A silly question...(About HDD and Framebuffers)

[!eVo!-X Ant UK]

I'll get straight to the point, Could PS3's HDD be used for a frame buffer?? or in any shape or form to reduce texture strain or bandwidth on PS3 in anyway?? Apart from the extra load speed could it be used for anything graphics related??

[/endsdumbness]

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Way too slow.

Edit : Way too slow for framebuffer ops. It'd work for texture caching and the like, providing a faster transfer than the BRD. You could also combine the access speeds of both BRD and HDD, streaming audio off one and textures of another say, so the possibilties to feed the RAM are high. It won't be useable for reducing RAM BW requirementes though. All data still has to pass through that RAM to be used.

 

[Acert93]

About the only thing the HDD can be used for graphically (to enhance graphics) would be an engine that is designed to be streamable (thus more of the RAM can be used on what is currently seen, and what is not yet seen in detail can be streamed in as you get closer). In which case a HDD's extra speed/lower latency could be used as a larger buffer (although this could be done with DVD/BR). Of course the buffered area would need to be a couple seconds away in all possible directions of movement and you would need to have lower detailed information already in RAM (basically the buffered area would have the higher level LOD information). This type of technology is already in use though and is part of UE3. A HDD helps, but is no magic.

But anything that needs to be rendered in a scene--waaaaay too slow. And framebuffer? Yeah, if you want 1 frame ever couple seconds! And that is only for the completed frame in the framebuffer which is meager in size/bandwidth

The HDD will help load times though, can aid in streamable worlds, and of course gives a large medium to save information from games and from online. It may also house Linux and hopefully some TiVo like features!

 

[Farid]

Thread Title Edited

Thread titles need to be a somewhat precise in the Technology Forum.

I edited the title just in case.

And to answer the question no, as pointed out, the Framebuffer can't be stored in the HDD, it's too slow.

 

[flick556]

I think the inclusion of the HD will have a visual effect, but in a rather indirect way. When in comes to using high rez textures load times are a huge consideration. If you keep lots of little textures in memory you have a library of textures often large enough to create an entire level with. As you move to larger textures you have less textures in memory thus less variety. One option is you simply make your level smaller; this is why tech demos can use huge textures because they only need enough textures in memory for a small level. If you build you game out of these small levels you free yourself to use larger textures or more textures for a given amount of space.

The trade off is frequent loads, and a larger disk footprint. HL2 is a good example of this philosophy the biggest thing that makes that game look so good is the extremely high rez textures. Yet it has to frequently load in order to erase what is currently in memory and replace it with new stuff. When you look at some of the ps3 demos you can see the really high rez textures being used, without the HD load times on these games could increase to crazy levels.

Streaming may eliminate the loading, but their is a finite rate at which things can be streamed. The faster this rate the more texture info can be used per a given area. The HD will stream faster than cd. Effective streaming is a really big deal having the most dramatic effect on texture detail next to adding more memory.

You will also need the HD for someplace to write to. If games allow for lots of destruction and environment interaction the game saves may grow exponentially so that all the changes to the environment may be persisted. This will make more sense in some game types than others. There are a few games on the pc that have allowed their saves to grow to the 100mb+ range, the amount of information persisted in these types of saves allows for the players past to have a stronger impact on game play.

Another thing, you may write the frame buffer to the HD. This would allow you to persist the frame buffer. This may be good to create procedural textures that require non real-time processing. For example you could take 10 seconds or more to generate some super detailed texture and store it on the drive for later use in the game. It would save BR disk space and may be dependent on some type of player interaction in order to be generated (like scanning the players face through eye toy) for example.