[manux]

Originally Posted by Elan Tedronai

2x blu ray speed? you have to be kidding me. The ps3 has 2x blu ray speeds and it's not fast enough because of the size of the storage medium. There's a reason why you have installs on the ps3.

If you are even slightly interested read the link below and figure out why for example 4x bd+4GB flash installation would be quite a nice combination(assuming there is no infinite budget allowing for all super fast flash or bd rom drive breaking the laws of physics)... http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread...th#post1580827

[manux]

Originally Posted by Squilliam

Maybe the concept of what we call a kiosk is impractical, instead of the concept of bringing a blank book to a store and leaving with a novel, why not print on demand? Maybe some kind of self contained cartridge/artwork combination which can be printed and developed in say 60-180 seconds per cartridge? If you have say 1-7 of these kiosks in a store you could effectively replace your minimum wage staffer for someone who comes in once a week and puts new blanks into the machine and thus make back much of the additional cost from the media with labour savings? If a person comes in and buys say 3 games at once you could always multi-thread the production process because you're only limited by the minimum time it takes to make one game and not as much limited by the number of machines which you could scale.

Maybe a concept of a machine which can write to flash chips and then inserts it into a printed container which works as both a case and storage medium ala the old PSP media discs? It gives you a box and cartridge in the one unit.

Why go to flash carts if one can leverage DD only sku on major markets(usa, europe, japan) and leverage old&cheap technology on those markets/people who are not ready to go DD only? DD only should be quite a bit cheaper than flash or BR.Leverage old factories+technology to distribute media might be quite a bit cheaper once counting in the investment needed to build factories to spit out appropriate flash cartridges + the initial higher prices for reasonably sized medias.

[Shifty Geezer]

The major markets aren't ready for DD only, especially on games larger than the current generations (how many times must this point be discussed?!). We have very mixed transfer rates and inconvenient data caps and the like. To go DD only is to possibly lose a good 20-30% of potential customers who can't actually use DD. That'll improve over time, but it'll be a significant impact and major incentive to buy the rival.

There is going to have to be a physical distribution mechanism next gen assuming a suitable increase in file sizes. DD only will only work for a light console.

[manux]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

The major markets aren't ready for DD only, especially on games larger than the current generations (how many times must this point be discussed?!). We have very mixed transfer rates and inconvenient data caps and the like. To go DD only is to possibly lose a good 20-30% of potential customers who can't actually use DD. That'll improve over time, but it'll be a significant impact and major incentive to buy the rival.

There is going to have to be a physical distribution mechanism next gen assuming a suitable increase in file sizes. DD only will only work for a light console.

Where I was going at was that any person who uses digital downloads is away from physical media. Hence there is less chance to get money back from investment to create new physical media and related manufacturing cost. Hence on my opinion the numbers add up on using existing technology+factories which already are readily available. Similarly by the time flash is reaching price parity with blu-ray it might be very different world compared to todays distribution mechanisms. If next gen lives for 10 years from 2014-2024 DD is pretty much guaranteed to happen in a major way.

And to just make it perfectly clear, I'm not advocating DD only, I'm rallying for 2 sku's where one is optical based and one is DD only. Make the DD only sku cheap, cheap, cheap and optical sku proper highend with 4k blu-ray support(one can always hope). And please have fast flash on both skus to alleviate any random read problems and give devs common base to work on.

[Elan Tedronai]

2 skus? lol. why waste resources and production costs on 2 varying different storage medium when one is enough.

great way to cleave through your market, confuse customers and retailers

[manux]

Originally Posted by Elan Tedronai

2 skus? lol. why waste resources and production costs on 2 varying different storage medium when one is enough.

great way to cleave through your market, confuse customers and retailers

I think xbox360 showed the power of 2 skus. There is further optimization possibilites next gen on delivering 2 skus which cater to those who want cheap and those who want it all. And selling those accessories to make cheaper sku usable, well... it's a gold mine

[TheWretched]

But... is "the west" really not ready for DD only? All the PC DD services that cropped up since Steam launched say otherwise. And with game sizes that already are single layer blu ray sized (The Witcher 2 is about 20GB) and next gen games probably not being MUCH bigger than that on average (with optional stuff like languages etc, a lot of PS3 games could be smaller than they are).

I don't mind having to download huge games (L4D2, ME2, Rage and TW2 are the worst offenders, in my list, at the moment), as I usually can preload them over a week or so anyways. But with PC there is sort of a difference... I have "built in BC", whereas on consoles, there's always the chance that I might not be able to play the games I got some years ago... on PCs this isn't going to happen... not as long as MS tries to stay compatible and with software like Wine practically making it possible to run Windows software anywhere on an x86 cpu, and of course DosBox, for the very old games.

I know that Steam is much smaller than either MS or Sony, which also results in much less traffic overall, especially with huge game releases. But, as always, good traffic management involves all parties. The ISPs should, with these things, use heavy proxying... it's usually pretty much neverchanging data. Working together with Sony and MS etc. it should be a breeze to handle that "internally" on ISP by ISP basis, too.

Of course, this doesn't work for countries that have very bad internet infrastructure... but you can always use the "copy them game at the store" approach or let Amazon send them an installation disc/medium (for free), which has to be returned... heavy overhead, but would defeat the argument of "internet isn't good in southeast Austria, or wherever).

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by TheWretched

But... is "the west" really not ready for DD only? All the PC DD services that cropped up since Steam launched say otherwise. And with game sizes that already are single layer blu ray sized (The Witcher 2 is about 20GB) and next gen games probably not being MUCH bigger than that on average (with optional stuff like languages etc, a lot of PS3 games could be smaller than they are).

How about this little thought, those that have crappy connections doesn´t show up on those services anyway, the millions that use them aren´t the problem. They are far and somewhat few but a wild number, losing 10% potential customers is enough.

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by TheWretched

But... is "the west" really not ready for DD only?

Yes. We have data caps and crappy connections, where even good peak bandwidth can actually mean terrible download speeds or connection interruptions. A 20 GB download for Uncharted 4/5 or Halo Extreme is going to be unworkable for many. DD is an option for some and I can see the value in a SKU targeted at them (although how you price games could get interesting), but DD only just won't cut it. Maybe towards the end of the generation it will, but the choices that have to be made to accomodate sales from the beginning have to include distribution for those without excellent broadband.

[manux]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

Yes. We have data caps and crappy connections, where even good peak bandwidth can actually mean terrible download speeds or connection interruptions. A 20 GB download for Uncharted 4/5 or Halo Extreme is going to be unworkable for many. DD is an option for some and I can see the value in a SKU targeted at them (although how you price games could get interesting), but DD only just won't cut it. Maybe towards the end of the generation it will, but the choices that have to be made to accomodate sales from the beginning have to include distribution for those without excellent broadband.

I think 20GB flash is also out of question. Then we are left pretty much with only blu-ray as reasonably priced distribution media.

[manux]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

Yes. We have data caps and crappy connections, where even good peak bandwidth can actually mean terrible download speeds or connection interruptions. A 20 GB download for Uncharted 4/5 or Halo Extreme is going to be unworkable for many. DD is an option for some and I can see the value in a SKU targeted at them (although how you price games could get interesting), but DD only just won't cut it. Maybe towards the end of the generation it will, but the choices that have to be made to accomodate sales from the beginning have to include distribution for those without excellent broadband.

I wouldn't mind seeing a 2-3 year contract DD only console which comes with monthly payments and promises online included in price + no datacap for transfers. That would be quite reasonable solution for super cheap initial investment DD only SKU. Sony/MS could partner with appropriate network providers.

Think about 99$ initial investment and let's say 19.99$/monthly payment. I think sony is already doing similar thing with psp vita(at/t) so it's not too big of a stretch to imagine home console data being packaged this way. Once the user is in they will probably buy some accessories like 2.5" hdd and ofcourse games which makes for additional revenue.

Ofcourse the optical media sku will be sold through traditional channels with traditional pricing model.

[manux]

Originally Posted by -tkf-

How about this little thought, those that have crappy connections doesn´t show up on those services anyway, the millions that use them aren´t the problem. They are far and somewhat few but a wild number, losing 10% potential customers is enough.

Those with crappy connection go to best buy/amazon and buy blu-ray just like they did before And they do pay more for the console because it has more hardware in it.

[Blazkowicz]

Originally Posted by Elan Tedronai

2 skus? lol. why waste resources and production costs on 2 varying different storage medium when one is enough.

great way to cleave through your market, confuse customers and retailers

pretty funny is stores have to order and put on the shelf these two SKUs, mostly identical. but with the first one, customers come back to the store and buy new games. with the other one they will never do.

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by manux

I think 20GB flash is also out of question. Then we are left pretty much with only blu-ray as reasonably priced distribution media.

I agree.

Originally Posted by manux

I wouldn't mind seeing a 2-3 year contract DD only console which comes with monthly payments and promises online included in price + no datacap for transfers. That would be quite reasonable solution for super cheap initial investment DD only SKU. Sony/MS could partner with appropriate network providers.

That's a possibility, but it introduces headaches for the console companies. They need to negotiate dataplans across countries. I guess the costs of the download can be covered in the download price. They'd need to developer an excellent download manager that has the console background downloading suitably and throttling back as household broadband increases (when people start streaming a movie on their internet TV, say, the console has to stop downloading if their bandwidth cannot cope). They need to educate the market on the differences. And they need to handle the pricing effectively. Currently PSN sells full titles at RRP, being massively undercut for physical media and making the DD option very expensive.

Now if they're also going to have to continue distributing physical media for those not buying the DD SKU, what exactly are the benefits to the added complexity of DD only on a contract?

As someone all in favour of elliminating physical media as a waste of world resources and ultimately a load of pollution, I look forwards to the day when everything can be streamed/downloaded. I can't see the business sense in trying to execute that for a console appearing in the next couple of years though. I think it'll happen when telecoms matures and people get freer and better access to downloads, and the consoles (or whatever we're playing games on then) will just be another consuming device without the need for special contracts or the like.

[Acert93]

Question: What is the cost of, say, of a very fast 8GB SSD?

I toss that out because I do think the most feasible distribution method is Blu Ray and forced installs (fixing the HORRIBLE PS3 method). I think a tiered install, where essentially after a short time (say 5 minutes) you can begin playing the introduction/tutorial as the remainder installs in the background, would be worth investment because this concept can span over the DD (after x minutes you can play and in the background the remainder downloads).

But that doesn't address a lot of issues and your going to need a large HDD. So why not front the HDD with a small but very fast (100s MB/s sequential read speed) SLC SSD. I know making such a SSD "wide" for speed is going to cost because you are looking at more chips, so maybe it doesn't work at all.

I dunno, still groping around for solutions for how poorly optical performs. Cheap and large are its benefits but it is slow, unwritable, and has a lot of latency/poor random performance not to mention noise and reliability issues. So how would others suggest affordable ways to minimize this impact on the actual gameplay experience? SSD+HDD with "tiered" game installs is the best I can come up with.

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by manux

I wouldn't mind seeing a 2-3 year contract DD only console which comes with monthly payments and promises online included in price + no datacap for transfers. That would be quite reasonable solution for super cheap initial investment DD only SKU. Sony/MS could partner with appropriate network providers.

Think about 99$ initial investment and let's say 19.99$/monthly payment. I think sony is already doing similar thing with psp vita(at/t) so it's not too big of a stretch to imagine home console data being packaged this way. Once the user is in they will probably buy some accessories like 2.5" hdd and ofcourse games which makes for additional revenue.

Ofcourse the optical media sku will be sold through traditional channels with traditional pricing model.

Welcome to hell, imagine the amount of ISP´s all around the world and the console manufactors have to deal with them? And developers have to aim for the lowest spec yet again? no thanks.

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by Acert93

Question: What is the cost of, say, of a very fast 8GB SSD?

I toss that out because I do think the most feasible distribution method is Blu Ray and forced installs (fixing the HORRIBLE PS3 method). I think a tiered install, where essentially after a short time (say 5 minutes) you can begin playing the introduction/tutorial as the remainder installs in the background, would be worth investment because this concept can span over the DD (after x minutes you can play and in the background the remainder downloads).

But that doesn't address a lot of issues and your going to need a large HDD. So why not front the HDD with a small but very fast (100s MB/s sequential read speed) SLC SSD. I know making such a SSD "wide" for speed is going to cost because you are looking at more chips, so maybe it doesn't work at all.

I dunno, still groping around for solutions for how poorly optical performs. Cheap and large are its benefits but it is slow, unwritable, and has a lot of latency/poor random performance not to mention noise and reliability issues. So how would others suggest affordable ways to minimize this impact on the actual gameplay experience? SSD+HDD with "tiered" game installs is the best I can come up with.

The easy way would be Hybrid Harddrives like those Seagate makes:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5160/s...rid-hdd-review

However you take away some of the flexibilty by letting the drive handle all the work, and you need a firmware specific for console use, and it puts us back to the old discussion about more memory vs faster loading, and what would be best.

Blu-Ray -> Harddrive -> Cheap Memory -> Real Memory

Vs

Blu-Ray -> Harddrive -> Nand -> Real Memory

The PS3 and the slow install should really not be so slow, imho sony or the developers really screwed something up. In a dream scenario, the moment i insert a new game to my PS4 it starts to copy files to the harddrive, and the requirment for the developers is that any files that has to be installed should be in whatever format/package that makes the installs faster. In any case, i am sure there must be a better and faster way to copy data to a harddrive than how it´s done today on the PS3.

[Acert93]

The first reason NOT to go with a Hybrid drive is cost as they are extracting a premium and you are tieing your SSD and your HDD sourcing together. A console maker would have more control on sourcing, cost, design, performance, etc by not going with a packaged Hybrid Drive. As noted they already are going to want a custom firmware (and probably OS drive controller) for compatibility and performance reasons so having say the solid-drive separate isn't an issue and should be quite cheaper.

The second is performance. They offer something marginal in performance over a HDD yet with a price premium. If you are going to pay for solid storage you might as well have a design that has a performance benefit. This would be easier to achieve by not getting tied down to a mainstream product when a fast solid memory array isn't on the overly complicated side of things.

[manux]

Originally Posted by Acert93

I dunno, still groping around for solutions for how poorly optical performs. Cheap and large are its benefits but it is slow, unwritable, and has a lot of latency/poor random performance not to mention noise and reliability issues. So how would others suggest affordable ways to minimize this impact on the actual gameplay experience? SSD+HDD with "tiered" game installs is the best I can come up with.

Have a 4x or even 6x constant angular velocity blu-ray drive(assuming it's not more expensive) for megatexturing/predictable streaming and have a reasonably large fast flash memory(ssd) on console motherboard to act as cache for random reads+save games+digital distribution media. Reasonably large depends on pricing but I would guess on 2014 reasonably large would be between 32-64GB.

As per this 4-6x blu-ray should be plenty for texturing part and let the ssd take care of random stuff. http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread...th#post1580827

Also do a DD only version of console without optical drive to push entry price very low. And both skus allow for optional vendor locked 2.5" hdd for extra capacity.

SSD in motherboard should be either cheaper or soon after launch cheaper than let's say current mandatory entry level hdd in ps3(hdd has higher fixed cost than flash soldered to motherboard).

edit. For DD game installs mandate that games comes as some sort of image that is mounted rather than installed.(get's rid of all installation waiting+disc fragmentation). For optical to SSD install either mandate install files to be included on optical media(simple large file copy) or staggered installation while playing. Absolutely don't allow for copying random files super slowly for 20 minutes(grhm... mgs4... horrible, gt5 even more horrible)

[Npl]

Originally Posted by manux

Also do a DD only version of console without optical drive to push entry price very low. And both skus allow for optional vendor locked 2.5" hdd for extra capacity.

You want a separate SKU with a hole where the drive would be or two seperate consoles differing alot more than that?
Also if you want to use that DD-only version for the triple A titles you gonna need a big HDD anyway, kinda opposite to the goal of makin it very cheap. But People dont seem to think long-term, and may end up with this and a HDD addon almost from the first day.
(I think PS3s (perceived) entry price is inflated by not offering a HDD-less SKU and annoys anyone that want to get another HDD than the available SKUs have with a dead-weight. It wouldnt practically change anything regarding costs but the common comparison to the cheapest XBox would look better)

Originally Posted by manux

SSD in motherboard should be either cheaper or soon after launch cheaper than let's say current mandatory entry level hdd in ps3(hdd has higher fixed cost than flash soldered to motherboard).

Its still a useless expense as soon as you plug an HDD in. HDDs can use flash too - Just sell the cheapest SKU with a 2.5 SSD drive you can rip out later.
That is unless you expect the flash to be super-speedy (and cheap?), but then Id rather have more main RAM than another pool that needs to be managed.

[Acert93]

Have a 4x or even 6x constant angular velocity blu-ray drive(assuming it's not more expensive) for megatexturing/predictable streaming

The problem with Optical Drives for megatexturing is less the transfer speed (but you will see more pressure here at 1080p when you start have color, specular, normal, etc layers all separate so bandwidth could be a concern down the line as well) but the seek time latency is a big issue. As sebbbi noted about virtual textures:

Seek latency however can be a big bottleneck on DVDs, since a worst case seek can take 100ms

He mentions some solutions but the bottom line is for a traditional game populated memory via transfer (filling 2GB+ of memory via an optical drive) is painfully slow yet going with a RAM friendly solution that leverages the nice big optical drive then butts heads up against a the really poor seek time of the optical drive. So in the traditional scenario you want the data on the HDD because sequential well packaged data is 5x faster and for megatextures avoiding the nasty latency on the optical drive is, while not ideal, can be up to an order of a magnitude better on a traditional HDD.

[manux]

Originally Posted by Npl

You want a separate SKU with a hole where the drive would be or two seperate consoles differing alot more than that?
Also if you want to use that DD-only version for the triple A titles you gonna need a big HDD anyway, kinda opposite to the goal of makin it very cheap. But People dont seem to think long-term, and may end up with this and a HDD addon almost from the first day.
(I think PS3s (perceived) entry price is inflated by not offering a HDD-less SKU and annoys anyone that want to get another HDD than the available SKUs have with a dead-weight. It wouldnt practically change anything regarding costs but the common comparison to the cheapest XBox would look better)
Its still a useless expense as soon as you plug an HDD in. Just sell the cheapest SKU with a 2.5 SSD drive you can rip out.
That is unless you expect the flash to be super-speedy (and cheap?), but then Id rather have more main RAM than another pool that needs to be managed.

I probably would want two completely different sku's where there is no option to update optical drive. Would it look the same or be different would be manufacturing optimization guestion. Perhaps having same case but different cooling would be cheapest option.

If we would assume 64GB flash DD only would be quite ok. Maybe you fit one aaa title(20GB), 2-3 regular titles(8GB) and then some DD only titles + save games + game caches. Ones you fill the drive you either go and buy the hd(which is premium price vendor locked) or you uninstall and are in (re)download loop.

I would probably want to put the flash on mainboard to optimize cost(no casing). This would allow nice scaling of price compared to having and HDD in base model. I would guess if the blu-ray drive is fast enough for mega texturing then having something along the lines of 100MB/s for flash would be reasonable for random data and giving a huge leap over current gen.

I don't think there is any game that has been designed to use SSD and having quite a fast random access+read speed. I wonder for example what madden could do if you could load extreme models to memory on demand instead of caching all the models to ram. PC games tend to just cache to ram instead of stream which is not that optimal considering limited budgets of console hardware.

[manux]

Another thing that there is swapping. Usually a curse word but with proper OS and fast random access media it would be very, very reasonable solution for consoles on limited budget. If the OS can load let's say 100MB/s it would let any task smaller than let's say 50MB/s be swapped to background and be loaded over game in less than 0.5s. Split the background services to engine and UI part and the UI parts can be easily swapped to disc while playing game and freeing a lot of memory. Os with SSD+proper swapping could give really insanely good feeling of multitasking without actually keeping that much in memory...

[V3]

Can't they do a better implementation of Gamecube A-RAM to mask loadtime, put in 2 to 8 GB of memory with around 1-2 GB/s bandwdith in there for buffer or something. I always thought Gamecube was well done in that aspect.

[manux]

Originally Posted by V3

Can't they do a better implementation of Gamecube A-RAM to mask loadtime, put in 2 to 8 GB of memory with around 1-2 GB/s bandwdith in there for buffer or something. I always thought Gamecube was well done in that aspect.

The problem with ram is you need to reload it on bootup. Flash/ssd/whatever retains the state.