PS3 hardware slow and broken (already proven false)

[yvzpa]

Hi everybody, I am new to this forum.
I was mucking around and then I found this article.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32171

I really hope the article is false, although I don't understand most of it.


Cheers,
yvzpa

[partridge]

Never believe the Inquirer, it's the gutter press of tech sites. I deleted it recently from my browser because the articles were getting more and more stupid and scaremongering.

Ignore the article, they always seem to come from "a source", and the "journalists" portray themselves as total experts in whatever field they happen to be writing about. It's a junk site.

[cws2882]

yea, this is just retarted. It is talking about the read speed to "local memory" being slow. In this instance "local memory" is the graphics card memory which you rairly if ever read from it. The processor just dumps large amounts of data to the graphics card (write speed) for it to display. There is no reason for the graphics card to dump data back to the processor.

[mainman]

I found an aticle, which shows that the inquirer aticle is all false, and that it is based on incorrect information.

Article:

The The Inquirer article is rubbish and that slide is taken out of context. It seems to imply that the Cell can only read "Cell local memory" (whatever that is) at 16MB/s.

Memory transfer bandwidth between each SPU and its SPU Local Memory is something more like 25GB/s (gigabyte per second); sustained actual bandwidth between all SPUs is greater than 100GB/s; peak theoretical is greater than 200GB/s (assuming all 8 SPUs present for simplicity).

If you had access to the full version of the presentation (part of the full Sony PS3 SDK and technotes), you'd realise that that slide is part of a presentation about the RSX (the PS3's GPU). As such, when it refers to "Local Memory", it means RSX's Local Memory (eg graphics memory, video memory, VRAM or whatever you call it in (ps3 sucks websites). To be understood outside that context, the columns would be better labelled "Main System Memory" and "GPU Local Memory".

The Inquirer article seems to suggest that this figure of 16MB/s (megabyte per second, by the way, what the **** is it with journalists swapping bits for bytes? why don't they get their shift/capslock keys fixed?) is some kind of show stopper. No it isn't. It simply means that the Cell processor has 16MB/s bandwidth when reading directly from memory-mapped GPU address space. So what? Unless you're planning on calling memcpy() or some shit to bring your data back then it doesn't really matter.

On RSX-initiated transfers you have 20GB/s bandwidth to do the same transfer (from RSX local to main system memory). Cell read bandwidth of GPU memory might as well have 0MB/s (ie no connection at all) and it wouldn't matter a bit.

Anybody who didn't know reads from GPU memory are slow turn in your geek card right now! On a PC, even with a 4GB/sec AGP connection, reading from the framebuffer can be as slow as 75MB/sec. This has been true for a very long time --- GPU's don't like anybody else directly touching their framebuffer. That's why Microsoft took direct framebuffer access out of "DirectX". It's a performance killer on modern systems. Sony's "work around" for the situation, using the GPU to handle texture uploads/downloads, isn't news --- it's common knowledge to anybody who has done any graphics programming on modern hardware.

[partridge]

Gamesindustry have also rubbished this article

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=17547

cleary the Inquirer is a website to avoid.

[mainman]

IGN, one of the most trustworthy sites, proves Inquirer article is false.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/711/711617p1.html

[zombie]

More FUD squashed! Closing thread.