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In very broad strokes, compared to the other consoles of its generation, the PS3 offered a large compute capacity via SPEs and was starved for RAM and memory ba
by RodgerTheGreat 9y ago
In very broad strokes, compared to the other consoles of its generation, the PS3 offered a large compute capacity via SPEs and was starved for RAM and memory bandwidth. I think you're conflating the technical impact of a heterogenous architecture with other differences in specs.
If you tailored a game to work within the memory footprint of a PS3 and did not take advantage of SPEs, a port is easy- you've aimed at a lowest common denominator. If you designed your game with the expectation that you'd have more RAM, you'll have to make some painful decisions to cut the game down to size. If you designed your game to actually take advantage of SPEs, there wouldn't necessarily be a comparable compute resource on the platform to which you would like to port.
- vvanders 9y agoJust a small nit that the PS3 and X360 had the same amount of RAM, it was just split on the PS3. X360 had a unified memory model which was a lot easier(PS3's is closer to a PC and X360 your mobile phone). We still did clever things like putting music in GPU memory and then streaming it back to system memory since the bandwidth wasn't large and read patterns were very predictable.