Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*

[manux]

I hope we don't suffer another ps3 because of their desire to push another home video format.

3 or 4 layer discs would be useless for gaming

It's very different this time. 4 layer discs and drives have been available for well over year now:
http://www.blu-raydisc.info/format-spec/r3-spec.php

The problem with 4 layer discs would be pressing them cheaply enough to make movie distribution financially feasible. There is no problem in reading the discs with cheap and durable hardware. My expectation would be that the drive itself+cpu+gpu would be able to handle the 4k physical media. The actual movies might come along later once the manufacturing issues are solved to become cheap enough. There is no hd dvd around this time pushing for way too early release of movie media...

Even if 4k movies come on 4 layer discs it doesn't mean games have to use more than a reguar 1 layer 25GB disc...

 

[eastmen]

And anything above 9GB is useless for games as well?

From what i have read and have been posted around on the web, there isn´t anything pointing to 3-4 layer Discs requiring anything expensive from the Disc Drive. But it´s very likely that at layer 3 or 4 that the maximum transfer rate might go down. Which must likely would leave games to 25-50GB

Should Sony go for Blu-Ray again, i am certain that they will be spending more time and energy on making the drive fast for games. Which.. shouldn´t be a problem compared to the PS3... Zing

Actually it would be a problem. Not only will you have delays introduced for switching to another layer but each layer will read slower than the previous layer

The fast Xl drive i've seen is a 6x for 25/50 and 4x for 100/128 . Your going to loose quite a bit of speed .


As for your comment above , more room is allways welcome but looking at this gen dispite one platform having acess to only 6.4 gigs of storage at one point the games on it hold up very well compared to the platform that hs almost 8 times the storage capacity . Not only that but there are very beautiful games out there on the pc like battlefield 3 which imo is one of the most beautiful games i've played to date . Only takes up 12 gigs of space.

There is plenty of room on current blurays and if multiple layer discs and drives add more cost to the format then whats the point ?

Esp if next gens more powerful hardware allows for better texture compression along with more generated textures to be used and tesselation.

 

[hoho]

As for your comment above , more room is allways welcome but looking at this gen dispite one platform having acess to only 6.4 gigs of storage at one point the games on it hold up very well compared to the platform that hs almost 8 times the storage capacity .

Didn't Carmack say something about MS not allowing multi-platform games to use better art on competing platforms?

There is plenty of room on current blurays and if multiple layer discs and drives add more cost to the format then whats the point ?

Multi-layer capable drive shouldn't really be all that expensive and if devs want they can use any amount of layers they like. E.g other megatexture-based things could use full four layers but other "normal" ones only one layer.

 

[-tkf-]

Actually it would be a problem. Not only will you have delays introduced for switching to another layer but each layer will read slower than the previous layer

The fast Xl drive i've seen is a 6x for 25/50 and 4x for 100/128 . Your going to loose quite a bit of speed .


As for your comment above , more room is allways welcome but looking at this gen dispite one platform having acess to only 6.4 gigs of storage at one point the games on it hold up very well compared to the platform that hs almost 8 times the storage capacity . Not only that but there are very beautiful games out there on the pc like battlefield 3 which imo is one of the most beautiful games i've played to date . Only takes up 12 gigs of space.

There is plenty of room on current blurays and if multiple layer discs and drives add more cost to the format then whats the point ?

Esp if next gens more powerful hardware allows for better texture compression along with more generated textures to be used and tesselation.

Lets beat the dead horse, 6.4GB is not always enough that is simply a fact, Forza DLC installs, new disc structure to allow more space, Rage , there is plenty of examples that proofs that 6.4GB is at most a compromise at worst a problem.

I think that we somewhere in these few pages already discussed transfer rates, 6x would be as fast as a 20x speed DVD drive, but not as noisy. And it would be able to fill a 3GB memory as fast as the current drive in the PS3 can fill 512MB. Or should i say as slow

The most important aspect of the drives, imho, would be streaming performance. If the drive is a 6x speed but is faster in seeks than a 12x speed it might be preferable?

Surprise, i would prefer a BDXL format with space and possibility of 4K support, and for Sony i can see the idea since it would be practically "free" and it would allow them to have another checkmark that the competition wont have. Imagine having a 30inch display with 4k Support and PS4 connected playing the newest Pixar movie on your desktop... droooool

 

[eastmen]

Didn't Carmack say something about MS not allowing multi-platform games to use better art on competing platforms?
Multi-layer capable drive shouldn't really be all that expensive and if devs want they can use any amount of layers they like. E.g other megatexture-based things could use full four layers but other "normal" ones only one layer.

Are multi platform games the only ones that exist ? I'm pretty sure there are plenty of exclusives on both sides and while we can get into an arguement over which looks better (which i hope to avoid)i think we can both agree that the 8 times increase in storage capacity does not show up in games with this gen of hardware. I doubt we are going to need a 100 or 120 gigs next gen and if we do the slower speeds will have down sides attached to it.

 

[eastmen]

Lets beat the dead horse, 6.4GB is not always enough that is simply a fact, Forza DLC installs, new disc structure to allow more space, Rage , there is plenty of examples that proofs that 6.4GB is at most a compromise at worst a problem.

I think that we somewhere in these few pages already discussed transfer rates, 6x would be as fast as a 20x speed DVD drive, but not as noisy. And it would be able to fill a 3GB memory as fast as the current drive in the PS3 can fill 512MB. Or should i say as slow

Except its a problem that came out late this generation and we can still count the number of multi disc games on a single hand for the xbox 360 dispite the system being the longest flagship console in a very long time

A 6x drive is only 27MB/s If we are talking about 3 gigs of ram it will take over a minute of transfer to fill. This doesn't take into account seek time or layer transfers which will drive it up even more.

A 12x dvd drive is 16.62MB/s so a 6x bluray will not even double the speed of last gen optical. Filling the 512 megs of ram with a 12x dvd drive would take just over 30 seconds to fill once again without including switching layers or seek times

The most important aspect of the drives, imho, would be streaming performance. If the drive is a 6x speed but is faster in seeks than a 12x speed it might be preferable?

It should be , but i'm not talking about bluray , i'm talking about BDXL and i've seen nothing faster than 4x in these drives

Surprise, i would prefer a BDXL format with space and possibility of 4K support, and for Sony i can see the idea since it would be practically "free" and it would allow them to have another checkmark that the competition wont have. Imagine having a 30inch display with 4k Support and PS4 connected playing the newest Pixar movie on your desktop... droooool

I don't see where you get practicly free from. The drives would still cost more and they would have to drive up mass production of BD XL and since the discs are so much money right now its virtualy useless for gaming and in the long run the slow speeds will be a hindrance. On the current drives i've seen filling 3 gigs of ram from the 3rd or 4th layer would be at least 166 seconds .


I'd rather them ditch optical all together and focus on nand tech for the console . You get fast transfers , extremely low seek times . Not only that but there are huge savings in the console itself and every month we see faster and cheaper sd media .

I bought an 8 gig sd card that hit 32 MB/s read speeds for $15 bucks over christmas and its a model that came out a year ago. Put two of the nand chips together in raid 0 and your looking at over 60 MB/s . Filling 3 gigs of ram now takes only 50 seconds at a fraction of the acess time .

Yes its more expensive than a standard bluray disc but tis much faster and you take a huge amount of the console cost out right away.


I rather these companys work on 4K downloadable /streaming options over yet another disc option. Current bluray players are god awful slow and loading discs take forever even in my old ps3 . I don't want to go through that again.

Introduce a new optical format like HVD if you really need yet another disc based option

 

[-tkf-]

Except its a problem that came out late this generation and we can still count the number of multi disc games on a single hand for the xbox 360 dispite the system being the longest flagship console in a very long time

A 6x drive is only 27MB/s If we are talking about 3 gigs of ram it will take over a minute of transfer to fill. This doesn't take into account seek time or layer transfers which will drive it up even more.

A 12x dvd drive is 16.62MB/s so a 6x bluray will not even double the speed of last gen optical. Filling the 512 megs of ram with a 12x dvd drive would take just over 30 seconds to fill once again without including switching layers or seek times

It should be , but i'm not talking about bluray , i'm talking about BDXL and i've seen nothing faster than 4x in these drives

I don't see where you get practicly free from. The drives would still cost more and they would have to drive up mass production of BD XL and since the discs are so much money right now its virtualy useless for gaming and in the long run the slow speeds will be a hindrance. On the current drives i've seen filling 3 gigs of ram from the 3rd or 4th layer would be at least 166 seconds .

I'd rather them ditch optical all together and focus on nand tech for the console . You get fast transfers , extremely low seek times . Not only that but there are huge savings in the console itself and every month we see faster and cheaper sd media .

I bought an 8 gig sd card that hit 32 MB/s read speeds for $15 bucks over christmas and its a model that came out a year ago. Put two of the nand chips together in raid 0 and your looking at over 60 MB/s . Filling 3 gigs of ram now takes only 50 seconds at a fraction of the acess time .

Yes its more expensive than a standard bluray disc but tis much faster and you take a huge amount of the console cost out right away.

I rather these companys work on 4K downloadable /streaming options over yet another disc option. Current bluray players are god awful slow and loading discs take forever even in my old ps3 . I don't want to go through that again.

Introduce a new optical format like HVD if you really need yet another disc based option

You know as well as i do that it´s pretty impossible to find a coke in a 33 cl can with more than 33 cl. So that argument is useless. However, there is examples of games that comes with DLC packs on a 2nd disc which you have to install just to get the full game assets. That in my book is a clear cut problem and a perfect valid example. You can keep on arguing it isn´t , but it´s reality, didn´t it start with Forza?

And there is no reason why a game should use more than the "fast" layers, unless it´s very very huge..
Which

The fast Xl drive i've seen is a 6x for 25/50 and 4x for 100/128.

would be on par with the PS3 loading times today. And nothing stops sony for going with 8/10/12 speed.

Since the last time we enjoyed these rounds Nintendo introduced the WII U, optical drive, and they only need XBOX 360 sized games, someone there did the math and did not go for NAND.

 

[manux]

And anyway console manufacturer other than nintendo will need to have space to store digital downloads, rentals and whatnot. It is not going to be very difficult to have i.e. 32 or 64GB speedy flash memory on motherboard acting as both storage and cache. This cache would make any arguments about the 6 versus 12x speed on optical media moot. And didn't we earlier already conclude 12x drive wouldn't be feasible on a small box due to vibrations.

If you think megatexture/megaobjects/generally smart game engine needs to first fill all memory and then can start to play that is just plain stupid design. Smart streaming and lod and caching is the way to go... With proper streaming instead of doing pc style "let's load whole level to ram" would also alleviate a lot of the problems people see with 2-4GB ram next gen consoles are likely to have.

 

[hoho]

i think we can both agree that the 8 times increase in storage capacity does not show up in games with this gen of hardware.

Let's take as simple thing as CGI cutscenes. I just love them in games and would like to see significantly more of them. Fitting them to tiny disk will be complicated

 

[steampoweredgod]

All this has been discussed at great length










Read up on the topic.

not sure if possible but if energy requirements can be lowered in multilaser holo lens(quite high pushing it like fusion 5 years into the future... aka indefinitely away.). Theoretically just like it can go down stacks of holo memory, it could be moved by a mirror to any location on the surface of the disc. Image processing would be a bit tough with such a disc using low power lasers, a metamaterial lens would probably aid in the construction.

OR there may be an even more efficient design.

 

[-tkf-]

And anyway console manufacturer other than nintendo will need to have space to store digital downloads, rentals and whatnot. It is not going to be very difficult to have i.e. 32 or 64GB speedy flash memory on motherboard acting as both storage and cache. This cache would make any arguments about the 6 versus 12x speed on optical media moot. And didn't we earlier already conclude 12x drive wouldn't be feasible on a small box due to vibrations.

If you think megatexture/megaobjects/generally smart game engine needs to first fill all memory and then can start to play that is just plain stupid design. Smart streaming and lod and caching is the way to go... With proper streaming instead of doing pc style "let's load whole level to ram" would also alleviate a lot of the problems people see with 2-4GB ram next gen consoles are likely to have.

Wouldn´t developers rather have the money used on "Speed flash" invested in real memory?

 

[Blazkowicz]

sure, you need to have it write as fast as the blu ray needs. so you are going to use several flash chips and a controller, i.e. an SSD, and hook it up with SATA or internal USB3.

not infeasible but a tad more expensive than a crappy eMMC on-board, as with the new Wii.
I wonder what's the cost of a 2.5" single platter HDD next to a low end, utterly mass-produced SSD. the HDD would be huge by then and good on sequential transfer rates.

 

[hoho]

How good would the reliability be for that "low end, utterly mass-produced" SSD? Comparable to random USB sticks?

 

[manux]

Wouldn´t developers rather have the money used on "Speed flash" invested in real memory?

Console needs anyway something to store movies, digitally bought games and all the whatnots. Regular hard drive be it 2.5" or 3.5" has fairly high minimum price that is pretty much set on stone, ssd scales to become cheaper every year especially so if it's integrated on motherboard not needing fancy casing etc. Having for example 4GB of fast cache from SSD is quite feasible, adding same amount of ram not so much And SSD retains content after boot which is a nice thing if you consider gaming. Have for example 32GB flash which is split so that single game can install up to 4GB stuff and rest of the free space is left over for digital content. Power users can buy 2.5" hard drives for storaging stuff not needing the ssd perf like movies and game installs(games still use the ssd cache...)

imho. console manufacturer is crazy if they bring out sku that isn't usable for live/psn purchases. So the ssd with reasonable perf as cache+mass storage hits the sweet spot on price/future scalability/multiuse(games+purchased content). Use the flash for random seek data and do megatexturing and other predictable reads from optical media. Also provide game developers single target to use instead of optimize both optical only + optical+hard drive.

For eastmen, If game sizes keep growing for next gen then I don't think flash cartridges like PS vita are price effective for distribution. If game sizes don't grow then jump from 2x bd drive in ps3 to 6x drive should give pretty damn good boost for performance.

Console doesn't need the absolutely fastest ssd, not even close. If it has 6x bd rom for predictable stuff and another 100-200MB/s read speed with insane perf for random data that should be pretty damn good platform for streaming and filling the memory with unique content... Write speed probably isn't super important as the cache is filled from optical media. Any decent flash solution combined with 6x bd rom drive should give quite a leap over current gen in anything but demos that have all the content preloaded in memory. Ofcourse that will also require new type of engineering to game engines as suddenly streaming random content become that much more feasible. (where random content could be for example extreme high quality closeup models on sports game)

What I'm worried about is that we see bean counters winning next gen and base skus come with bare optical media, no flash, no hard drive. Then game developers are stuck again with quite a dilemma and probably the hard drive sku comes with el cheapo and fairly slow 2.5" hard drive. We won't see much unique content per frame and the main thing is to fill the ram and reuse same textures.

 

[eastmen]

Let's take as simple thing as CGI cutscenes. I just love them in games and would like to see significantly more of them. Fitting them to tiny disk will be complicated

The trend in games is increasingly moving away CGI and I for one can't be happier.

Aside from that , no one is saying to stick with 6.4 gigs of space next gen. I have never once said MS should stick to DVD.

 

[eastmen]

You know as well as i do that it´s pretty impossible to find a coke in a 33 cl can with more than 33 cl. So that argument is useless. However, there is examples of games that comes with DLC packs on a 2nd disc which you have to install just to get the full game assets. That in my book is a clear cut problem and a perfect valid example. You can keep on arguing it isn´t , but it´s reality, didn´t it start with Forza?

Sony has produced many PS3 Exclusives and they do no offer any sizable graphics improvement over 3rd party games limited by xbox 360s dvd requirements

And there is no reason why a game should use more than the "fast" layers, unless it´s very very huge..
Which would be on par with the PS3 loading times today. And nothing stops sony for going with 8/10/12 speed.

So your saying we should yet again get saddled with something uneeded for gaming ? Why not just forgo the optical drive and go flash , let the console makers design slimmer cheaper systems

Since the last time we enjoyed these rounds Nintendo introduced the WII U, optical drive, and they only need XBOX 360 sized games, someone there did the math and did not go for NAND.

When was the last time Nintendo pushed any limits ? The WII U will mark the 4th generation of consoles that are behind the curve in formats.

And anyway console manufacturer other than nintendo will need to have space to store digital downloads, rentals and whatnot. It is not going to be very difficult to have i.e. 32 or 64GB speedy flash memory on motherboard acting as both storage and cache. This cache would make any arguments about the 6 versus 12x speed on optical media moot. And didn't we earlier already conclude 12x drive wouldn't be feasible on a small box due to vibrations.

Um why , We already have single platter 1TB hardrives in the 3.5 inch range. Remove the optical drive and the current gen 2.5 inch drives and include a 3.5 inch drive and a type of flash reader. You get a smaller console with a ton of cheap storage.

If in 2015 or 2017 or what have you we start approaching large capacitys that are cheaper than standard hardrives we can remove it , till then the standard drives will be the best.


If you think megatexture/megaobjects/generally smart game engine needs to first fill all memory and then can start to play that is just plain stupid design. Smart streaming and lod and caching is the way to go... With proper streaming instead of doing pc style "let's load whole level to ram" would also alleviate a lot of the problems people see with 2-4GB ram next gen consoles are likely to have.[/QUOTE] Constant streaming from an optical drive will kill it . A movie is what 1-3 hours max. People game for hours at a time.

sure, you need to have it write as fast as the blu ray needs. so you are going to use several flash chips and a controller, i.e. an SSD, and hook it up with SATA or internal USB3.

not infeasible but a tad more expensive than a crappy eMMC on-board, as with the new Wii.
I wonder what's the cost of a 2.5" single platter HDD next to a low end, utterly mass-produced SSD. the HDD would be huge by then and good on sequential transfer rates.

You can build the controler into the console. An arm chip with 64 megs of cache isn't very expensive , would cost less than an optical drive . Have the arm chip handle the raid for the dumb ssd .

like i said i have sd cards hitting 32MB/s

 

[-tkf-]

Sony has produced many PS3 Exclusives and they do no offer any sizable graphics improvement over 3rd party games limited by xbox 360s dvd requirements

So your saying we should yet again get saddled with something uneeded for gaming ? Why not just forgo the optical drive and go flash , let the console makers design slimmer cheaper systems

When was the last time Nintendo pushed any limits ? The WII U will mark the 4th generation of consoles that are behind the curve in formats.

Um why , We already have single platter 1TB hardrives in the 3.5 inch range. Remove the optical drive and the current gen 2.5 inch drives and include a 3.5 inch drive and a type of flash reader. You get a smaller console with a ton of cheap storage.

If in 2015 or 2017 or what have you we start approaching large capacitys that are cheaper than standard hardrives we can remove it , till then the standard drives will be the best.

If you think megatexture/megaobjects/generally smart game engine needs to first fill all memory and then can start to play that is just plain stupid design. Smart streaming and lod and caching is the way to go... With proper streaming instead of doing pc style "let's load whole level to ram" would also alleviate a lot of the problems people see with 2-4GB ram next gen consoles are likely to have. Constant streaming from an optical drive will kill it . A movie is what 1-3 hours max. People game for hours at a time.

I understand, or rather i don´t really understand why you defend the idea that the Microsoft proposed idea "6.4GB is enough" so hard. But at least it makes it easier asking you the tough questions. If 6.4GB was enough for this gen why shouldn´t it be enough for next gen?`It´s not like next gen is going to be more powerfull than current PC´s which is one you main arguments now that 6.4GB is enough "because PC games doesn´t require more space than 360 games" even though you know just as well as i do that most PC games just reuse the Console assets.

As i said some 20 or 30 pages ago, i bet everyone(me) would prefer flash games if the size wasn´t compromised (which it will be) and if prices weren´t going to suffer because of it.

But unless something drastic changed a Blu-Ray disc with 50GB of data is still going to be much cheaper than a Flash Card, and most important, cheaper to produce with a game on it. You can stamp Blu-Rays with games, in the case of flash cards, after you created the card you would still need to transfer the game, adding cost, even if small, to the cards.

And with the next gen i bet that installing games will be more of a standard thing, hard-drives will be big and discs will mostly be used for with very big games that require a lot of streaming. Streaming which by the way has been used since PS1 and so far has not resulted in any meltdown on drives all over the world.

 

[manux]

So your saying we should yet again get saddled with something uneeded for gaming ? Why not just forgo the optical drive and go flash , let the console makers design slimmer cheaper systems

Um why , We already have single platter 1TB hardrives in the 3.5 inch range. Remove the optical drive and the current gen 2.5 inch drives and include a 3.5 inch drive and a type of flash reader. You get a smaller console with a ton of cheap storage.

If in 2015 or 2017 or what have you we start approaching large capacitys that are cheaper than standard hardrives we can remove it , till then the standard drives will be the best.

like i said i have sd cards hitting 32MB/s

Have single layer 25GB blu-ray disc for games. Probably costs less than 20cents to make nowdays in the quantities games are pressed. Current blu-ray optics/drives can read those 4 layer discs trivially and the 4 layer discs are not a burden to games. Assuming you think game sizes are not going to grow significantly and you hit 6x drive(3x performance boost) the performance should be absolutely better than this gen

Physical hard drives have higher base price than flash due to material+building+space(shipping) than an flash ram soldered to motherboard without packaging + benefitting from Moore's law. This becomes super important when you want to have single baseline for consoles+hit the 199$ mark.

SD cards as replacement of HD are all fine and that's what can happen if beancounters make the consoles(i.e. strip everything away and let user decide what to buy and leave devs with no common baseline/no common performance). This would be a shame as it borrows from the future and gives suboptimal solution. But ofcourse this is what we see in a typical american use case(2 year rip off deals with monthly payments, base sku not very usable without addons, pay for online etc. anything goes if the base price is cheap and people are not smart enough to calculate what the necessary addons costs or what is lifetime cost)

Eastmen, Which do you think is cheaper, have single fast 32GB flash on motherboard for cache+25GB blu-ray delivery or deliver games on fast flash memories(assuming average game size of let's say 10GB)... Yeah, please provide numbers if you think flash delivery is going to be cheaper And if you make the game binaries same size as current gen or even smaller do remember the 3x speedup on blu-ray drive so all the perf points of flash become quite moot.

All things considered I would rather have the 32GB good speed baseline flash inside the console than buy that 32GB with microsd and leave devs to support sku without fast physical media(i.e. optical only). Or leave devs supporting varied physical medias which will cause huge pain in the ass when trying to optimize games.

2015/2017 flash prices to cheap sku scale better than physical 3.5" drive. This can be either cost advantage or scale to bigger drives. And do note, I think flash could be fairly small and bigger sizes can be achieved with optional cloud or 2.5" hard drive storage.

 

[manux]

Looks like my 20 cents is still off, but not too far. for 25k discs one get 1.02$ per disc deal here: http://www.cdrom2go.com/catalog/blu-ray-duplication-replication_568.htm

I wonder what sony charges for making 500k+ copies on their factories. Probably quite a bit less than 1$ but more than 20cents. Still, flash will have very hard time competing with that price and speed of replication for quite some time. (and time is money there when you need to replicate those games)

 

[hoho]

For comparison 25k dual layer DVDs cost $0.41 at same place. Price difference is surprisingly small I would say
http://www.cdrom2go.com/catalog/dual-layer-dvd-bulk-dvd-duplication-replication_849.htm