"PS3 1000 times more powerful than PS2"

[Bobs_Hardware]

Are u watching at results of 4MB of textures on PS2 or results of more than 4MB?

..Wha??

Nobody denies that.But if the PS2 had more than 4MB(like if it could stream 32MB of textures for an example)of streaming VRAM u would have seen better results than XBOX.A lot better

If the bandwidth wasn\'t increased accordingly, that amount of VRAM would be useless.

There are also other factors that come into play, such as texture compression and the like.

Nope. I can\'t agree with you there. No doubt the PS2 has a very different architecture than a PC but the 4MB VRAM is SERIOUSLY holding it back. Look at the XBOX. Even with inferior bandwidth and an age old architecture, it manage to outdo the PS2 simply with brute force. Sure it may not be elegant but who cares?? It\'s the result that counts.

The PS2 can hold it\'s own or even better the XBOX when it comes to polygon counts but is losing out to the XBOX in most cases graphically where textures and resolution is concerned simply of the small VRAM. With more VRAM, it means less ingenious headache for the programmers and nicer graphics for the consumer.


We can all talk about tech specs till we drop but the results has cemented the FACT that XBOX has superior texture simply because of a larger VRAM!!

If the PS3 is to follow the PS2 archictecture, fine, but the system must be balanced as not to be severly handicapped in other areas like VRAM.

You\'re flat out wrong Paul.

The reason why PS2 has problems with textures is not because of the VRAM size, but because of the limited bandwidth (EE <-> GS).

VRAM on PC == Texture Cache + Framebuffer
VRAM on PS2 == Framebuffer (and display lists; polygons)

From a developers point of view, I can say that you misunderstood the way PS2 was designed. Simply enlarging memory would not make "the" difference you\'re refering to.

And the Xbox [as Bobo rightfully pointed out already] btw hasn\'t got VRAM either. It\'s called a UMA and the space is found within the 64 MB of RAM. Incase you haven\'t noticed, the PS2 has a UMA as well, with the difference that the embedded memory on the GS is for the framebuffers and display lists. No textures are being cached here.

[Bobs_Hardware]

Pfft, way to say the same thing that I already had, seven.  You just had to make it sound all intelligent :rolleyes:

I know, I know.. admittedly, I didn\'t read your comments until I had posted my reply already and besides, since he was disagreeing with my post, I feel that I had to add my 2 cents in aswell.

No offense.

Originally posted by Bobs_Hardware


..Wha??

Are the results of 4MB of streamed textures the same as of 4MB of stored textures?

If the bandwidth wasn\'t increased accordingly, that amount of VRAM would be useless.

There are also other factors that come into play, such as texture compression and the like.

I ment if they made it feasable to stream them.I am not comparing the PS2\'s ability to stream textures with the XBOX\'s ability to display high quality textures.I am comparing the idea of streaming textures with the old idea of storing.

[Bobs_Hardware]

Are the results of 4MB of streamed textures the same as of 4MB of stored textures?

It all depends on how it is used, how much bandwidth there is, etc.  Theorhetically, it can achieve far more than 4MB of stored textures.  But only as much as the bandwidth will allow.

Oh, and PS2 doesn\'t have VRAM, it has 4MB\'s of embedded on board cache.  Much faster, and more expensive.  

[Paul2]

ps2 have 4mb of VRAM.
I used to thought it pretty low
but comparing it to Gamecube, GCube only have 3 mb of VRAM
but because Gcube have 6x texture compression, 4 layer of textures per time, making 3mb of VRAM equals 18 mb because of the 6x compression ratio.

ps2, on the other hand was develop over a year before of xbox and gcube.
it doesn\'t have texture compression, but rather some sort of streaming technology.  it can only do 1 layer of texture a time.  if develop wants to get 4 layers, they have to do it again 4 times which take longer time.  streaming texture is a bottleneck to many developers.

if ps2 have 6x texture compression, it would have outperform gcube.

Are the results of 4MB of streamed textures the same as of 4MB of stored textures?

The results are quite different, as the 4 MB must be used to save the buffers. If you add it up, you should get around 3 MB being used. That would leave 1 MB just for "cached" textures. If you stream them however, you can use far more, as the textures aren\'t saved locally but somewhere within the 32 MB of main Memory.

ps2 have 4mb of VRAM.
I used to thought it pretty low
but comparing it to Gamecube, GCube only have 3 mb of VRAM
but because Gcube have 6x texture compression, 4 layer of textures per time, making 3mb of VRAM equals 18 mb because of the 6x compression ratio.

GameCube\'s 3 MB is also only used for the buffers alone.

ps2, on the other hand was develop over a year before of xbox and gcube.

so?

it doesn\'t have texture compression, but rather some sort of streaming technology.

it certainly does. It can also decompress on the fly.

it can only do 1 layer of texture a time. if develop wants to get 4 layers, they have to do it again 4 times which take longer time.

correct, although this hasn\'t got to be a bad thing. PS2 is extreamly fast with its single-pass (thus it having a very high fillrate).

if ps2 have 6x texture compression, it would have outperform gcube.

It does have compression. The bandwidth and the 32 MB of memory is the shortage.

PS: Sorry, but I\'m tired and couldn\'t bother with an in-depth reply.

You know when they say 1000 or what not faster they really mean that the CPU will be made up of CPU Cores that make up one complete CPU. Meaning 100 little cpu\'s will be on the CPU LOL they are really saying that multi-processing will allow the Speed to imitate 150 GHz  so if you put 100 cores at 1.5Gig you get the 150GHz.

[Bobs_Hardware]

seven, perhaps you could explain the texture compression in the PS2 for me.  I know that it can use MPeg (which can go as high as approx. 80:1), but I was under the impression that all textures had to be moved around internally in uncompressed form.

mpeg-2 is pretty useles for textures unfortunately, but PS2 can do CLUT compresion. The idea is to store textures in a compressed state in main memory and then decompress on the fly when sending them to the GIF (graphics-user interface: interface between EE and GS).

[Bobs_Hardware]

What\'s the compression ratio?

It quite depends on the developers effort and the texture.

Some additional information on CLUT:

The PlayStation 2’s does feature pseudo-texture-compression in the palletized textures via a CLUT. Palletized textures are 8-bit textures where the palette has been selected from a complete 24-bit range. This can reduce the texture storage requirements by almost a factor of three, and is a technique used in the Glide version of Unreal. To get around potential dithering issues, it’s possible to break up a large texture into multiple, smaller 8-bit textures; since each texture has its own palette. Of course, breaking up these textures requires developer effort. In the strictest of terms, this is texture compression in that it is a lossy representation of an original 24-bit image. On the other hand, since there really isn’t a clever algorithm involved, people usually don’t group it with VQ or S3TC/DXTC approaches.

I had a pretty good Powerpoint Presentation somewhere... but can\'t seem to find it. I\'ll post it when I do.

[Bobs_Hardware]

So you could say it\'s possible to get to approx. 3:1 ratio?

If that were the case, would that explain why Naughty Dog push approximately 40+ MB\'s of textures when limited bandwidth should, theorhetically, be limited to about 16.8MB (at max)?

hum, why 16.8 MB?