Ninja Theory = Heavenly Sword
"Originally Posted by Deano´s Blog
"You would think that as we get more and more memory in consoles, that memory management would get easier but alas its not to be…
PS3 has 512Mb of RAM in total, which is a sizeable chunk when compared with the last generation of consoles (64Mb in the Xbox). The problem is that, we want to do much more and we want to do it ‘easier‘.
So where does it all go…
Well first you have to OS thats going to take a bit of the apple. And its a sizeable chunk…
Then we need space for all these lovely HDR AA framebuffers and render targets.
Then we have textures and geometry and least we forget animation data and sound. These content items consume the vast majority of the RAM. Off the top of my head its in the region of about 300Mb in total! This is all streamed as well, so be glad you have a nice big disk to put things on…
By nice big disk I meant Blu-ray not hard disk etc. With a single ‘area’ in our terms (something like a room) being 300Mb of in-game memory you need a fair bit of space on the disk to store it all."
I’ll make a prediction for how PS3 games will evolve.
1st Gen: PPU used for most things with the SPUs just doing some heavy lifting.
2nd Gen: PPU still dominant but SPUs doing a lot more tasks.
3rd Gen: SPU completely dominant with PPU now more of a game coprocessor.
I expect the third generation of PS3 titles will really shine, the first engine that is really SPU centric and just treats the PPU as a coprocessor is going to kick arse. The SPUs are fast like greased lightning but just require a different paradigm thats not going to be fully incorporated for a few generations…"
http://rattie.demon.co.uk/?p=43
