Playstation3 :Possible leakage from Sony

Originally posted by Paul2
Man, I find Sony did a great job with PS2 by making it dvd movie playable and backward compatible with psx.

But Microsoft a computer giant with more money than Sony, make XBOX with stuff like dvd movie playable, built in hdd (which ps2 lack), 4 controller ports (ps2 only have 2), and somewhat better graphic.  It sound like Microsoft is losing money selling each units, but Microsoft have too much money, losing a little money doesn\'t seem to hurt them at all.

So, with that said, ps3 and xbox2 will be quit interesting to see hand to hand combat.  Competition is good.  I\'ll wait and see what both consoles will have to offer in the E3...

I think the reason for ps2 success beside it predecessor did so well is they arrived on time in 2000, and giving it a year headstart over xbox....
If both XBOX2 and PS3 arrive about the same time, this will get even more interesting.

acoridng to forbes, Sony doesn\'t have that much less money than microsoft.  Microsoft ranks 152 in the world and sony is 160 in assests.  And as the overall best company, MS is 32 while Sony is 77.  Not all that distant.

[Paul2]

hey talking about forbes, is that the magazine in your sail boat?

I can imagine you in the bathroom sitting on the toilet reading a magazine...although forbes doesn\'t have any nude pics....

what was i babbling about?  (shrug...eh)

yeah, Forbes is one of my fav mags and I get it free thanks to freebizmags.  As for the bathroom, I have stuff, FHM and Maxim for that!

in overall money there is no way sony has as much money as ms. And this has been talked about on the is forum a lont time ago someone even posted the number years back.

My dad is bigger than your dad.

Originally posted by Lord Nicon
Its funny you say that. Are you trying to say that Sony forcibly made devs learn how to stream texures etc by giving the ps2 4megs of vram on purpose?  : \\ <--- where is this kinda smilie when you need it

If developers had 32 MB of Vram would they bother to stream textures when 32 MB of textures produce great results by themselves already?
If it wasnt that then due to some other reason they included only 4 MBs and gave the ability to stream textures so it wouldnt limit it to produce only results of 4 MBs.Beats me.

Originally posted by Unicron!
The only way to get developers to know how to utilise streaming textures was to force them do it by offering small VRAM.
I dont know what developers actually exploited the streaming aspect of the VRAM but I believe after seeing games with high ress detailed textures on PS2 like  SH3 I can only imagince how much can 32 MB of streaming textures can do

Not quite. VRAM (eDRAM) is very heavy on transistors heavy and expensive, which is why only 4 MB of it were placed on the GS. The GS was already *huge* in size - any larger than that and clock would have went down or you\'d have problems with keeping it cool enough.

What hurts the PS2 compared to todays consoles is the lack of a proper hardware mipmapping implementation and perhaps good texture compression which makes 32MB of main memory already quite small compared to the other consoles. It *is* older hardware though (built on less advanced processes, therefore using less transistors/logic).

speaking of which, the VRAM is *not* the bottleneck - neither is the EE <-> GS bus - in most cases it\'s the CPU core that holds back the rest of the units.