LarasAider wrote:Cross game chat has a bunch of interfering nobody's
talkingshouting to you constantly regardless of the game you're playing on. To be honest, what happened to the telephone? The feature dominates the Xbox 360 and is regarded as the best feature of the rival console. For me it's just a worthless piece of kit, that has no real meaning nor sense.
Level 6
trubadman wrote:
frodouk wrote:
Jesus. What is this? Since Sony announced why they couldn't bring in cross game chat everybody and his dog thinks they understand how RAM works.
You really don't. So stop. Now. Thanks.I hold up my hands, I don't know what I'm talking about, all I do no is I have 3 different PS3's; a phat one, the first slim and a new slim and they can all barely handle the in-game XMB and have all froze sometimes when bringing it up. At the same time, they can all record on PlayTV at the same time as playing Uncharted 2.
Minor note: "Understanding how RAM works" is mostly irrelevant to understanding this particular limitation. In fact, the PS3's RAM has no special properties which makes is less suitable for cross game chat than the XBox 360 or a PC. Though it's helpful to understand basic digital architectures, operating system design, real-time programming, resource management/allocation (RAM, in this case, is just one end of the MMU).
That said, frodo's basic point is valid - some people are unnecessarily trying to explain details they don't understand. A simple "Because Sony said so" would suffice in most cases.
But that's not really why I'm replying -- the question you almost asked is a very good one: How come you can record media from PlayTV to the PS3 HDD when playing Uncharted 2, while the PS3 struggles to handle the XMB while a game is running?
Let's start by looking at it from the other end. Assume that the OS is preemptively multitasking, and when you press the PS-button, the game receives an interrupt/signal which instructs it to "switch to 'pause mode'". At that point, the social thing to do would be to block or otherwise yield the CPU time. But seeing as how it's a game on a console and not a desktop application, some developers might choose to simply busy-wait, which would cause the XMB to slow to a crawl. Or the game and the XMB use cooperative multitasking (unlikely, but I mention it for illustrative purposes), and some games don't relinquish control often enough, causing the XMB to almost stop completely. The important point is that the game and the XMB need to share the same resources.
I don't know how the PlayTV gear is hooked up/integrated to/with the PS3, but if the external hardware converts the data to a simple stream which can just be DMA'd to the harddrive (its controller, obviously) from some port, it requires much less intervention than you might think (well, it's not exactly that simple, but you get the point). It would require a lot of I/O (read: bus) time, but not much CPU time and/or primary memory.
I can definitely understand how it can feel counter-intuitive that streaming media to a harddrive would "require less resources" than showing a simple XMB screen. But look at it in terms of that DMA was designed to be asynchronous and leave the rest of the system alone. If the buses used by the video stream and buses used for running Uncharted 2 have little overlap, or the parts that overlap has enough bandwidth to accomodate both without problem -- well, then that could explain what you've observed.
I'm expecting the reply "Wouldn't piping the voice audio stream around be akin to to piping the video stream around?". Excellent question; I'll answer the question with another question: "Does it need to be processed (read: pass the PPU/SPU and associated memory)?". Like I wrote above -- if the PlayTV unit prepares the data so it can be streamed, more or less directly, to the harddrive then the required PS3 PPU/SPU intervention could be relatively small. Voice chat, on the other hand, could need to be taken off the network stack, parsed, buffered, resampled, muxed and may require special encoding/decoding, and could further need to be pushed onto the bluetooth stack -- all of which needs to be done using the same resources running Uncharted 2.
Sorry for the long post, but hopefully you'll see that the behavior you've observed can be explained and understood. Even if the theories I wrote here don't apply to the PS3+PlayTV specifically, in general they do. If you can use two different asynchronous resources without an overlap, you can do an impressive amount of parallell work. If, on the other hand, the resources clash you'll run into scheduling issues.
Level 3
LarasAider wrote:Never Say Never when it comes to hardware; just because Sony sais no... now; it doesn't mean it can't be implemented in the future when software devices, take up less space. So I wanna remain a little optimistic, if I can?
You can remain optimistic all you want, it aint ever going to happen. The reason being that for Sony to release cross game chat it would have to work within the XMB, and not be game specific (like the custom music thing is)
So for that to happen they would have to radically change the way the XMB works, now I dont know exactely how it works but I do know the XMB is like your operating system on your computer. Its always there, its always running in the background. So that 256 Meg of memory that is for your PS3? some of that is being used by the PS3 to run the XMB.
Sony at some point will have told game developers that games have a maximum of say 225 Meg of system memory (not counting the video memory) now say for example Uncharted 3 uses up all of that 225 meg of system memory. And then Sony releases an update that makes the PS3 do cross game chat, but to get it too work they use up an extra five meg of system memory. This would mean that uncharted 3 would no longer run, because there would only be 220 Meg of system memory available.
As people have said in the past the PS3 was never made with cross game chat in mind, heck alot of the stuff it does do was never even thought about when it first got released. Trophies, custom music, cloud saving etc. are all completely new to the system.
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