Sorry for this kinda gamerbrained question.

The Xbox 360, Playstation 4, Xbox One, honestly most consoles after the Playstation and Saturn have shared memory pools. It allows flexibility in how much memory and VRAM developers want to assign, right? Why does the PS3 not have a shared 512MB pool of GDDR3? It caused all kinds of problems, most notably with Bethesda games.

Is it the Cell Broadband Engine needing the specialty XDR memory? Is it an artifact of the Nvidia RSX graphics chip being added late in development? Looking back I a)most wonder if the split memory was more of a problem than the Cell tbh.

    • ashinadash [she/her]
      ·
      4 months ago

      a trend that would continue to this day.

      blocky-wat The PS4 outsold the Xbox One 2:1 and the PS5 continues this trend, they're also pretty normal architecturally?

      But yeah no kidding, it just seems to me like this bizarre PPE/SPE orchestra is so much worse than simply three cores with simultaneous multithreading. (and a unified, flexible memory pool) It's like they tried to reinvent the multitasking wheel...

      • KnilAdlez [none/use name]
        ·
        4 months ago

        The PS4 outsold the Xbox One 2:1 and the PS5 continues this trend, they're also pretty normal architecturally?

        Just joking since the PS5 is also lacking in games. The PS4 did fairly well with game support, especially towards the end of it's life.

        Someone at sony said "get a supercomputer for our console" and this is how it ended, though The PS3 did have some success in that field. Then GPGPUs became popular like 2-3 years later so it was all for naught.

        • ashinadash [she/her]
          ·
          4 months ago

          O yea it doesn't have any gaems, true =)

          I saw that the PS3/Cell had OpenCL stuff too, hilarious. What was Sony's sales pitch with this? They want it to be a media center, a superpowered gamer box (lol) and... also a highly parallel mainframe-ass computer? Is that gonna sell to gamers? wut

          • KnilAdlez [none/use name]
            ·
            4 months ago

            I can only guess as to what is going though Sony executives' heads sometimes. Though the ps3 did it's most important job (to sony) extremely well: pushing the Blu-Ray to be the dominant format for HD home video.

            • ashinadash [she/her]
              ·
              4 months ago

              For all the good it did them winning that war, when Netflix was popular by 2010 agony-shivering