PS3 Production Starts In 2005 With XDR DRAM

News for nerds writes "According to Mr. Goto @ Impress PC Watch (Japanese article), Rambus Developers Forum Japan 2004 was held this week in Tokyo to show the roadmap of XDR DRAM, the memory chip in the Sony PlayStation 3 console, and SCEI did the keynote speech; the next-gen interactive console will be able to render in real-time, unlike current pre-rendered content playback machines. XDR DRAM production start deadline is still set at mid-2005 by Toshiba, Elpida and Samsung, which means that production of PS3 itself starts in 2005 and the console will be shipped in late 2005 or early 2006, as Cell is already sampled. Mr. Goto has revealed another insider news; single XDR DRAM chip in PS3 was changed to 256Mbit from expected 512Mbit. It means either of the 2 scenarios - (1) Total memory in PS3 was reduced from 256MB to 128MB (2) Memory bandwidth in PS3 was raised from 25.6GB/sec to 51.2GB/sec (RADEON X800 XT has 35.8GB/sec). Since Toshiba put the same potential market forecast per bits at RDFJ 2004 as in 2003, (2) is likely."

Could someone explain what the hell this means?

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

the next-gen interactive console will share entire set of raw materials and content production environment in it, unlike current pre-rendered content playback machines.

Re:Could someone explain what the hell this means?

[simoniker]

I went and Babelfish-ed the article and have changed that sentence - as another commenter suggested, it was just suggesting that next-gen consoles like the PS2 can do real-time rendering, so there should be no (or less) need for pre-rendered intro sequences and suchlike.

Re:Could someone explain what the hell this means?

[Jahf]

Yep ... PS2 advertised real-time cut scene rendering VERY heavily but it didn't provide the capabilities the story tellers wanted.

Something tells me the PS3 will be the same story ... give a graphic artist an inch in realtime and they will still ALWAYS want more (that's a good thing, I'm not complaining). You'll likely still see rendered cut scenes to some degree for a very long time.

If you get the PS3 to be able to render in realtime what 3 years ago was rendered longtime you still haven't made it look as good as what you see in, say, Spiderman 2. I don't see a console getting to the "realtime looks as good as longtime rendering" anytime in the near future, if ever, as longtime rendering will constantly be improving as well.

Re:Could someone explain what the hell this means?

[Naffer]

Ray Tracing is absolutly impossible in realtime without a cluster. Without ray tracing, a prerendered video sequence will ALWAYS look 5x as good as on rendered in realtime.

Re:Could someone explain what the hell this means?

[Jahf]

I disagree with 5X better for raytracing. Better? Yes, but not 5X. There are a larger number of tricks that can be done to make it look acceptable in realtime on today's fastest workstations (non-clustered). However the step from console to "today's fastest workstation" is probably of the same magnitude as "today's fastest workstation" is to a rendering cluster.

Additionally I'm not convinced that raytracing will always be the best looking solution. For the next 10 years? Sure ... but advancements are const

yeah, and 640k is enough for anyone

[Andy_R]

Even if we skip the fact that arguably, the Cell architecture IS a cluster, realtime raytracing is possible already, if you sacrifice enough quality/use simple enough objects/lights.

Will the PS3 pack enough punch to do worthwhile things with raytracing? Maybe, maybe not... but that's not really relevant, what Sony are pushing for is not raytracing but procedural rendering - instead of storing textures, generating them on the fly.

Take a look at Artmatic Voyager [uisoftware.com] if you want to see some amazing procedural re

Re:Could someone explain what the hell this means?

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Thank you. It was the "raw materials" that I couldn't get past. I was thinking maybe the design would be open-sourced or something.

Guess not.

Umm, help?

[bluephone]

I can't make heads nor tails of this sentence: " the next-gen interactive console will share entire set of raw materials and content production environment in it, unlike current pre-rendered content playback machines."

Can someone translate this for me? Between the bad grammar and Zero-Wing like sentence structure, I'm lost.

Re:Umm, help?

[mR SlIcK]

My best guess is this means instead of just creating these amazing looking movies on powerful computers and then capturing the output into a movie file as part of the video game production, they'll be able to just "program" the movies, and tell the game what's supposed to happen in the movie. Then the PS3 will render everything thats happening and the cinematic is sent to your tv screen.

Thats my theory. If anyone wishes to correct me, feel free to.

Re:Umm, help?

[noselasd]

Uhm, it's not a theory, its already done. Many, many times, in many games.

Re:Umm, help?

[Crowdpleazr1]

Yeah, all games do real time rendering. It's the quality of the rendering that goes down with less powerful machines. The definition of rendering is drawing a graphical scene, which is exactly what all game consoles do.

PS2 can do some decent quality real time cutscenes (Xenosaga comes to mind). I imagine the PS3 will look about 10 times better than that, and as we've all seen with the recent Unreal3 videos, ray tracing is NOT the final word in making a scene look very good.

Re:realtime rendering?

[CaptMonkeyDLuffy]

Errr... One problem with your theory. The big propoganda push for the Playstation 2 worked.
While it would certainly be amusing if your theory were valid, somehow I have the feeling it's more likely a case of things getting lost in translation, and this will be the same old Sony hype machine we saw rolled out for the PS2.

Re:realtime rendering?

[Rallion]

Sony promising what they couldn't deliver was the finishing blow to the Dreamcast and allowed them to own the next-gen market without significant competition for many months, creating an install base that was and is too large to challenge and absolutely guarantees hefty profits and developer's preference even after their only two major competitors have entered the ring.

I have to say, I don't think the lesson learned from that is "don't do it again."

Developers' point of view

[News for nerds]

Thanks Simoniker for changing my offensive line of techno-babble Engrish to simple "realtime-rendering", but the original sentence "share entire set of raw materials and content production environment in it" is meant for developers (naturally, because it's Rambus Developers Forum), explaining recyclability of objects, not promising higher image quality to consumers. It suggests the standardized protocol to share the same model/scene/animation/programming data between feature film, game, and other domains, without losing (programming) control, not only suggesting shift to in-game real-time rendering. But I couldn't crunch that nuance well into the short article.

Anyway the juicy part of this news is not SCEI hype, but memory bandwidth and expected shipping schedule of PS3 itself.

Cell chip will not be used in PS3

[thue]

According to this article [ign.com] the Cell chip will not be used in the PS3.

I can see there are a lot of websites stating that the Cell will be used in the PS3. Can anybody back that up with an official statement from Sony, or are those sites just stating that because there are a lot of web sites stating it?