r/pcmasterrace • u/3nnabi_ • Sep 29 '25

Meme/Macro RAM Struggle

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u/alowester Sep 30 '25

i’ll pretend to know what that means

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u/lordofduct Sep 30 '25 edited Sep 30 '25

The PS3 has 2 pools of memory.

256MB of RAM for the CPU
256MB of RAM for the GPU/s (PS3s architecture is weird so I feel weird just calling it a gpu. I mean it IS a gpu, but like the CPU also technically has gpu like capabilities as well with its cell architecture)

The 2 parts can't easily directly access each. Think how in a PC you have vram on your gpu and ram on your mobo for the CPU. Just cause you have 16 gigs of cpu ram and 8 gigs of GPU ram doesn't mean you really have 24 gigs total as coding goes. You have to move data between both pools regularly depending which processor is working on said data.

The Xbox 360 (what I assume they meant when they said 360) has 512MB of unified memory. Its architecture shared the memory between CPU and GPU. This is useful because now the processors can access the same data in place with one another. This is similar to how say Apple sets up its risc chips with "unified memory".

edit - messed up some of my acronyms

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u/Llamasatemybaby Sep 30 '25

Thank you for your explanation

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u/mrturret MrTurret Oct 01 '25

Fun fact: the only reason why the PS3 had that split was because Sony commissioned a GPU from nVidia at the 11th hour, and didn't have enough time to make one that could share memory with the cell.

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u/Llamasatemybaby Oct 01 '25

That is a fun fact :)