Wait... That huge list (yes it's huge, Davros, one of the biggest I've ever seen) is made up of games where the online part was disabled, or were they literally made unusable even offline?
Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*
- Thread starter Cheezdoodles
- Start date
My prediction remains a compromise of 1TB SSD and 100GB game size in 2019.
At 0.10/GB (which is possible), a 4TB would be $400, this 10 times too expensive for a console. So that's not a solution.
Dramexchange contract price average is currently 4.22 for 128Gb but the volatility is scary!
That's $260 for 1TB today. If that drops by half per 18 months, we get...
$140 for Q4 2017
$70 for Q2 2019
So maybe $60 for a launch Q4 2019.
Solutions:
1. Accept the limitations of 1TB local storage and 100GB games, for 2019.
2. Launch in 2021 with a 2TB SSD and bigger game sizes.
3. If HAMR is successful, a 4TB HDD with a 256GB SSD in 2019.
#3 an interesting best of both worlds, it also significantly reduces the risk of flash market volatility.
Sometimes Big and slow is better than small and fast. Sometimes.
Three is along the lines I'm hoping we'll get.
My compromise would be a dirty little 2TB laptop drive and 120 ~ 240 GB SSD (perhaps even an eMMC
). Games are given a slot on the SSD to use as scratchpad. Developers choose what to put in the scratchpad (say texture, models, code) and what to load directly from the HDD (say 4K video files, cut-scene data, uncompressed audio). Kind of like the OG Xbox, but with a SSD where the HDD was used, and HDD used where optical once was.GrimThorne
Newcomer
Wouldn't it be wiser for Microsoft to launch a VR/AR platform separately from their 4th Generation console? I mean a VR/AR set-top with it's own core architecture and Head Mounted Display. In this way whenever Microsoft gets around to launching it's 4th Gen console gamers won't have to go through that HMD's price point (which I suspect will be expensive) in order to get to Xbox 4. It also would keep Microsoft from repeating the same mistake of 2013 of placing Kinect in the box and therefore bundling something that some gamers won't want or can't afford.
Microsoft would then only need to make sure that their 4th gen console was spec'd to run the HMD and make it available for purchase independent of it's hardware. Gamers who actually are intrigued with mixed reality could then adopt the device at their own pace.
As for Hololens, I'm not so sure anymore. I've briefly experienced Hololens and seen what some developers are doing with it. It may have some gaming aspirations but I think gamers are going to be somewhat disappointed when they see how the vast majority of projects being created for it will have very little to do with gaming. And Hololens needs nothing from an Xbox to function. I don't see a necessary marriage there at all. Even Satya Nadella has stated that version one of Hololens is going to be enterprise focused.
Cool so how do you play the games when you own the disc and they have a day one update that no longer exists cause it was pulled down ?
This isn't the ps2 era when few games were online and you never saw patches. Today almost every major if not every major game comes with a day one patch .
Also a lot of those games are on PC which means DD owners don't mind them going off , most likely because a majority of the list were just yearly updates and they've moved on to new ones
Games still function even without a day one patch.
some , not all. There are plenty of unplayable games without their day one patch.
I don't think that's accurate.
when the generation first started techreport would look at games with and without the day one patch. Lots of games went from unplyable to playable.
The Language Trap
Use a word in different ways, but logically treat it as the same concept:
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-propaganda.html
Yes, we know! Hence the talk about an SSD caching area.
Yeah, HDDs are slow, but 4KB random write isn't such a useful metric for loading games.
Games can optimise layout for known access patterns. A linear game with predictable chunks could be fairly close to linear, contiguous access. Loading open world games by grids (like Skyrim) can do pretty well too.
If you could put the most sensitive areas onto an SSD cache / scratchpad, then streaming some data from a HDD might not pose a practical problem.
I was responding to the 3.5inch drive questions. The raptor is only reading at a 140MB/s max sequential reads , you can see I posted those also. A good SSD will hit in the 400 range for that or a pcie drive in the 2000 range.
A hybrid drive will help but you would only be able to cache a few games at most in them. Mr Fox is expecting 100gig games for next generation. So you will need a lot of flash with a controller.
But then whats the point of the mechanical portion. Its just there to once again make up for a compromise.
Remove the cost of optical , remove the cost of mechanical and just put that into a larger SSD and hopefully a pci-e ssd.
A bog standard 7200 1TB 3.5" drive like the one I use can get 130+ MB/s so a 4TBdrive with a more dense platter should easily be able to clear 150 MB. We won't get a proper "man size" HDD though so it's all a bit academic.
OG Xbox had 3 x 1GB scratchpad areas on the 10 GB HDD. Games used them to store large amounts of data to stream quickly into ram. The data persisted, and slots were allocated to games on a last used, first out basis. It worked really well actually.
A similar approach along the lines I, and I think Mr Fox, are talking about might be a 240 GB SSD with, say, three 60 GB partitions for caching. Developers chose what to put in the fast partitions, and what to pull directly from the 2TB or 4TB HDD.
This way after an initial caching period on first play the game will feel like it's installed to SSD and will remain that way until several other games have pushed it out of its slot. You get large amounts of storage and games can be built around fast access, but you save a ton over paying for a huge SSD.
Everything is a compromise in console land!
That 4TB SSD is going to eat into silicon budget or price the console out of the market.
This thread is about distribution media, so the choice between mechanical and ssd for the internal storage is not very important. They'll use what they can fit in the BOM (ssd, hdd, hybrid, tiered,etc..), regardless of which distribution media is prefered.
There was a glimmer of hope from mushkin and bad journalism leading to broken dreams of having a big SSD in a console soon. It was false. Cost per gigabyes is not dropping faster than expected.
According to eastmen's own prediction above, his 4TB SSD in 2018 will cost $400. This is why cost per gigabytes is the most important metric. You can't propose any solution without taking that metric into consideration.
There was a glimmer of hope from mushkin and bad journalism leading to broken dreams of having a big SSD in a console soon. It was false. Cost per gigabyes is not dropping faster than expected.
According to eastmen's own prediction above, his 4TB SSD in 2018 will cost $400. This is why cost per gigabytes is the most important metric. You can't propose any solution without taking that metric into consideration.
