Gamecube have enough RAM?

SirXcalibur

SirXcalibur

Admin in Shining Armour
Do you think that the 24MB highspeed ram for the GC is enough? With extra 16MB slower ram shared with the sound chip enough. I know they are suing s3tc but once environments are loaded is it enough?
 
Nod, more than enough considering its speed.
Gamecube stream its textures and geometry on the fly and its automatic, what i mean is, its not like ps2 where developers have to tell its memory controller what to get or not from the dvd. The problem with PC, even with huge ammount of rams is that developers will never take use of the technology till 2 years, there is no way to make a game that can stream on the fly with low latency, simple because PC is an open platform.

16MB sdram = Sound, animation and caching
24MB 1t-sram = Textures, geometry and AI
3MB embedded 1t-sram = 1MB for texture stream, 2MB for zbuffer/frame buffer.

Its very well done, dont be surprised to see 1t-sram based video cards in a few years on PC (radeon3?) considering it BARELY cost more than DDR. In fact, i bet 50$ you'll see 1t-sram in the next generation console, its THAT advanced.

DDR will simply never catch up to 1t-sram's latency, you would need the memory speed to be over 5ghz almost ;)

And like you said, s3tc, vertex compression (which is higher than 2:1) plus virtual texturing will take care of space, the streaming is just ice on the cake :) and no, ps2's streaming capabilities doesnt come close to gamecube, mainly cause it lack compression, unless you call the shittiest compression algorythm on earth, jpg, to be good :rolleyes:

I've also heard flipper can be hacked into a deferred renderer, which unless you didnt know, its the most effective HSR you can imagine. They just store the display list on the gekko's L2 cache (its small, no worries) then the simd unit calculate, send to flipper's embedded memory and voila, deferred rendering :) Most developers will just go with the traditional rendering though.

To put it simple, 1t-sram = perfection :)
 
Overall the GameCube has a total of 43MB of RAM (24MB main, 16MB aux. and 3MB embedded) although the 16MB aux. is slower than the main RAM it's still really fast and yes, it's plenty of RAM for games. It would be nice to have like 96MB or so but the GameCube is really efficient and doesn't need as much RAM as say the Xbox does.
 
I heard something , somewhere about a RAM expansion module. Does anyone know what the hell I am talking about ?
 
yea, there is an high speed port under gamecube that could add 32MB to the a-ram, which would be a total of 75MB

But i doubt nintendo will use it, they just like to have the possibility to upgrade if needed, like NES had a satellite port and could even go online, same with SNES, the vram add-on saved n64's ass for textures, etc etc.

But that add-on wouldnt really be needed, the audio will rarelly take over 5MB considering Musyx's compression range from 4:1 to 15:1, caching aint a problem either, heck its faster than n64's cartridge in loading, so the only thing i can see is if a game have a SHITLOAD of animations, which i really dont see how a developer would ever need over 32MB of extra ram for that..................heck shenmue or MGS2 barely take over 3MB of animations.
 
or would the High speed port be capible of an external hard drive. Save games Downloads, just like the XBox. Nintendo has alot more experience in games then microsoft. I have a funny feeling microsoft has otehr plans to lure people to the x-box and I don't believe it's games. but if it's game you want, nintendo has the best..
 
"or would the High speed port be capible of an external hard drive"
Click to expand...

Yes, in fact there are 2 high speed serial port, one for HDD, one for add-on. There is also the high speed parallel port for the modem.

cubesides.jpg


Look at the lower right gamecube. The top left port is add-on, lower right is the modem, and the middle port is the harddrive add-on.

and yes, nintendo will have an HD add-on.
 
Well a hard drive add-on would be cool but add-ons don't work. They never have and never will.
Only do small exceptions to this.
A) if its bundled with the game
B) if its absolutely nessesary for a majority of games

This is why so many people got the RAM expansion for the n64
 
"Only do small exceptions to this.
A) if its bundled with the game
B) if its absolutely nessesary for a majority of games"
Click to expand...

You know nintendo, they'll bundle it with the killer apps when they're ready, and usually they're really good at it.
 
Is it November yet? I just have such a hard time waiting for this thing to come out...I'm really hyped about the 'CUBE
 
The Xbox will be killed. It needs a lot of RAM to just get it run smoothly and every time you play a game, either MSN ads come up or the system crashes.
 
I gotta say, the Gamecube might be a good system and whatever, but it is butt ugly. The PS2 looks so much better.
 
Gamecube with a hdd?No way i don't whant crap games fixed by updates!!!!Imagin this you get home after you got a game then it dose not work so god....conclusione:you have to wheit one mounth to play the game like you sould do in first place!!I don-t whant a second PC
 
NYHecK said:
I gotta say, the Gamecube might be a good system and whatever, but it is butt ugly. The PS2 looks so much better.
Click to expand...

I kinda like the fact that it's so small. You can get it in several colors. The all black one might suit you more. I do agree that the PS2 looks wicked cool though.
 
I agree that the PS2 looks better than the cube but they're both just ugly boxes. The N64 on the other hand, was kinda sleek and cool-looking with it's curves...almost like a Dodge Viper :cool:
 
Are you talking about the regular silver coloured one or the DVD 'Cube? I haven't heard anything about Nintendo releasing different colours of the GameCube. All the colours shown last year were "not final" and as far as I know it's only going to be released in the purple colour at launch
 
Far as i know, nintendo of america plans to launch with 3 colors. purple, silver, black. It could change but right now its their plans. nintendo of japan is another story though, they'll love purple :)

About the blue led, its not in the final silver gamecube (only dvd version) but what i meant is i would mod it, very simple mod :) It would look amazing.
 
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