Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*
- Thread starter Cheezdoodles
- Start date
Sounds expensive. If the game is on the cart and you're going to copy it to SSD, why not just use optical?
I don't see the advantage. If the SD card is no faster than an HDD, use the HDD as we currently do. If you want way faster than the HDD, you could use fancy carts but they'd cost loads. Or you could use an SSD which'd mean way less storage for the money but you could use cheaper optical storage.
But that's slower than HDD using your above figures. the moment you have faster-than-HDD speeds, the cost increases, and the references to these prices are always much more than just a few bucks. AFAICS your figures are mostly guesses based on retail prices? With no idea what the margins are on those, we don't know how cheap the devices (plus effort to copy contents across) would really be, and I definitely think you're low-balling it by a large amount. I doubt 64 GB of 300 MB/s cart will be less than the order of $20 at best, looking at $80+ games. And as function points out, if you have to appease the B&M retailers that whacks up the price of your download titles too. Imagine Console A has COD for $60 in the download store and Console B has it for $80, and that goes for all the other titles. I'm sure the backlash would be far higher than the positive noise about lower load times.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Ignoring cost for the moment (which isn't something you can do in the actual market). It isn't that difficult to work around that. But it does require changes to how games on consoles are distributed.
First some assumptions.
- All game distribution uses the same digitally packed version of the game. Physical media becomes just a way to distribute the digital package physically.
- This requires that the console features some kind of online requirement to validate ownership. This is a step up from Steam's requirement to check at least once a month or something faster as Steam can't force verification of all apps installed on a machine. Physical media is thus no longer an implementation of DRM.
- Users can use any physical media to distribute the game. Users can "load" their physical medium of choice from any location with an internet connection (friend, neighbor, game store, coffee shop, PC Bang, whatever).
- The console features expandable, not just replaceable, storage. This could be internal or external, it doesn't matter.
The expandable storage is there to more easily allow a console and its user to easily manage their local library of games. This is assuming that for whatever reasons, they can't download games on a whim (data caps, for example). While a console could come standard with 500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB, etc. of drive space eventually that fills up. And of course, is more problematic on a mobile console (like the Switch). So less of a problem for a home console than one that can be used as a mobile console.
That then means you could easily make do with an SD card that is only large enough to hold 1 of the largest game available for the platform. If console makers were willing they could automate the ability to split the digital install package across multiple smaller SD cards. You can already do this manually on PC. Or they could get a larger and cheaper thumb drive, or an external HDD drive, or an external SSD drive (if they have that money!).
I'm a huge proponent of something like this (as long time readers of this thread likely know), but it does have some downsides. For example, without rigidly enforced online verification of digital content it'd open up the consoles to pirating. Something that PC suffers from. As Windows does not enforce digital verification of applications. It can't because it has been designed to allow users to run any code the user wishes to run.
Another drawback is if you need to go off-site to get the install media it'll take time to transfer it to your external storage devices. That would be relative fast or really really slow depending on your media. This could, of course, be addressed in several ways.
- The console manufacturer could offer officially branded external media with minimum guaranteed read and write speeds. At the same time not restricting what storage media the user can use.
- Enterprising retailers (online or local) could offer a service with pre-loaded storage media. You go in and exchange your storage device for one that is pre-loaded with the game you want. Presumably the service would either come with one such device as part of the service or require you to purchase at least one supported storage device to start the service.
- Play games with your friend at your friend's house while the digital package is transferred to your storage device.
- Copy the digital package to your storage device while at work. Be sure to be sneaky as the workplace would probably frown upon this.
Tongue in cheek comment aside, there are, I'm sure, some users in some countries that may not have internet available where they live.It's an idea that would work. But it's definitely way too soon to get console gamers to accept something like that.
BTW - this wouldn't preclude the use of existing non-rewritable means of distribution. You can still distribute digital packages on optical media. In fact, you could theoretically also allow the use of re-writable optical media. However, presumably console makers would want to take the opportunity to reduce the BOM of the machine.
Regards,
SB
Their needs would be the same as Nintendo unless they go back to some online DRM scheme. Otherwise, how would they authenticate the cart as a genuine copy and prevent the production of bootlegs? If they use generic NAND, they would still need to add a separate chip providing copy-protection, and they would still need a cart copy service for mass production.
Crypto only prevents modifying data and decoding content, and provides the integrity check (i.e. validates the data itself is genuine). It doesn't help copy protection. The missing link is a robust key exchange between the cart and the hypervisor.
1) you keep saying copy it to the ssd. I'm not saying to do that. You don't need to copy it if its on a cart. If the cart is already capable of 150MB/s then its on par or faster with the current drives in consoles. If its 300MB/s then it will be faster almost in ssd territory
2) The advantage would be not having to have an optical drive that takes up space in a console , a good 30-40% of the console is dedicated to the optical drive and a good $20-$30 of the console cost. Not to mention you still need a drive to install too. You can eliminate all that from the cost of the console and perhaps increase load times
3)Yes we don't know the true costs but they would be cheaper than retail. These aren't close out prices by amazon or one day sales they are doing. Back in the old days games would increase in price based on the size of the game. So you could have a 32 gig or lower game come in at $65 , a 64gig at $70 and so on. Through the generation the costs would decrease.
What if Console B was more powerful and cheaper than console A also ? Would consumers be willing to spend the money spread out over games vs a cheaper console upfront that is also more powerful.
http://static.techspot.com/images2/news/ts3_thumbs/2016/08/2016-08-03-ts3_thumbs-cb1.jpg
Look at the amount of space lost due to the Bluray drive in the xbox one S . Imagine what they could do if that was removed , they could increase cooling for the APU or they could make the console smaller or a little of both.
SD cards already have DRM buil into them although we can't know what it is unless we buy a liscense from the SD association . But regardless I wasn't advocating for SD card per say. I was more of the thinking that MS / Sony could use the nand chips in their own format with a proprietary connector that doesn't exist in the pc .
Although online authentication could be done. We are another 4 years removed from 2013 and DD content has only continued to get more popular. The backlash would be smaller if it exists at all.
I'm saying if you have an SSD, copy to it as it's faster. And you're the one who said there'd be an SSD in there!
But then it's crazy expensive.
That's an unfair comparison. What if Console A was more powerful and cheaper and had cheaper games? Talking about the choices available with the parameter being considered, the choice isn't 'more expensive games on a better console versus cheaper games on a less powerful console' but 'more expensive games with a shorter load/install time versus cheaper games with longer load/install times'.
Although it's not quite that because the proposition seems muddled. I can't tell if you're talking about a system with an internal SSD or a system with superfast carts, or both. But as I said before, the argument for both is virtually non-existant. If you already have an SSD, install and run from that. Or rather use it as a smart cache.
Depends on the ssd and what the cart is doesn't it ? Some ssd's are not much faster than high end SD cards.
How do you know ? The system using nand carts wouldn't need an optical drive so that's $20-$30 right there aside from savings on shipping due to lower weight , smaller design and savings on packaging and so on. So it is possible that the console with nand carts would be cheaper. Not only that but if you look at something like the gap between scorpio and the pro , scorpio could come with nand carts and be more powerful and be the same or cheaper price because of that.
Look SSD's are still expensive. So you create a system with a nand cart. If they are only capable of 150MB/s then yes the ssd will still be much faster however if they are 300MB/s then that would be close to the cheaper ssd drives esp if they use sata 3. Then you can ship with a 512gig ssd . If the drive is about the same speed as the SSD you wouldn't need to install to it.
We also know that Nand tech isn't sitting still. Its still moving forward and a good clip. IF you build smartly and intergrate a UHS-III interface tis capable of up to 624MB/s . So as we continue forward nand gets cheaper and faster load times can continue to decrease as the generation goes on and games can continue to increase in size and loading times would stay the same or decrease.
Which spec are you talking about? The argument from you was if a game had to be split over cards, it could be installed on the SSD instead. Ergo I'm guessing the SSD is as fast or faster than the cart.
I don't know. Neither do you, so it shouldn't be presented as an argument. You present lots of speculation - same could be speculated on the other system. There are many possibilities, none of which we can predict. eg. What if they add $2 on every game and still undercut the cost of their rivals by $10? They could sell cheaper and recoup more in software sales. Instead of second-guessing every option, what we can do is look at actual data and talk about the stuff we can actually get a bit of a handle on without resorting to blind guesswork.
At which point the whole thing is very expensive. Or do you think a 512 GB SSD is going to be cheaper than a cheap HDD and optical drive?
It's been moving forwards for 9 years. It's gotten faster and denser as HDDs and optical drives haven't improved anywhere near as quickly. Exactly the same arguments you make now were made 5+ years ago. eg: March 2011
By the end of 2011 there was apparently a hard time arguing against flash in consoles, so what the heck were the console companies thinking?! All these engineers, all with actual data and costs instead of speculation, going with BRD in their 2013 consoles. Madness, or does that point to your price and performance speculations being well wide of the mark?eastmen said:
Blazkowicz
Legend
Will HDD density increase once again? It's been stagnating with the vendors just adding platters and using a silly trick with overlapping tracks (for archival grade HDD although that would work for games you mostly write once)
But if it doubles, and is thus (sqrt 2) faster than the current state of the art, it might be good enough. Like, quite possibly 200MB/s average on 5400 rpm.
Allow a CPU core to burst at 3.5+GHz even if it's just a special mode for loading screens. Yes, about 3x the single-thread performance of a 2.1GHz Jaguar, should be good for something?
NAND, perhaps more accurately 3D-NAND / V-NAND : yes it improves, maybe you'll see your 1TB for $100 and saturating the interface speed but well, that will still be expensive. And risky, as Moore's law can actually be ending for good or perhaps just cycles of overinvestment and underinvestment. We might be entering an era where it's like with DRAM prices (or oil prices) : year on year the price might be down 50%, but in a bad year it doubles in a matter of months/weeks.
even a $10 card/cart will still be $10. I wish we had $0.50 128MB cards (or bigger size), in a form factor we can write on. Floppy replacement! But I've never seen stuff cheaper than about $5. And with no parallelized read/writes that's slow as hell.
But if it doubles, and is thus (sqrt 2) faster than the current state of the art, it might be good enough. Like, quite possibly 200MB/s average on 5400 rpm.
Allow a CPU core to burst at 3.5+GHz even if it's just a special mode for loading screens. Yes, about 3x the single-thread performance of a 2.1GHz Jaguar, should be good for something?
NAND, perhaps more accurately 3D-NAND / V-NAND : yes it improves, maybe you'll see your 1TB for $100 and saturating the interface speed but well, that will still be expensive. And risky, as Moore's law can actually be ending for good or perhaps just cycles of overinvestment and underinvestment. We might be entering an era where it's like with DRAM prices (or oil prices) : year on year the price might be down 50%, but in a bad year it doubles in a matter of months/weeks.
even a $10 card/cart will still be $10. I wish we had $0.50 128MB cards (or bigger size), in a form factor we can write on. Floppy replacement! But I've never seen stuff cheaper than about $5. And with no parallelized read/writes that's slow as hell.
Blazkowicz
Legend
Great I hope the new Xbox has a thunderbolt port so I can add a $1K drive to run a high end database server.
Now that is impressive.
Blazkowicz
Legend
Oooh it's pretty. But can someone explain me why they didn't make an "S" version right off the bat lol.
Let me guess, the PS5 / Xbox 4 will come in a "big" version, followed by a smaller one (likely with some new Dolby standard you have to worry about, but not idea what it will be).
If you remove the optical drive it will be harder to justify the big one. They will have to fill it with air like some less fortunate designs of the 80s.
No my argument is to use a bigger card. What game wouldn't fit on a nand chip ? We have sd cards up to 512 gig and micro sd cards up to 256 gigs. That's beyond bluray xl sizes which top out at 128 gigs.
Your the one who first brought up what ifs , why can't I expand on it ? We know there are benfits to not having a bluray drive in the console and that is cost.
I think its approaching a similar price to a cheap hdd. Prices for 512GB drives are slightly above the $100 mark at retail pricing
And its still true. We are just now getting 12TB 3.5 inch drives and they will cost over $500 . Mean while the price of a 1TB ssd has droped from $1,000 to $250 or lower . SD prices have also fallen as capcity has gone up. Bluray specs have stayed the same since bd xl was announced back then.
Well we can see that console fans are more regressive and tied to physical media vs the pc side of the equation. We saw what happened in 2013 when ms dared to try and move us to 2003 in the pc world
isn't the xbox one based on 28nm while the s is on 14nm. That would drasticly cut the power and heat produced. So you can make a smaller console. Also my xbox one is silent while a complaint with the original ps4s is their noise esp over time
phoenix_chipset
Regular
Digital is regressive ; taking away our ability to own and sell games. People always want to give up freedoms I guess. Anytime I can I buy physical I do, very rarely will I buy digital, only for the best games where I have no choice.
Consoles have been regressing since the 7th generation ; patches (incomplete games), dlc, increasing emphasis on digital. 6th generation and earlier, now those were real consoles. Now we just have gimped PC's (Albeit with less software issues), but at least physical games have value unlike on PC. These things were inevitable with the rising cost and time of game development, but it still sucks.
Blazkowicz
Legend
I don't know, I'm assuming the PS4 Pro is 14nm and the Xbox One S is 28nm. Simply a tiny new revision and binning of the same chip (it adds at best an output mode? is that even just wiring/support components and firmware?), shaving a few tens of millivolts here and there, a new motherboards that adds a few % efficiency on the VRMs, a design inherently less power hungry than the original PS4 (RAM and GPU specs), even shape of fan blades.
I think that about does it, even a 5% lower CPU or GPU voltage goes a long way. I might have made a bad joke in my previous post.
/edit : I guess I'm just stupid as a web search says it's built on 16FF.
For the Scorpio the thermals might be another story, sure. Quite a specs bump but if they want it quiet it's design choices about sizing the console or cooling.
I think that about does it, even a 5% lower CPU or GPU voltage goes a long way. I might have made a bad joke in my previous post.
/edit : I guess I'm just stupid as a web search says it's built on 16FF.
For the Scorpio the thermals might be another story, sure. Quite a specs bump but if they want it quiet it's design choices about sizing the console or cooling.
Last edited:
Blazkowicz
Legend
Digital is doubly stupid. There were such things as analog video games, but they predated the VCS 2600. How about some information highways, thanks.
$4.5 ~$5 contract price for poxy 16GB SD, minus copying and extra security hardware. Large cards would potentially waste tens of GB of space. It's an incredibly expensive and wasteful proposition when mobile isn't a consideration. Most SD cards are not remotely in the 300 MB/s range, and the ones that are cost a lot more.
In reality, publishers would require games to be heavily cut and compressed to get the down onto the cheapest SD card possible, because that increases margins and competitiveness. Digital prices would still inflate in line with retail prices. Because in reality, that's how it works.
Nothing to stop games coming on multiple BRs, or having several tens of GB of download data, or in the future coming on multiple 100GB BR disks. SD will never get close to the distribution cost of BR in the lifetime of Scorpio, and the move is towards online distribution where there is no up front media cost.
Console fans didn't design these machines. MS and Sony both set out to make the best, most attractive console they could. Both had the option of using cheaper, faster, better SD cards for their games as you predicted (to the point of saying there wasn't a valid argument to the contrary), yet both went with BRD.
If gamers had any impact on the consoles like they did with XB1's policies, you'd have seen a console announced that used cheaper, faster, better SD cards for games, then the gamers complain across the internet, and then the companies changing their minds and putting a BRD in there. Probably delaying release a year at least (redesign, change manufacturing, press launch game discs etc.). That didn't happen. The technical experts and engineers made that call, not gamers.
Instead of blaming gamers, you need to either state MS and Sony engineers are more backward and unintelligent than you, or acknowledge that your 2011 predictions were wrong and flash wasn't a viable option.
Your reply when presented with the case of wanting three 40 GB games was to install the third onto the internal SSD. And then if you wanted a download to download to the SSD. Nothing at all about using a larger card (or adding that expense on the cost of the console for the end user).
And you were definitely talking about installing on external SD cards as a user expansion as the above was a continuation of this:eastmen said:
Last edited:
