the access speed at which the PS2 can read the textures off the DVD. The guys at Volition said you can improve that preformance by using the MPEG2 compression which can compress at ratios as high as 80:1. But then again, since the PS2 is designed to stream data the realistic ratios at which data can be decompressed on the fly is around 6:1 or 8:1.
So really, if used really effeciently, the PS2 can theoretically push more textures than ANY console in this generation. The bad thing is, the Xbox and GC still beat the PS2 since they can multilayer textures and (as far as I know) the PS2 can\'t.
May you give me any URLs ?
...it\'s so interesting...I know PS2 can do 8 pass technique via Software...and I asked Prof 2 or 3 months ago about reading Textures off the DVD....but nobody answered me....
-
Just go to the link I provied above and look up any info you can on the PS2\'s archetecture. The bit about using MPEG2 compression is a bit harder to find since I read it from a Daily Radar interview with the Volition guys. You might wanna try Volitions site to see if they\'ve said anything more on the subject.
The single pass maximum textureing I got from IGN\'s system compairison chart. (IGNXbox Faq).
-
They can implement multi-layer texturing in software mode.
The thing that I wonder about is,can they make the VU\'s do all that work,instead of doing it slowly in software.