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.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
    ·
    2 months ago

    Likely it was a tradeoff between various competing and contradictory constraints, most of which will probably never be revealed.

    • ashinadash [she/her]
      ·
      2 months ago

      :/

      Sony also did this on the Vita, which has a way more lopsided 512mb system ram/128mb vram config, so it's happened more than once. Just strikes me as so weird, and usually consoles with split ram have more system than video ram...