> Orchid XP v8<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> I found the graphics to be fairly tame on the PC versions of AS1 and
>> AS2.
>
>    Depending on how powerful your PC is, you might be simply comparing it
> to other PC games, rather than to other Xbox 360 games.
>
>    The Xbox 360 has a pretty decent CPU and GPU even by today's standards
> (although the GPU is probably getting a bit antiquated by the month), but
> the absolutely major flaw of the system is the amount of RAM: 512 MB, which
> by today's standards is absolutely puny. (Many PC games have had a minimum
> requirement of 1GB for years.) What is worse, the RAM is shared by the CPU
> and the GPU, in other words, the GPU doesn't have its own RAM (as is
> customary in a PC). This means that graphics and other game data have to
> share the 512 MB (unlike on a PC, where graphics can be done mostly on the
> GPU's RAM and whatever the game needs on the main RAM).
>

It's one of the reason to refuse any PC with an integrated video. Most 
laptops are in that case, and all netbooks. Those also have shared main 
RAM/graphics RAM.
Another problem with that, is that the CPU always have to wait for the 
GPU. Whenever the GPU, and other display hardware, is accessing your 
RAM, NOTHING else can access it. If it was the other way around, you'd 
get corrupted display with shearing, horizontal and vertical rolling, 
and lot of flicker.

Depending on the resolution used, colour depth and refresh rate, it can 
hit your CPU performance by over 50%.
On multicore systems, it's even worst.



Alain

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