62 replies to this topic

[DéliopT]

wut..jpg

That means absolutely nothing....at all. That's it I'm done until E3, see you guys then.

 

I wasn`t supporting that kinf of thinking. Just showing how several people think.

[Desert Punk]

I remember reading something from a 3rd party developer stating that it wasn't that the Gamecube wasn't appealing since it had good graphics, but the storage medium was tiny (the mini discs the Gamecube was known for), hence why it never got games like GTA for example. Sad really, since it is the only time in recent memory that Nintendo competed, spec wise, with other companies. Mind you, It was never Nintendo's intent back then, but its spec sheet was much closer than the Wii was. 

 

Too early to tell for Wii U though.

 

They were 1.5GB and because of their small size they were spun at quite a high speed plus because the laser had to travel less the seek time was much lower. End result was a disc that stored less but sooo much faster at loading. The gamecube had 16MB of slow memory dedicated to caching the optical drive plus functioning as a sound buffer too.

 

I think the issue with the Gamecube was its main memory was only 24MB of 1T-SRAM and 3MEG of video. The slow 16MB wasn't really designed to be used as main memory. Xbox had 64MB of RAM plus virtual memory thanks to the hard drive. PS2 had 32MB of Rambus memory plus 4MB of video. I think that was the issue converting games to Gamecube as it was sometimes hard to fit them in. In some games like Medal of Honor Frontline there was missing detail in the Gamecube version. The developers would strip out minor graphic detail in levels. However compared to the ps2 often Gamecube versions of such games were silky smooth in frame rate possibly helped by the missing graphic detail. Video was the worst thing effected on gamecube though. Often not enough space on the disc so the videos were often cut down, overly compressed or in a small window. Some gamecube games were split on to multiple discs to get around this.

[3Dude]

Desert Punk, on 31 Mar 2013 - 07:54, said:They were 1.5GB and because of their small size they were spun at quite a high speed plus because the laser had to travel less the seek time was much lower. End result was a disc that stored less but sooo much faster at loading. The gamecube had 16MB of slow memory dedicated to caching the optical drive plus functioning as a sound buffer too.
I think the issue with the Gamecube was its main memory was only 24MB of 1T-SRAM and 3MEG of video. The slow 16MB wasn't really designed to be used as main memory. Xbox had 64MB of RAM plus virtual memory thanks to the hard drive. PS2 had 32MB of Rambus memory plus 4MB of video. I think that was the issue converting games to Gamecube as it was sometimes hard to fit them in. In some games like Medal of Honor Frontline there was missing detail in the Gamecube version. The developers would strip out minor graphic detail in levels. However compared to the ps2 often Gamecube versions of such games were silky smooth in frame rate possibly helped by the missing graphic detail. Video was the worst thing effected on gamecube though. Often not enough space on the disc so the videos were often cut down, overly compressed or in a small window. Some gamecube games were split on to multiple discs to get around this.



thats... not right.

Cubes main memory wasnt the dram, it was the 24MB single transistor psuedostatic ram. It was so fast and low latency many called it an 'l3 cache', despite being of a 'low' bandwidth.

THIS is why the cube had such great loadtimes and the best streaming world games.


There was nothing special about the god, it had a data transfer rate of 16-24 mb/s. Size of the disc is irrelevent. 24mb is 24mb. Thats megabits mind you.

So around 2-3 MegaBytes a second.

ps2 had a 4x dvd drive capable of 5.25 MB/s.... Though it rarely reached full speed. It too hung around 2-3 MB/s.

It was the memory heiarchy.

The cubes memory smoked the ps2.

Ps2's rambus got 6GB/s bandwidth compared to the cubes 1tsram's 2-3 GB/s. First appearences look grim. But that the memory had a sustainable latency of 6ns while ps2 was over 20, as well as the xbox's. The cube was untouchable in latency.

So, while the cubes main 24MB pool had a 'low' bandwidth of around 2-3 GB/s, most of the work that would need that bandwidth was handled on 2 additional 1tsram pools, embedded on the cpu and gpu respectively, with bandwidhts and latencys unapproached by the competitors.

Because of this, cube had a texture/post op effect bandwidth of over 10GB/s. And this is why cube exclusives blow the ps2 out of the water.

The extremely low latency of the main ram also meant no waiting for ram to refresh ever, also helping with load and stream times.


Cubes other ram pool was around the same performance as ps2's ram. And was thus typically used to hold audio assets or something else not exactly super pressing..

Edited by 3Dude, 31 March 2013 - 05:14 PM.