Rumour: Modder Making SuperPS3 (Improved Textures, Draw-Distance in Games)

The PlayStation 3 is already a beast of a machine. Sony’s platform is not only used by gamers; the console has been put to good use by Universities, the military, and helping towards the case of cancer via the form of Folding @ Home. However, despite the console’s sheer power and capabilities, a modder has seemingly managed to enhance the platform even further consequently resulting in improved textures, draw-distance, and much more.

[smurfz]

I don't think this is possible, but color me intrigued!

[sikbeta]

It's a gaffer, dude said he coud do it with GTAIV and U:DF, no idea how but was posting some pics, don't know if legit though...

[rob6021]

wonder if better hardware would take care of the screen tearing in U:DF.

[fear88]

Essentially all he has done was replace the capacitors, improve the shielding from the power supply, and improve on the cooling of both the CPU and GPU in order to reduce electronic noise being leaked through the video signal and processing components.

This won't add more memory or help render textures faster. All this does is reduce picture noise and deliver a CLEARER picture.

I am impressed by the level of know-how this guy exhibited but surprised that he does not notice the most obvious flaw of the PS3 is a lack of memory and data bandwidth.

Kutaragi designed the PS3 as "a dream machine" for shear number crunching. But while Kutaragi was looking at "how fast calculations can be made" he overlooked the aspect that all games and applications need memory allocated to perform well to the end user.

Having faster ram only helps if there is enough to go around and there was clearly not enough to store all the textures and model data. Even if you streamed that data, that data would not be transfered fast enough and memory will still need to be allocated to which there just isn't enough.

I am impressed by what extent this guy goes through to improve the PS3 but at the end of the day, rumor or not, there isn't enough of an improvement to justify this and it becomes a wasted effort.

[nveenio]

Your comment makes sense if we're talking about early multiplatform games. But I think that Rage and games like Uncharted 2/3 show that the PS3 is plenty capable of delivering fantastic graphics, even with a stunted maximum number of available RAM.

[fear88]

Naughty Dog has excelled in designing their levels in a way to reduce the need for high res textures being rendered too soon. A lot of their levels are very well optimized to a degree that they use very little ram.

Naughty Dog are just in a whole other league compared to most devs this gen. They are very very talented and personally I cannot wait to see what they can do with the PS Vita.

Rage on the other hand seems to have a problem freeing up enough memory fast enough to render the next batch of textures which is why it has frequent pop-ins. If it has more ram, there would not be an issue trying to free up the memory fast enough.

I mean it looks great when you are standing still but as soon as you move into another area to be rendered it just does not stay good looking.

One developer though that has impressed me with the rendering of larger environments and higher textures is Santa Monica Studios. The environments in God of War 3 are VERY large and everything from the lighting, anti-aliasing, and textures are well done.

PS3 is not a bad platform in any sense but it does have its limitations and the games would look phenomenal with an additional 256MB of ram.

It would greatly improve draw distances in games and prevent texture pop-ins.

PS Vita though will definitely be a great platform for developers.

[nveenio]

Your issue with Rage's cause of pop-in being due to Ram is completely and utterly false. I can prove this right now by showing you video from my PC copy of Rage. I'm running a GTX 460 1GB with 8GB Ram, and I still have texture pop-in. It's obviously not due to insufficient memory. It's because of Carmack's engine and the way it handles his megatextures.

You can't blame the problems of an engine on a lack of Ram, especially when you can have an abundance of Ram and still experience the same issues as a lesser platform.

The fact that my PC rig and the PS3 experience the same issues with Rage prove that the issue is not hardware but software instead.

Naughty Dog are FANTASTIC developers. What's more is that they have no level loading (just like Sony Santa Monica and God of War 3). Streaming everything into 512MB of combined Ram for two of the best looking games this generation???

You seriously can not still think that Ram is the issue. Software plays such a HUGE part in development. More so than the hardware.

[limewax]

@inveni0

Yeah with Rage it is a huge design flaw in the mega-textures technology. I get the same issue through an [email protected] and a 3gb gtx 580 lightning xtreme with the same 8gb ram.

Even more disturbingly it brings my GPU temps up to new found levels of 62c whereas something like Unigine Heaven benchmarker will only manage 54c. I don't know what Carmack actually has been doing over these last 6 years but I wont be taking much interest in any game that uses Mega-Textures in the future

[Sarcasm]

It sounds a bit ridiculous.

How would physical hardware changes affect the software level?

It's like the game developers design a game to do 2 + 2, and the guy changes a few capacitors and mumbo jumbo and claims the game now does 2 + 3.

Call me skeptical for a reason on this.

[gamingdroid]

The question isn't if there is pop-ins. It is if there is less pop-ins? Comparison between the PS3 and Xbox 360 (not installed) version, shows significant more pop-ins on the PS3. You can see the video here:

http://www.gameblurb.net/fe...

The PC version is based off the console version, and if not properly not optimized will exhibit similar pop-ins as well. It should be significantly reduced though since the Xbox 360 version is reduced as well.

If the streaming of texture is slow it will be more pronounced, so on the Xbox 360 install it. On PC, if you have an SSD hard drive, install it on that!

I think it is pretty common sense that if you can't stream the textures fast enough that more video RAM is preferable so you can load it in the background. Of course that doesn't mean it pop-ins are eliminated, because "loading" takes time.

[Thecraft1989]

inveni0 I don't think you aware that rage pop ins where fixed by allowing it to access more of the video ram. So fear88 was correct It was memory
issue.

[gaffyh]

I don't see anything special in the screens, they look the same to me. Only way to see the difference is to take a shot from a non "Super" PS3, otherwise this is the most pointless endeavour ever.

[SilentNegotiator]

GamersMint always has a credible rumor on hand.

/sarcasm

[LordMarius]

Hi Gaf

[VvKILLAGOOSEvV]

Super ps3 ??? Oh, I already own one of those...Actually a lot of us do!

[zeddy]

im sure if they built uncharted 1 and gta 4 from the ground up again, it would look way better than those pics, just look at uncharted 3.

[Dart89]

That pix of Drake:O.

[psb]

but the pics do look better. Who knows, I'll be keeping a tab on this for sure.

[SilentNegotiator]

I'd be willing to bet it is a photoshop. And yes, you CAN fake an offscreen shot with photoshop.

[doctorstrange]

But it sounds weird and unlikely.

Would be cool if it was true tho.

[StillGray]

This better be true. I'm gonna re-play all the Uncharted games if so.

[FlareDReborn]

Oh really? I will be looking into this more.

[dragonelite]

Lol off screen shot.
piss off dude. Get me a proper writer and a backbuffer grab then we can talk about enhanced and shit. Because modern tv have a shit load of post processing options.

From what i gathered he replaced the cheap stuff with some higher quality stuff. If he can replace the gpu to like a 8800GTX then and hack naughty dog code to enhance the textures and stuff then i want to see a abstract paper on how he did it.

[KUV1977]

You're right... All improvement he can possible have is less interference when using component cables and maybe, just maybe, a tiny little improvement in texture loading speed. Anything more will require code-adjustments. Even if you can slap in a better graphics-chip that - by miracle - is completely compatible with the current one, only faster, you would get less tearing and less lost frames... everything else requires improvements to each individual game-code.

[e-p-ayeaH]

Its Dynamic Contrast nothing more.

[kennyboy]

you really dont understand that no other chip will work with the ps3 effectively like the rsx the 8800gtx would have to be modified for to work with ps3 in order for it to make any increase over any current ps3 games

[ProjectVulcan]

Why is this nonsense allowed on this site? WHO approved this? It is patently rubbish with a terrible description, and even on the forum linked to shows it is rubbish by simple checking of the photographic files the person in question uploaded!

[popup]

Exactly dragonlite.

This guy may be able to hold a soldering iron but he will only fool the fools.

Trouble is that they will all probably line up to have work done and he will make a fortune!

There is nothing wrong with his attempts as far as giving himself something to do but taking pics off your plasma make me laugh too :)

[Gamer3000]

"The PlayStation 3 is already a beast of a machine."
i agree to that

[qwertyz]

"beast of a machine" lol maybe compared to a 2004 high end pc yes(ps3 is 2x as powerful as those) it is. both consoles are nothing compared to a pc from several years ago

anyway this isn't possible because sony has the best security better than that of MS and nintendo and ps3 is by far the most difficult console to hack not to speak of altering the game code because you'd need a dev kit to do that and to the best of my knowledge you can't turn a ps3 into a ps3 dev kit sonys security is that good and has been since ps3 launched.

360(the older models) on the other had can be turned into a poor mans dev kit(thats technically what a jtag console is) lol but you still can't alter game code because its not a proper development kit with the dev tools and such. MS's security sucks(except their xbox live security) and but nintendos is worse

[pupa]

Now we have PRO PC troll's coming with some cr@p shots. Yeesh. My PS3 plays the BF3 beta just fine (for a console) but my PC cannot play it at all unless I purchase another graphic card twice the price of my PS3 console. Faggots!

[kevnb]

a graphics card 25% the cost of a ps3 would be enough to beat it. If we want to demolish it, about half the price and up...

[adamant715]

Gimme a break. When you have games like Uncharted running on your precious 2004 PC, call me.

[icecoldfire]

well to me it was , at release date, an overpriced blu-ray player with games to get those lazy bum people to pay to play, now its a cheap blu-ray player with games to get those lazy bum people to pay to play

[xtreampro]

Why would this be impossible to do?

[Gamer3000]

bec every one on N4G is a dev
and they know every thing about programming

[kevnb]

its pretty simple electronics actually.

[squidyj]

It is 100%, grade A, BS.

The guy tweaked his power supply and his connectors.

[Ingram]

Firstly because draw distance and texture quality depends on TAU's ROP's and pixel shaders.Not thermal paste replacements, polishing, or capacitors.

Then, game code itself is totally locked (it won't automatically output better textures or draw distance as is expecting fixed hardware) and lastly because all he did are physical improvements on the quality of components in the motherboard and PSU.

[Undeadwolfy]

Was waiting for someone to explain. Listen to what this guy said ^

[xtreampro]

Yeah I kind of realised that after posting my first comment.

He's probably just seeing things.

[Fanbot]

mhhh no...

IF [IF(period)] a game have uncrypted textures, or packed in a very simple container, a simple replacement can result a in a better game.

BUT...

this mean more ram usage, and the game can fall in crashes, freezes and frame rate drop, since it's developed for a fixed amount of ram

oh, should be obvious that to run the game you MUST have a modded PS3.

[sjaakiejj]

@Fanbot:

Except that a game doesn't start loading better textures if it detects better hardware. Everything in a console game is static, with the exception of contrast levels, so any improvement you make to the hardware will be wasteful, because the game will not use it. The only thing it may improve, though not guaranteed, is output quality.

But the claim by this guy that he's running it at a very high resolution is complete and utter bullsh*t.

[Fanbot]

i'm not talking about hardware replacement, i'm talking about TEXTURE replacement.

[Ingram]

@fanbot

Sorry but there are no "simple" replacements in all of this theorizing.

If you are indeed talking about an additional texture pack (which would be almost impossible to achieve since you would have to update the game with a geniously tailored pirate PKG, PUP or something), be prepared, as you yourself have said, to have more RAM.

And in that eventuality, good luck finding
1)XDR ram if you hacked SPU/SPE culling.Or

2)A modern-like 256 bits GPU that bypasses RSX since is the weakest link, if you hacked in that direction.

3)A way around PS3's MoBo BUSES to implement such solution, where would you put an additional XDR module? Where would you connect a modern GPU, would the MoBo BUS allow it? of course, a better PSU is needed reached this point.

The conclusion IMHO, is that given the code know-how required, it would be easier to just hack a PS3 game and run it on a custom PC build from scratch; in other words, it's just easier to build your very own PS4.

[mrsatan]

As far as I know this is impossible to do. You can't just upgrade hardware on a machine and magically have all your software on it look better. PS3 games are coded to run with certain graphics options.

Think of it this way: I have a PC game with no graphics options, everything is already set. Upgrading my rig will provide no benefits unless I go into the PC games .ini and change the graphics settings to a higher setting manually.

This reasoning alone is why it is damn near impossible to do what the poster is saying. He would have to run spoof code that tells the game to run in higher graphics and that is INCREDIBLY hard to do.

I smell BS.

[jneul]

i agree, the person above me is right they would have restricted the games to run under certain graphical RESTRICTIONS, this is not a pc where you can up the graphical settings via some menu....

Although look at uncharted 3 now, wow ND came a long way and made a hell load of improvements, lesson to be learnt == ps3 is more powerful and capable than what you all think!!

[joeorc]

@mrsatan

100% for truth, the Software Code would have to take into account your Mod, which it is not going to be able to do so because these systems are Embedded systems, their Hardware is set at a level that the developer knows is not going to change, thus even if you as an example Mod the system an Added ram, you would not be able to have any of the games take advantage of the increased hardware without Moding the software itself.

[mokopa]

The guys who say ND improved UC3 beyond PS3 capabilities were the same guys who said UC2 maxed out PS3 in 2010. The PS3 only has 256mb of GPU ram, the only way they can improve on UC3 is to compromise on some aspects of UC2 to fool gamers. Next year, UC4 will be better and maxing out PS3 again. I call this the hypemachine.

[byrnezy]

I can adjust colour and lighting on my tv as well... Absolute load of BS

[PirosThe4th]

Ah... nah... i see what he's done. He changed the hdmi components and such and reduce the interference caused by the power-supply. Hence you get less noise on the picture. |
TITLE IS MISLEADING! THAT DOES NOT INCREASE DRAW DISTANCES AND TEXTURES. IT MIGHT SHOW THEM WITH MORE CLARITY THAT'S ALL!

[net123456]

Like the post above mine said. The Title is misleading. Some people dont seem to understand what was done here and probably wouldnt even be able to recognize the difference rightaway. The differences are not obvious and refer to the quality the videosignal gets through the mods.

It is great to see someone doing this but from a non modder standpoint its pointless.

[Ingram]

Good job improving basic components, but the supposed consequences described are nonsense.

[Redempteur]

i've never laughed so hard since the last 3 months .. the GAF thread is hilarous and the way this got blown out of hands even more ..

Even the best comedy shows don't get near this level ..

[Noctis Aftermath]

I read the thread on gaf, someone said they were going to post it here as a joke, it's made me laugh so hard that it actually got approved.

For those who don't know,The changes the guy made to the PS3 in no way improve the visuals on games.

[kevnb]

many people here are pretty gullible, believe anything they read. Just think if people wrote articles saying pc was 100 times better than consoles.. all these console kiddies would go pc.

[THC CELL]

So why aint these people getting a job then ?

[Raoh]

LOL

Hilarious how a neogaf post becomes a website article

[gypsygib]

Sony better not sue this guy.

[humbleopinion]

SOMEONE should sue him for actually spreading this bullshit. I can't believe I bothered to read all that nonsense.

[user9841288]

listen I would like to believe this but the idea that a person would spend so much time doing this and not have a video to show it off when just about everyone has a cam on their computer/phone seems odd don't you think?

[Snowii]

thats actualy very possible

[Motorola]

My TV can do that

[xX-StolenSoul-Xx]

Correct me if I'm wrong but don't the games limit how good it can be? It's not like a PC game where you can just pick your detail levels, Console games are locked to a certain look.

[Ulf]

Draw distance is determined by software, not hardware... Also, the only way to "improve" texturing, without modifying the textures themselves, would be to (via BOTH software and accompanying GPU support) enhance things like AA quality or texture sampling.

This "rumor" is about as laughable as they get.

[icecoldfire]

leave the game as it is plz it is the best game series ever. and yes i own both consoles and a hardcore pc

[Titanz]

At least we know that the PS4 and Xbox 720 won't dwarf the Wii U.

[kevnb]

makes no sesne, the gpu is still a 7950...

[St0]

Would be good if he could fix the jaggy shadows in GT5

[GodSquad]

Beast of a machine? HAHAHA. What moron wrote this?!