PS3 Cloud Storage a reality

[Brad]

Interesting concerns.

1. There's no way to guarantee bandwidth so robbing a bit for voice chat is neither here nor there. Most multiplayer games have voice chat support anyway
2. I'd have thought that the OS-reserved SPE would have been capable of processing system wide voice chat. There's enough juice there to run a small OS and games must give up that SPE if requested to do so.

I agree there are technical issues but nothing to indicate that it could never happen.

Xbox had voice chat in every game but they managed to allow a layer on top of that for private part chat and stuff. No reason Sony can't shoehorn it in to PS3. I think it comes down to whether Sony want to do it or not really.

[InvisibleKid]

2. I'd have thought that the OS-reserved SPE would have been capable of processing system wide voice chat. There's enough juice there to run a small OS and games must give up that SPE if requested to do so.

Unfortunately not, have you seen how slow the in-game XMB is in some games?

Because the XMB does require *some* PPU usage the reserved SPE is left stalling quite often (GTAIV, Read Dead for examples). Also voice requires some PPU usage too..

Regarding 1), I know that network bandwidth isn't guaranteed - you're absolutely correct - but partners aren't going to be impressed when Sony reduce their already limited bandwidth.

Network games are often heavily tested using the estimates of the kind of bandwidth to expect on average and optimised for those environments - reducing the quality of games that have already shipped in that way is probably not a great idea.