Rumor: new specs on the PS3 OS

According to a dev friend, the Xbox persistent stuff takes about 4% of available CPU. They also reserve 32MB of system RAM -- which is 6% of the total. Hardly the mess #48 indicates.

Another example of how "efficient" Microsoft's operating systems are in terms of resource consumption:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/09/07/vista_hardware_reqs/

Hardware keeps getting faster, but Windows PCs don't show it because Windows becomes ever more "resource efficient".

/sarcasm

Ok now we have the BS spewers.
IF games released on Blu-ray, which they may be forced to due to the transfer speeds of blu-ray (unless they release with 4x + which is extremely unlikely ) data redundacy artificially makes up for low seek times which blu-ray suffers from.

Given Sony's statement that games will only release on DVD that somewhat blows the capacity out of the water, however leaving the PS3 trapped with what equates to approximately a 10x dvd drive with terrible seek time.

The reality is that how the OS ships is how developers will be forced to develop for for the rest of the consoles life. Claiming that the OS could us firmware updates overtime to free more system resources for games AFTER its initial shipment is like claiming that Sony would make PSP games playable only with firmware after 2.5. Lets be realistic.

Considering the fact that all PS3 games will be written in OpenGL on a linux kernel, its mre than possible that amount of ram may be used. The demands on resources is likely derived from the decision to code in OpenGl which no matter how you slice it is not as refined as directx.

Reviewing sony's claims ans what they have annouced so far forces you to make a number of assumptions

DVD only games:
longer loadtimes based on the bluray standard and how it compares to DVD. The seek times will be insane thanks to the hybrid BD/DVD player. Thus Extreme amounts of data redundacy will be required ala GTA. ( as a side note San Andreas took up roughly a third of the DVD in actually content. Much of the the space was used for data redundacy to improve seek times. What we could see are extreme load times similar to PSP.

Use of OpenGL and Linux kernel:
Yes everybody loves linux, but ask how many games they play with opengl and linux enough said. Im not saying they it cannot be done effiecently however neither are refined enough nor tuned to the level of expected results. Expect developers to be writing a TON of low level garbage.

I cant remember too much more off the top of my head but Its all good. Basically 96MB of ram is TOO DANG MUCH for a stinking "blade system" I cant help but wonder what else is really going on here. For comparison the orginal box used 1/2 MB for its OS. SO 96MB is an extreme amount especially due to the design the Ps3 cannot afford to spare that much ram.

Stop throwing around percentages whilst not knowing anything about how it will affect performance. No one here knows enough about the Cell processor to say whether this will sink the quality of games at all, let alone by how much. Equally no one can say that a core will be dedicated to other functions, it's not even been stated whether DVR can even be used whilst playing a game.

And statements akin to "nail in the coffin" when it's just a few more specifications they don't truly understand are ridiculous. It's the exact same kind of stuff people were throwing around about the Revolution specifications when they thought it was just an Xbox, knowing nothing about the architecture of the CPU.

And if the PS3 performs as claimed, it's doing hella more than just "copy what 360 does". "Computer entertainment system" means far more today than the "Nintendo family entertainment system" meant all those years ago.

But I think that at the rate MS and Sony are going, PCs and consoles are heading towards the same goal, as homes become better networked, better integrated into our livingroom/home theatre systems, it's already our DVR, games machine, HD movie player, completely online etc.

Even the 360 seems to be aspiring to this, but as PCs catch up and people become more wise to how much they can offer (don't argue about PC vs console price, as PCs are everywhere) consoles seem like they'll be doing almost the same thing for a very small difference in price. It's fine now, but in 5-10 years, they'll need an edge bigger than "this'll play games slightly better than an average gaming PC".

I've never seen the blue screen of death on my Windows PC. I've been through Home, Professional with SP2, and currently I have Windows Media Center 2005. I think if you keep your computer in tip top shape you should never see it. Your computer is most likely a Dell running with a Pentium 4 with no H/T and 256 MB of ram. I see it all the time on Dells. My friends laptop takes 5 minutes to boot up. Then it slows to snail pace.

"Claiming that the OS could us firmware updates overtime to free more system resources for games AFTER its initial shipment is like claiming that Sony would make PSP games playable only with firmware after 2.5. Lets be realistic."


Erm, GTA and SFA:Max both only play on version 2.00 or above. I don't think your statements are unrealistic.

And where has it been said anywhere about DVD-games? Are you talking about PS2 games? Haven't they clearly reiterated many times that games will only be on blu-ray discs? Am I missing something?

These kinds of articles are bad. Most people don't understand what all of this means. This gives the impression that %20+ of the PS3's power is worthless, where that isn't necessarily the case.

This also gets those people spouting "7 CORES!" like they always do, even though an SPE is NOT A CORE (it's more like half a core). With 1 SPE reserved for the OS with the ability to take another one away at any time...does mean a little bit for game performance but it's not cataclysmic.

Since an SPE is more like half a core, you could say the PS3 with the OS using 2 SPEs has 1 core + (.5 cores x 6) = 4 cores. Don't take this "math" literally, because it's not entirely correct, but this is just for the sake of explanation. This is where the "less of a power advantage" of the PS3 comes from. Not because of some supposed "resource-hogging" OS.

Anyway, this information really isn't that important. Naturally, we care about the games. Besides that, what I really want to know, is how many of these "planned" features Sony intends to actually implement. Most of the PS2 features never happened or didn't survive (HDD, Linux, versatile online abilities), so I want to see if they can improve over their previous blunders.

GTA uses the features inherent in 2.00 firmware to play custom background music I believe. Apart from lack of homebrew the new firmwares have done little to restrict playback of legal media. Hell, even illegal media. My brother enjoys the better AVC format on his PSP, whilst I have my retro emulators.

It's a tradeoff. But one neccessary to prevent piracy, which they've done well to in the newer firmwares. I more than understand Sony screwing those few using their PSPs for genesis/SNES games to prevent more playing backups. And they're giving them other features to sweeten the deal. I've even considered dropping the homebrew for PSOne emulation.

I don't know why Joystiq decided to leave out the comparisons between the 360 and the PS3 that were quite clearly spelled out in the original article?

"In the case of the PS3 this equates to 12.5% of the available Cores on the CPU always reserved, an additional 12.5% sometimes taken, 12.5% of the available RSX memory and 25% of XDR Cell memory. Balancing these out, one could argue that Sony has removed a total of 25% of the available CPU power and 18.75% of RAM for these features as well as others that are not mentioned here or will be added in future updates to the PS3 Operation System."

"In the case of the Xbox 360, this cost is approximately 2% of total CPU time and 6.25% of the Xbox 360's total available RAM. Balancing these out, one could argue that MS has removed a total of 4% of the Xbox 360's total available system power in order to provide these features and more which were not mentioned. They also left room, CPU and RAM wise, for future features. In other words, they are not using all of the CPU time and RAM that they have reserved to date."

Makes sense in my opinion - MS is a software company, they know what they're doing with an OS. Sony, on the other hand... well...... you know.

To the person talking about compression and how having a larger disk is going to free the PS3 from using any compression - you really need to read up on why compression is used in consoles. It's not about persitent storage capacity, it's about bandwidth and moving data round the system as quickly as possible. The PS3 will use the same compression the 360 uses and will set aside similar resources for it.

The entire BR thing is a giant red herring that waaayyyy to many otherwise informed people are buying into.

#53

When did I mention Linux? Could it be possibly NEVER? The OS used is just trivia from a consumer's perspective in a device of this nature. They should never be confronted directly by it as they would on a PC. I was addressing a mistaken statement about Windows, not comparing it to other candidates for an embedded OS.

What we're discussing is independent of operating systems and intent on resource consumption compared to traditional console design. PC developers are accustomed to sharing the environment with myriad functions that have no bearing on their particular app but are vital to offering a full featured OS that may simultaneously be running tasks using those diverse functions. Since they are already in the PC OS business, Microsoft understandably feels less need to weigh down their console with excess features already well served elsewhere. Sony may have some remarkable stuff in store but for now a lot of explanation remains.

As for Vista, have you noticed the amount of different levels offered? Yes, the the featured packed version requires a high end PC by today's measure but the same can be said for getting the best from Linux or Mac OS. High-end is a moving target. It won't be terribly long before a machine running the full Vista feature set will be under $700. Compare that to what people paid for the first generation 80286 and later 80386 systems just to run DOS with only improved speed and no added features. Those systems entered the market at $5,000. Even after factoring for inflation, a decent Vista PC will cost far less than people paid for previous advances.

Most consumers don't buy a new PC just to run the same old stuff faster. They want more than that. When the Mac first made GUI systems well known beyond the tech geek audience this upped the ante for system resources. The GUI consumed a big slice of memory and system time by the standards of the day. Thus a 512K Mac couldn't handle editing a document that fit in memory on a 512K PC but the addition of WYSIWYG features carried far more value for most users. OTOH, plenty of GUI users tended to keep a simpler plain text editor around, especially for code work, to take advantage of low resource needs and speed. How many of us to this day still bring up Wordpad instead of Word (or equivalents on other systems)for fast and simple documents that still need a few WYSIWYG elements?

On a game console it is a different story. Developers are rightfully jealous of anything competing for control of the machine. Stuff like a standard 3D API ala OpenGL or Direct3D has direct value. But what about resource thieves that not only don't contribute to gaming but may even compete with it, such as downloading of non-game content? That is where the issue become a potential sore point.

#51

You've given a very good reason why having a game console double as a DVR is a bad idea. If consumers wanted to be hassled with making performance optimizations at their end, they would just do all their gaming on PCs. To operate effectively as a DVR without complicating gameplay a console would have to have permenent resources allocated for DVR operations that are never available to the game developer. A developer wants to choose an optimum mode for the game and target that. Users with less demanding displays and only stereo speakers may make their machine work less hard but shouldn't see any great gains in frame rate or other quality issues. Unlike the PC market, consoles are expected to perform correctly at the intended display mode since the capability of the platform is so extremely predictable. Xbox 360 developers are going to target 720p and so will PS3 developers. Just because NTSC will be supported does not mean better performance should be expected at that level. Good developers are going to enlist every bit of the machine for best game at the targeted mode. They really don't want to deal with a part-time SPE that moonlight as an MPEG encoder.

Having an SPE offer a 'maybe you can have it, maybe you can't' situation is a way of telling developers they really have a Cell with 5 SPEs and some other hardware they shouldn't touch. The function performed by that hardware may be invoked by game code but never directly under the game developer's control.

To put it another way, does anyone really want a console game that includes warnings against recording a TV show during gameplay for optimum performance? Avoiding that situation is why I favor consoles for gaming. I'd rather have a separate Media Center PC or other DVR and a dedicated game console that avoids all concern of whether one will step on the other's toes during use.

E3 in less than a month guys. We'll know all then so lets not argue about something that could turn out to be infact a pile of naff. It sounds a bit odd really. But if it DOES run fully and constantly and HAVE to, then there must be a valid reason for it. It doesn't automatically mean games are gonna be jerking around though... but I do feel a little wary...

Does anyone remember the few games made for Dreamcasts Windows CE operating system?? Frame rate in Sega Rally 2 anyone? ACK! At least programmers had the option with DC and 95% decided to ignore the "Powered by Windows CE" and do their own thing. If Sony force the developer to use the General OS then things could be a little less than what they could be to the max. But who knows? Nobody even knows how this 7 core monster is gonna work. What other system out there can we even compare it to? exactly... none.

It doesn't make sense though. If the OS is allowed to run all the time FULLY (I assume this is the Linux based OS) then its gonna leave the machine wide open for hackers to run illegal code. It makes sense that the Linux OS runs only for front end and Media facilities, switching to a special (Incerdibly protected and low resource hungry) system to run games.

*Reaching for the salt pot*

Kotaku has a much more realistic article about the same subject...

http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/ps3/playstation-3-to-be-fat-and-retarded-166948.php

"Playstation 3 To Be Fat And Retarded
The last bit of bleakness is the rather astounding news that the OS that the PS3 will be running on will consume 25% of the system’s core and 18.75% of the system RAM! Holy crap! Don’t we buy consoles so we don’t have to deal with that sort of OS overhead?"

It makes sense, PS3's OS will be required to do a lot more at the same time as the game as 360's. Sony is quite serious about PS3 being a multi-functional, multi-user system.

It should be noted, though, that this stuff is really "worst case". The OS requirement may well come down before launch. It did with the PS2 - basically Sony tends to tell developers not to rely on a certain amount, with the hopes that they can reduce that as development continues.

Sony is the one promoting the PS3 as a COMPUTER entertainment system, Ken has been very forward in expressing their Linux based OS will be intergrated into the PS3 for more "domestic" uses. What that entails god only knows how they have stated it and thus is is a VERY important feature. Just because consumers do no know they are running on a linux system doesnt mean they dont have to actually deal with the OS.

As for Vista. It requires such high system requirements to run WinFS and the new directx 7 compliant desktop. Both of which take advanage of feature sets, rather then raw power of hardware. WinFS truely needs AT LEAST a hyperthreaded processor to run decently.

I completely agree with #58 with the exception of one detail. The edram in the 360 was made specifically for this purpose as a decent framebuffer. The ps3 by contrast has a powerful gpu, however its forced to use system ram or vram for its framebuffer basically cramping it into the 50GB bandwidth hole. By contrast the 360s 256GB edram bandwidth isnt ever enough to do HD graphics thus it resorts to tiling .

In case you were too busy to read PAGE 1 of the article (since it links directly to page 2)

"The operating system running in the background enables,

- Custom Music in all games
- Simplifying development of Online games
- Seamless updating of games when the Xbox360 is connected to the Internet
- Voice Chat across all games, even outside of the games own UI
- Notifications and messaging to be sent between users regardless of the games they are playing

As one would deduce, this does not come without its own costs in terms of power, including,

- 32mb of the 512mb of available GDDR3 RAM
- 3% CPU time on Core 1 and Core 2 (nothing is reserved on Core 0)

Everything that one wants to do involving software on a game console, specifically while the user is playing games, comes at a cost. In the case of the Xbox 360, this cost is approximately 2% of total CPU time and 6.25% of the Xbox 360's total available RAM. Balancing these out, one could argue that MS has removed a total of 4% of the Xbox 360's total available system power in order to provide these features and more which were not mentioned. They also left room, CPU and RAM wise, for future features. In other words, they are not using all of the CPU time and RAM that they have reserved to date."
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So in this case -- the XBOX360 OS takes up pretty significantly less total resources than the PS3.

Yes, it's true that OS revisions can free up more RAM and claim CPU/SPE time less frequently but doing this in the firmware or on the hard drive is getting into risky territory.

On older systems, the middleware and kernel live on the game media. Two Xbox games can have entirely different revisions of the DirectX code but have no effect on each other running on the same machine. So long as programs talk to the APIs in the way specified by the maker, compatibility isn't threatened. But getting developers to follow the rules has always been hard at best. Some incredibly ancient Window 3.x stuff still runs fine on a WinXP SP2 machine but many others have become unusable exception under emulation. The ones that still work played by the rules but even many of those needed special accomodation. A big portion of the hard drive space occupied by current Windows is code that gets invoked only when special situations created by evil but popular techniques used by old apps arise. Vista is dropping Win16 support at long last, so a lot of that special exception code is going away as well. There will be no shortage of Win9x stuff to take its place.

That is life in the PC world. If a corporation with 50,000 seats has a 15 year old VB app that absolutely must run on any new OS upgrade (even though it would cost far less and have substantial benefits to just produce a new app from scratch) the OS maker will bend over backwards to make it run. Even if it means writing code for that one customer. It's essentially an OS patch that only runs when needed.

A console with a long life cycle and many complex OS revisions faces the same risk. Popular older games could fail and require costly special attention to keep viable. (Wonder why Xbox emulation on the Xbox 360 is taking so long to be complete?) Things would get better in terms of performance and features but at the potential cost simplicity in being able to run all games for the platform without considering their age and any special details.

"So in this case -- the XBOX360 OS takes up pretty significantly less total resources than the PS3."

This is true, but it's also required to do less. The simple fact that it's going to be rendering out up to 1080p for things like the OS overlays etc. automatically doubles some of your memory requirement, not to mention everything Sony has said you'll be able to do simultaneously with gameplay, over and above what 360 offers.

Also, 25% of CPU time on PS3 is a big stretch. We've know idea how much it requires a second SPE, it may be a tiny percentage of its time, if at all.

#66

I think the advantage of the 360 OS layer is that it's not overly extrenuous. The OS layer offers a noticable slowdown when activating it and toggling between the game and the system.

It's noticable -- but not cumbersome. It would be a fine line to create features that enhance gameplay with OS functionality and integration. It would be counter productive to lose focus when simply trying to do too much on that layer which would in turn sacrifice the gaming experience because the layer is too bloated.

I'll give Sony the benefit of the doubt that this 19% or whatever resources doesn't take away from the gaming experience.

You already hear complaints that the added resource cost of the OS of the 360 being noticable.

In comparison to what the PS3 is reported to be using, it would be a HUGE disappointment if they let their overly ambitious goal mar the gaming experience which was crucial to the success in the first two generations of the Playstation.

It's easy to tell this is just a hoax. An OS absolutely requires a more general purpose processor than an SPE is, they can do nothing but vector math.

in OTHER WORDS! it has been dumbed down AGAIN to hardly if AT ALL more powerful than the 360, to the point where the argument of which is more powerful comes back up. all thanks to that RAM that the OS sucks up.

oh and by the way i hope MS sues sony. theyve stolen enough in the gaming industry. (so dont anyone bring up about anything MS has stolen outside gaming industries)

"in OTHER WORDS! it has been dumbed down AGAIN to hardly if AT ALL more powerful than the 360, to the point where the argument of which is more powerful comes back up. all thanks to that RAM that the OS sucks up."

I know some people are keen to blow this out of proportion. The difference in RAM is less than 15%. It's an annoyance, nothing more. You'd have to take maybe 4 or 5 SPEs for the OS before you could start talking about the CPUs being equivalently powerful, IMO. And 15% is less than the difference between shading power on the two systems, for example, or for texturing bandwidth on the two systems etc.

Also, for what it's worth, actual PS3 developers on Beyond3D.com are saying that the stuff about a second SPE being reserved is not true. Someone just made that up on Beyond3D, and other sites are taking it as gospel. The OS takes one SPE.

Don’t worry about ram usage by the OS being a limiting factor. The limiting factor for developers will actually be the complexity of the hardware. Here's why:

Multi-cores/processors are nice for passing off what would naturally be a separate thread like playing a music file, but using a multi-core to increase performance from what you would naturally write as a single thread is a huge pain. I'm sure that most developers would have preferred MS to use faster 2 cores instead of the current 3, so at least games designed for dual-core pcs could easily be ported to the 360. However the nice thing about the 360 is that you can still get a lot of power from using 1 or 2 cores, and I doubt any of the current games actually use more than one core. Oblivion doesn’t require two cores and look at how amazing it is.

As for the PS3, not only will Sony again be using a 3D API that is much more difficult to write for than directx, they will also be expecting developers to write their games for multi-core. Yes each PS3 core will be equally fast and most new games will only need to use one core, but the 360 could easily end up with a stronger advantage by being able to take ports of games created with directx for high-end pcs that have dual-core processors. If dual-core and directx become the de facto standard for high end games Sony will be in serious trouble.

John Carmack, creator of the Doom/Quake series is of similar opinion and in fact stated that he wished MS went with a really fast single core. He was disappointed to learn that MS was going with a triple core, so you can understand why he said he will probably prefer the 360 to the PS3. Sony is really expecting too much from developers and that will be more of a problem than any issue with cpu or ram usage by the OS. Games are already difficult enough to create and developing for the PS3 to me looks like a nightmare.

My PC is a good enough gaming machine for now so have not owned a gaming console in years. But... does it matter that IBM supplies processors for all the consoles? I don't expect to see too much difference between Xbox and PS3 in terms of video quality (I think xbox has 3 powerpc processors to compensate for Sony's single cell chip which has up to 8 or 9 processors on the chip). I think the Hardware can deliver the goods, it's up to the programmers to take full advantage of the processors power to create some really cool games. I don't know if Sony will succeed with the PS3 but I am hearing a lot about the Cell chip in other industries. Mercury systems has a demo of a Cell chip blade server for medical imaging check it out here: http://www.mc.com/cell/demo.cfm This is the only demonstration of the Cells power so far... Isn't it strange that other Cell based products are now available (yes, you can buy one right now) from Mercury and IBM before the PS3?

To post 73... processing power has reached a ceiling, that's why it's going multicore... you just can't get more juice out of a single core anymore... So, John Carmack can wish all the single core chips he wants, he'll never get the power to compete with multicore. Yes programming is going to be a lot more difficult for now, until better compilers and programming tools are made available over time. And if Oblivion is amazing with one core I'd expect (demand!) something much better with multiple cores.

To post 73... processing power has reached a ceiling, that's why it's going multicore... you just can't get more juice out of a single core anymore... So, John Carmack can wish all the single core chips he wants, he'll never get the power to compete with multicore. Yes programming is going to be a lot more difficult for now, until better compilers and programming tools are made available over time. And if Oblivion is amazing with one core I'd expect (demand!) something much better with multiple cores.