PSM Unity

Unity logo inside the device

Unity for PSM is a runtime and development tools suite for the PlayStation®Mobile platform/business model.

Unity for PSM currently only runs on the PS Vita.

It's distinctively separate from the pre-existing "PSM SDK" . "PSM SDK" and "Unity for PSM" do not share tools or APIs.

PSM Development Assistant for Unity

Version	PS VITA FW	Category SFO	Creation Date	Hash MD5	Hash SHA1	Links	Notes
1.00	3.00	gd	02013-11-26-November 26, 2013	md5:D207A1663E4778BE4CC8818506D05DE4	sha1:CD3A66939E2E4DBF698314921A49C13A66315C78	mega.co.nz	-
1.01	3.01	gp	-	-	-	-	-
1.02	3.10	gp	-	-	-	-	-
1.03	3.12	gp	-	-	-	-	-
1.04	3.15	gp	-	-	-	-	-
1.05	3.15	gp	02014-07-12-July 12, 2014	md5:1FAA126521DFABFF9032EBB12F79D2CF	sha1:A78E54CE19D7E015AE8D6684EF8E7F8866CD94B6	mega.co.nz	-
1.06	3.30	gp	02014-10-17-October 17, 2014	md5:1673FA51A732347C4B8319986DB79BA3	sha1:D73875D9FFC51F61AD55E0C16C756C8071703AE6	mega.co.nz	-

• http://www.psdevwiki.com/ps4/Template:Media_Services:PSM_Development_Assistant_for_Unity

CPU

The CPU has 3 hardware threads available to the application.
Unity uses at least 2 (main and rendering), so creating more than one additional worker thread from managed code is not likely to yield any additional benefit.
But this of course depends on how the application itself is behaving. For example, a GPU-limited application might have plenty of CPU time to spare.

Graphics

PowerVR-based graphics core. Shaders are written in Cg. Textures are compressed using DXT or PVRTC (PVRTC is currently not supported by Unity).
Screen resolution is 960 × 544.

Memory

The physical memory available in the PS Vita is 256MB of system memory, and 128MB of video memory.
Not all of this is available to a "Unity for PSM" application - below is a breakdown of how much is reserved, for what, and how much is available to the application.

System Memory

Name	Value
Physical Memory	256 MB
Reserved	-8 MB
Available to "Unity for PSM"	Available to "Unity for PSM"
"Unity for PSM" executable	-32 MB
Buffers (sub-system allocations)	-32 MB
Available to App	184 MB

Video Memory

Name	Value
Physical Memory	128 MB
Reserved	-16 MB
Available to "Unity for PSM"	112 MB
Buffers (screen and commands)	-25 MB
Available to App	87 MB

• The numbers above are theoretical limits. It's good practice to allow for a few MB of unused buffer space, to not run out of memory while running the application.
• The memory listed as "Available to App" is used not only for scripts, but also for any kind of additional game data, such as meshes, physics/collision structures, etc.

Input / Output

The PS Vita has these input / sensor capabilities, all which are available from a "Unity for PSM" application:

• Directional input and × ○ □ △ buttons (digital)
• Left and right shoulder buttons (digital)
• Left and right analog sticks (x/y axis)
• On-screen touch input + rear touch pad
• Compass / Gyro / Accelerometer / Location
• Front and rear camera
• Speaker and microphone

Runtime

Application code runs in a Mono 'sandboxed' environment where only managed (C# / UnityScript / Boo) code is allowed.
The Mono runtime uses Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation of application (user) scripts.

Rendering

Unity for PSM reuses the same graphics driver used in the "Unity PS Vita"
This ensures that a high-performance rendering path is available also with Unity for PSM.
But the graphics driver behaves quite differently in one key aspect : A shader instance is only compiled when it's actually used, i.e. right before rendering the material from which it is referenced.

This means that the classic fallback shader mechanism provided in Unity is not available on PSM.
An unsupported shader (a shader with a programming error, or otherwise fails to compile) will simply be replaced with the Default Shader, which usually produce a pink color output (and the compilation error output written to the device log). Because this step can sometimes be computationally intensive, shaders already compiled are cached, and can be reused on subsequent application runs (provided the shader hasn't changed). One benefit of compiling shaders at runtime is that Unity for PSM also supports the older Unity "fixed function" shaders.