At the start of last month we brought you the news that the PS3 version of Final Fantasy XIV had been pushed back until 2011 due to “technical problems.” The game’s producer – Hiromichi Tanaka – has now gone in to more detail about what this actually is;
“The main reason was the memory. On the PC, they have enormous memory. For PS3, there’s a restriction. They are adjusting the memory size and customising it; it took longer than we were expecting, but we’re really working hard to bring it out as soon as possible.”
By memory, we assume he means RAM – of which the PS3 has 256MBs dedicated. During my trip to Gamescom I managed to see Final Fantasy XIV in action on the PC – and it’s looking really good. Let’s hope the PS3 version will arrive as polished.
Source: VG247
Radboud
Couldn’t they just use a virtual memory?
Like having a gamedata file on the HDD and use that as extra memory?
Don’t really know if it would hold up performance-wise though, as reading/writing to disk is slower than RAM, but it should be possible to split them up right?
Anyhow, really looking forward to the PS3 version of this :P
badgersnapper68
stop it. my head hurts.
Deathbrin
They will probably do that anyway, include the place for the cache in installation data size or something.
kevatron400
I’m surprised the ps3 has only 256mb available. Most pcs come with at least a 1gb these days – I can see why they might need to optimise!
Radboud
Well, PC’s do tend to use a lot more memory when they do nothing though.
Right now, this PC Im on right now is using 452MB memory of which 49MB is for the various Internet Explorers that are running.
Windows already uses 400MB just to sit there waiting for you to do something :P
Deathbrin
You still use IE?
Radboud
@Deathbrin, yeah, computer at work, don’t have the authorizations to install anything else :P
I use Firefox at home though…
hazelam
actually it’s 256mb for the processor and 256mb for the graphics chip, total 512mb, which is still a pitifully small amount compared to all but the most basic PCs.
teflon
Bear in mind that the current gen of consoles were largely developed during 2004-2005. Back then 1GB RAM in a PC was fairly typical, but since a console doesn’t have a silly OS to run the whole time (or at least a very very stripped down OS), that RAM can be used to the maximum and micromanaged to an extreme.
So 512MB is OK… Of course, both MS and Sony were trying to keep costs down, and so, since they were going for faster and more expensive RAM (at the time), limited themselves to 512MB rather than, say, 768MB or ever 1GB to cut costs.
It’s a shame really, because for $20 more their RAM capacities could have been far more spacious for Devs to tool around with… Doesn’t help that the PS3 was a big fat mess of complications and expense at launch. Silly Sony.
Porcupine_I
doesn’t the PS3 have 512MB of ram split up in 2. one half for the processor and one half for the RSX? or something like that?
beeje13
yes but the it’s 256mb XDR RAM (very fast) and 256mb GDDR3 (most PC graphics cards these days come with GDDR5)
tonycawley
I love it when people make technical comments about these things but don’t really know exactly what they’re saying. I know nothing about this, but i’m convinced square enix know exactly what they’re doing so i’m really not worried.
SmokeyPSD
well actually, they don’t have much of a track record this generation whatsoever so I take issue that they know what they’re doing completely.
Dan Lee
You’ll have to excuse my ignorance on the matter – but from what I’ve read it has (as has already been mentioned) 512mb of RAM but split into two lots – 256mb of dedicated XDR DRAM and 256mb for the RSX graphics chip. All this makes me face hurt, so it’s coffee time!
Kennykazey
I thought it had more… hmm I’m dissapointed now, anyway I recon SE will do a good job though. just wish there would not be any monthly payments for + subs.
cc_star
The PS3s 256+256 memory is on of it’s biggest limiting factors.
Not only can it only hold a more limited amount of stuff in it than a low end gaming PC or the 360, but it is also slow, and has a low ‘fill rate’ This explains why that unless a game is designed specifically for the PS3 there is less stuff on screen and what is on screen has less detail along with the usual lower average framerate and more torn frames.
To make a game look the best possible it seems you either need the unlimited resources of Polyphony Digital (which ain’t gonna happan) or work for Naughty Dog who are experts with offloading tasks to The Cell to help with the limited throughput.
Perhaps Naughty Dog should set up a seperate company which other developers could contract to help with PS3 optimisation.
DrNate86
Sony must have realised this would cause problems when they developed it, how strange to build in so little when I presume (though knowing nothing about this stuff perhaps not) that it is fairly easy to build in more RAM, as people have said, most laptops have at least a gig.
AG2297
Well the ICE team is part of Naughty Dog (link below), so they are half way there. I assume that the team is only allowed to work within Sony’s first party studios though, or maybe just exclusives (R*’s Agent maybe).
http://www.worldwidestudios.net/global-tech
gazzagb
But Uncharted 2 runs fine with the memory restrictions and GT5 looks brilliant. So does this mean that Square Enix are really pushing the graphical boundries of the PS3?
cc_star
No… It mean’s they’re porting a PC game, as opposed to designing a PS3 game like they did with XIII
YOURMUMANDME
@CC, I’m sure we talked about this before but can’t the SPU’s take a bit of the processing brunt or are tge purely for multi-tasking ?
Radboud
Yes they could, but you have to design the program that way.
cc_star
They can handle stuff in parallel with the RSX GPU, so say if you offload lighting to an SPU, it alleviates the PS3’s underpowered RSX. But, I’m not exactly sure how the undoubted power of The Cell (in skilled hands) can help with a memory limitation without going through loads of old Digital Foundry articles.
YOURMUMANDME
So it would need to be made from the ground up a bit like Crysis or something (does the Cryengine do that ?) ?
retro_
Oh how times have changed.
My expanded ZX81 had 16k memory which was a hell of a lot back in 1981/2 and that is 32,768 times less than the PS3. I suspect the RAM in the ps3 is also many tens of thousands of times slower than the PS3’s and I suspect the CELL runs many millions of times faster that the Z80a cpu in Sinclairs little miracle.
Sorry, went all nostalgic there for a second !
TSBonyman
Dammit, now you’ve got me going too..1k of ram,black and white with no sound and just ascii characters as graphics but having only 1k as standard helped teach the value of efficient programming. At least we can hope the devs are learning stuff now with PS3’s limited memory that will stand to them next gen when more memory is available.