Age of subsidizing is over?

[Silent_Buddha]

You are ignoring installed (HDD) games as well as in-game transitions. I don't have a list handy, but many games in this gen use the HDD for swapping data, as an extension of RAM. Again, it especially affects sandbox RPGs like Oblivion and DA:O which suffer from terribly long in-game transitions.

In the long run, while playing a game, more memory means less need to reload data from either the disc or the HDD.

The effective 256M of main RAM isn't matching the rest of the HW in the 360 or the PS3.

Not really, more memory will ultimately mean either longer load times or more complex texture streaming. Even with an SSD on PC, loading up a game with 2 GB of textures (can't think of any game that does that except with 3rd party texture packs) would take a very significant amount of time.

And streaming only helps to some extent if you want really detailed textures.

As such I'd be very surprised if the next round of consoles have more than 2 GB of main memory and at most 1 GB of video memory with 512 MB the more likely sweet spot. 2 GB also makes it easier to port the game to PCs running a 32-bit variant of Windows (2 GB virtual address space per program). You can get access to more by making a program large address aware, but that is rare for a developer to do and 32 bit Windows is going to be limited to 3 GB virtual address space per program even with that.

Regards,
SB

 

[acaeus]

Not really, more memory will ultimately mean either longer load times or more complex texture streaming. Even with an SSD on PC, loading up a game with 2 GB of textures (can't think of any game that does that except with 3rd party texture packs) would take a very significant amount of time.

And streaming only helps to some extent if you want really detailed textures.

As such I'd be very surprised if the next round of consoles have more than 2 GB of main memory and at most 1 GB of video memory with 512 MB the more likely sweet spot. 2 GB also makes it easier to port the game to PCs running a 32-bit variant of Windows (2 GB virtual address space per program). You can get access to more by making a program large address aware, but that is rare for a developer to do and 32 bit Windows is going to be limited to 3 GB virtual address space per program even with that.

Regards,
SB

I understand where you are coming from, but you talk almost exclusively about textures. And I still have a hard time agreeing with "less is more." Many more techniques become available with more RAM. e.g. you may be playing the game while (more of) the next stage/chunk is loading -- like an app level pre-fetching. Streaming may even become unnecessary for certain games that depend on it now.

Even on the PC, once you add more RAM, loading times get better; in fact they get a lot better for certain games.

And, again, if you talk about in-game transitions, more RAM is key! Take oblivion for instance, when you enter or leave a house/room, it dumps some info to disk and loads data. With more RAM, less needs to be reloaded between stages, levels, and locations; more of the common data can remain in RAM (at all times).

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Initial load times can't be helped. The beauty of a console game used to be that you insert the disc and start playing within seconds - the current 45-60 sec you have to wait until it starts is already stretching it.

If I have to spend 2 minutes or more sitting in front of my TV I'm going to be really, really unhappy.

 

[holsty101]

The beauty of a console game used to be that you insert the disc and start playing within seconds - the current 45-60 sec you have to wait until it starts is already stretching it.

If I have to spend 2 minutes or more sitting in front of my TV I'm going to be really, really unhappy.

Are you sure you're not thinking of cartridge based games rather than disc based ...

Maybe my memory is getting fuzzy with old age but it seems like almost every disc based console takes a minute or more before you could get going.

If a couple of minutes waiting is gonna make you "really, really unhappy" maybe you need to ... I dunno, learn to chill out a bit more, maybe do some zen breathing exercises or something ...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Current consoles, which means 5 years, have always had trouble with the loading and tried to hide it with logo animations and several levels of menu screens. But I'm sure PS2 and Xbox1 titles loaded a lot faster, there wasn't as much memory to work with.

And it's not about zen, it's just that consoles were meant to be the simple way and PCs were the ones with installs and long load times (boy, installing Starcraft 2 reminded me of Wing Commander 3, you could literally take a dump or a bath...)

 

[Shifty Geezer]

...but honestly it does as well as it does because it happens to be the best option for a purchaseable multiplatform engine which is relatively easy to develope on. No easy accomplishment.

the compaints against UE3 come from all too many dodgy-framerate, low feature PS3 UE3 titles. It may be the best available, but it's hardly great in its achievements on a per-title basis. It feels to me like Epic are just sitting on it, getting the sales because there's no competition and not improving the engine so it runs at a decent rate. Now it may be they are focussed on UE4 and this will all be addressed then, where UE3 was something of a DirectX centric design that was ported. There is definitely considerable room for improvement though.

This is all by-the-way regards the console companies choosing an engine, because neither is going to provide a cross-platform engine, meaning you'd be looking at proprietary engines per platform. MS can support PC and XB within the same framework (which they do already with XNA). Otherwise the choice is either subsidise the harwdare and get more users, with more difficult development tools annoying developoers (like PS3 this gen), or provide great developer tools but inferior hardware which may affect adoption (look at people still talk about PS3 being the more powerful platform this gen despite all too often XB360 getting the better quality cross-platform implementations; performance values still count for something).

I agree there's a very good case for investing in services. Having seen how this generation panned out, I'd rather provide a decent software platform than the bestest hardware. I would utterly hate to be notably undercut in performance though, and a couple of more costly hardware tweaks could see that happening (think double the ram bus width, and you can offer twice the BW and RAM which would definitely have notable improved visual quality. It doesn't all have to be loaded assets, or all require filling prior to your game starting).

 

[Squilliam]

Surely with the initial load they could always precache the last 1-4 titles onto the consoles storage and therefore simply load whats required from the disc?

 

[Otto Dafe]

the compaints against UE3 come from all too many dodgy-framerate, low feature PS3 UE3 titles...

That, and it's inspired considerable enmity from PC gamers playing crappy DX9 ports with no AA on their bad-ass 2010 HW. You could fairly blame the port-monkeys for that, or just the market reality, but it doesn't change the fact that when we see, "Awesome Unreal Engine 3 (TM) visuals", on the features page, we say, "Ughhh".

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I understand where you are coming from, but you talk almost exclusively about textures. And I still have a hard time agreeing with "less is more." Many more techniques become available with more RAM. e.g. you may be playing the game while (more of) the next stage/chunk is loading -- like an app level pre-fetching. Streaming may even become unnecessary for certain games that depend on it now.

Even on the PC, once you add more RAM, loading times get better; in fact they get a lot better for certain games.

That is only true if your texture quality stays constant. That would allow you to hold assets potentially for multiple levels. Shared assets are going to be stored regardless of how much memory you have. In other words games with lots of shared assets + lots of different assets (between levels) will be designed as such.

If we want to remain with the same quality of textures as we have on consoles today (puke) then yes, more memory can potentially increase level load times AFTER the first level as you can pre-cache assets.

If we want to actually increase texture quality to take advantage of the extra memory then your load times are going to go up no matter what you do. Even textures on PC games now days is horribly disappointing considering there haven't been significant advances in that area for "most" games (yes there are a few rare exceptions, and even there it isn't much considering the advances in memory sizes the past 5+ years) in the past 5+ years. So yes, I'm not surprised if some games show improvements with console level textures with more RAM.

I do the majority of my gaming on PC and texture quality is even more disappointing on PC in my eyes due to the fact they have so much more memory (graphics and system) to work with. And even with the rather glacial increase in texture quality, load times even with an SSD can still take a significant amount of time.

If I go back and play games that utilized at most 512 meg of system memory and 256 meg of video memory, levels load almost instantly in comparison to games released today on PC.

More RAM = more assets = longer loading times. Unless as I said above, you want to have at best minor improvements in texture and graphics quality.

And, again, if you talk about in-game transitions, more RAM is key! Take oblivion for instance, when you enter or leave a house/room, it dumps some info to disk and loads data. With more RAM, less needs to be reloaded between stages, levels, and locations; more of the common data can remain in RAM (at all times).

You'll still need to load those textures at some point. And if we actually want significantly increased texture quality, that's going to take a lot of time as you'll be swapping textures more often and caching textures less often.

Regards,
SB

 

[assen]

It feels to me like Epic are just sitting on it, getting the sales because there's no competition and not improving the engine so it runs at a decent rate.

The engine runs at no rate by itself; the engine runs at a crappy rate whatever the idiot artists threw at it without any concern for performance. The same people who decided it's ok to run at 15-20 fps under UE would just throw more assets at e.g. the God of War codebase. Teams who are likely to buy all-encompassing middleware instead of developing their own, are more likely not to care about performance.

 

[Gubbi]

But I'm sure PS2 and Xbox1 titles loaded a lot faster, there wasn't as much memory to work with.

Depends on the title. I've recently replayed KOTOR and load times in that game are fairly long. The XBOX DVD drive was a CAV 2-5 X speed drive, so while we have 8 times the RAM in the 360, the DVD is more than 3 times faster, HDD faster yet.

More RAM means more choice for developers. RAM could be blown on the texture budget, but it could just as well be used for caching schemes, which could significantly lower loading times.

One of the most anoying things about playing Mass Effect 1/2 or Dragon Age is entering a doorway, wait for the level to load, realise you entered the wrong door, turn 180 degrees and go through the door you just entered, ..... and have to wait for loading to complete again.

Using a chunk of RAM to cache geometry and the smaller mip-levels would allow for faster transitions, albeit with pop-in. But considering that the low-res mip levels of next gen consoles is equal to this gen's full detail level, I could live with pop-in.

Cheers

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The engine runs at no rate by itself; the engine runs at a crappy rate whatever the idiot artists threw at it without any concern for performance. The same people who decided it's ok to run at 15-20 fps under UE would just throw more assets at e.g. the God of War codebase. Teams who are likely to buy all-encompassing middleware instead of developing their own, are more likely not to care about performance.

Except in undemanding titles like Fat Princess and Alien Breed, it still chugs, so it's not a matter of poor developers overloading the engine, but the engine having a low base performance. Also see Otto's opinions on the PC ports.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

The above mentioned ME2 is a nice example of making the most out of UE3, it has a lot of detail and runs at an almost constant 30fps. Especially if you compare it to ME1's uneven frame rate and considerably less detailed looking levels.

And yeah, more RAM is always good, but one has to consider the pro and contra as well; 2GB just seems to be the best compromise for next gen in my opinion.

 

[Cyan]

Not really, more memory will ultimately mean either longer load times or more complex texture streaming. Even with an SSD on PC, loading up a game with 2 GB of textures (can't think of any game that does that except with 3rd party texture packs) would take a very significant amount of time.

And streaming only helps to some extent if you want really detailed textures.

As such I'd be very surprised if the next round of consoles have more than 2 GB of main memory and at most 1 GB of video memory with 512 MB the more likely sweet spot. 2 GB also makes it easier to port the game to PCs running a 32-bit variant of Windows (2 GB virtual address space per program). You can get access to more by making a program large address aware, but that is rare for a developer to do and 32 bit Windows is going to be limited to 3 GB virtual address space per program even with that.

Regards,
SB

I have to go soon so I will be brief. I don't think there should be a difference based on whether or not next generation consoles have or not more memory, if developers use it smartly. You could play a level while streaming the rest of it to avoid long loading times.

Or use "repetitive" assets at the beginning of the levels while streaming the rest without the player noticing.

If that were the trade-off, then I would go with either 2GB or -even better- 4GB of RAM.

Every generation has its trade-offs, but oddly enough the next one would be the one were typically RAM starving machines like consoles would be limited by having more RAM than they ever had.

As for assets, I remember Laa Yosh's :smile: words saying that they aren't going to change much. I'm not asking developers to do so....

What I would like to see is more even quality between textures and assets, which doesn't seem possible with 512 MB of RAM. Annoying.

It's not uncommon this generation to see great textures next to ones that look so muddy you seem to be looking at an entirely different game.

4GB of RAM would help with debugging, and things like loading almost the entire game to RAM greatly reducing loading times, if those assets are reasonably large.

It would help to extend the life of optical drive lenses, too, requiring less access to it, just in case you can't install the game to a HD.

1GB of RAM isn't much...especially taking into account even most modern Mobile phones require or feature 1GB of RAM at least -iPhone, Windows 7 Phone... etc-, which is great for developers when they are creating their games for the platform.

If the next generation consoles are going to feature 4GB of RAM -or 2- developers might end up adapting to that amount of memory, and find solutions to circumvent the problems related to it. In the end it's one of the things uncomplaining developers always do, I think.

 

[Gubbi]

We'll have 4GB because:
1. If either MS or Sony opts for 2GB while the other opts for 4GB, they'll be on the losing side of every image quality comparison for cross platform games for the next 6-7 years.
2. Moore's law. The price for 4GB might be steep at launch but falls exponentially.

Cheers

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This isn't the thread to discuss next-gen specs!
We're all getting sidetracked with explaining reasons to choices facing the console companies, but the details of load times and RAM usage isn't really for here. Suffice to say, you can present a case as to why a console company should or should not subsidised there console, but leave the details for thrashing out in the various tech threads. I'm sure loading times was covered in one of the next-gen threads.

 

[Squilliam]

We'll have 4GB because:
1. If either MS or Sony opts for 2GB while the other opts for 4GB, they'll be on the losing side of every image quality comparison for cross platform games for the next 6-7 years.
2. Moore's law. The price for 4GB might be steep at launch but falls exponentially.

Cheers

I doubt that if one console has twice the ram of the other two if not more that developers will spend the time especially in the important first few years developing assets which will actually use 4GB of RAM. At best you might have improved texture compression but at twice the size you're falling behind in the average texture to read speed metric. At best we can expect 8* BR which scales just nicely against the PS3s 512MB RAM compared to an expected 2GB of RAM.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Well, here's one idea then: instead of subsidizing an extra 2GB of memory, which could be as much as $20 per console, or 50 * 20 = 1000 million USD, spend $10 million on developing middleware for virtual texturing.
That's $990 million of pure profit, I'd like only 0.1% royalty for the tip, kthxbye.

 

[corduroygt]

DigitalFoundry's test has proven that a cheap 16GB USB pendrive is prefectly capable of replacing the HDD. If it becomes cheap enough - certainly cheaper than an HDD - then players can use the flash memory for temp installs and caches. But it won't be enough to significantly speed up load times and more then 2GB of main memory would take forever to fill.

It can match the read speed, but the write speed still suffers with the USB drive, according to the DF test. So I don't think you can replace the HDD yet with a 16GB USB drive, write speeds are too slow, and it'd get more expensive if you wanted faster write speeds.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Thanks for the info, forgot about that part.
Nevertheless, I still think that it's fast enough for installs and such, because you're already limited by the optical drive's read speed when copying data.

And it sure beats nothing Those who want speed can get a more expensive SKU, flash drive would be for the base models.