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

[-tkf-]

As financially ruinous as launching with blu-ray in 2006?

Very short sentence for something that was much bigger. Blu-Ray was expensive because, they had more problems with production than expected, and because Microsoft tried to cockblock sony with a HD-DVD strategy.

I hope Microsoft stays with something feasible so i don´t have to pay more for my software licenses on my PC

 

[Acert93]

Blu Ray was expensive because the DVD manufacturers were being undercut as DVD players become commodity devices and could not compete with Chinese production. With the rise of HD penetration there became the opportunity for a new optical format to meet the emerging market and yet there was no consensus on the best route and split plans on formats, HD-DVD and Blu Ray, emerged. Massive royalties were at stake. There were many opportunities to compromise between the two factions but no resolution was found between such megaweights as Sony, Disney, WB, Fox, Toshiba, Apple, MS, and so forth.

That small framework is only to say: Sony didn't have "more problems" with production than expected--they were racing to market to compete while there was still a competition to be had.

You paid a ton for Blu Ray because it was rushed to market and the supply/demand model was turned upside by requiring a mass market commodity device (PS3) to have one which created a huge demand for a limited supply of certain components (e.g. blue laser diodes). So-called "cock blocking" by "MS" was really a coalition of a large assembly of corporations that were left out of the Blu Ray camp. Yet it is hard to blame Toshiba and Co. for Blu Ray's cost. Sony's ace in the hole was the PS3 but it was also the reason for releasing a product that was still very green and costly. Funny how there are so many different ways to blame Sony on that one but you fast tracked it to MS.

You should be happy that Sony took a huge risk that cost them billion(s) so you can enjoy your Blu Ray player; any blame for the high cost should be put at the foot of the Sony camp--and should be quickly forgiven because Sony themselves lost their shirt in the short-term with Blu Ray. No need to blame others.

 

[Acert93]

Tim Sweeney:

GI: With Microsoft and Sony not too far away from announcing new consoles, there have been all sorts of rumors. One is that Microsoft may be going away from discs and using solid state storage. I'm curious, what is your reaction is from the tech standpoint?
TS: Rumors aside, you can look at different storage devices from a purely technical point of view. You see that spinning optical media has about 250 milliseconds of latency. If you want to get some bits from somewhere else on the disc, you have to wait a quarter of a second for the little mechanical elements to move the head around so they can read it. A hard disc is about 20 times faster than that, and a solid state drive is tens of thousands of times faster. It's basically the speed of electrons that limits the solid state drive.
One of the major things a game needs to do in a world with a large environment and lots of graphical resources is continually go out and pull new textures and sounds and 3D models from different places in the storage media. So solid state drives have a really dramatic advantage from that point of view. It would certainly be desirable for the working storage to be solid state or some other extremely fast medium. But that's a completely separate question from distribution media. Solid state drive costs are fairly expensive.
You couldn't ship a game on a cartridge that's a solid state drive itself. It would terribly prohibitive economically. You could potentially envision downloading a game from the internet to a solid state drive, or taking it off of optical media and installing it on a solid state drive. There are lots of ways to get a game onto optimal media for playing the game. If you look at decoupling the distribution media, whether it's internet or storage from the streaming medium (which is used during gameplay), you see far more flexibility than just in current console games. If all you have is a spinning drive, you just have to go out, load a resource, and wait for a drive to go out and do its mechanical work.

And that pretty much sums it up. Maybe Epic is pushing for Optical for game sales but SSD game installs for the reasons he deposits. It would be quite interesting to know if they have some demos of how the game design paradigm might change if behind your RAM you had a SSD.

 

[-tkf-]

No need to blame others.

I have every right and reason to blame others. Without Microsoft putting money behind what was a dead format HD-DVD would have been out of the game before it even got serious. They made people believe in a dead format, and many invested in the hardware and software only to be left with no future and tons of gloating Blu-Ray fans. There is plenty to point fingers at Sony for and you have valid points, but the HiDef war was all about Microsoft and the 360.

 

[function]

It's not the bandwidth that causes problem it's the seek time.

If you bothered to read the link(post from dev) you would realize virtual texturing is highly predictable. Good cache outside optical(like ssd or hard drive) would take care of random access just fine. And it's not a memory hog either

I'm talking about a real, actual game!

PS3 Rage texture pop in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-5Sik87qhQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rbh7ztsQU8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moqh1P-pQps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOnvJMb89o0

And some bonus Xbox 360 pop in (while installed on the HDD):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-BcKptfWgM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ7IsR4ef2c

And there are more videos. Oh yes, there are many more videos.

Maybe you should email iD software that link to sebbi's post and tell them to bother to read it. But maybe you should look at it closely first (the highlights show you searched for bandwidth - you're barking up the wrong tree).

If we assume a compressed tile size of 10 KB (in HDD), the total bandwidth required during the turn becomes 13.6 MB. A 360 thumbstick turn on a console shooter could take 2 seconds, so we need 6.8 MB/s transfer rate (assuming no seek penalties = a wrong assumption obviously). Slow 5400 RPM notebook hard drives have around 100 MB/s sustained transfer rates and DVD drives have 20+ MB/s, so transfer rate is clearly not a possible bottleneck in any scenario. Seek latency however can be a big bottleneck on DVDs, since a worst case seek can take 100ms. So the engines use different methods to reduce seeking. Id hasn't told much about their methods, but they surely have implemented some state of the art methods implemented to optimize the virtual texture page ordering in their DVD images. Lionhead's tech papers reveal that they are storing nearby objects and terrain close each other in the virtual texture (maximizing the tile usage in lower mips) and they group four 128x128 tiles in a single continuous compressed region in disc (and have a small additional 2x2 macrotile loader cache). We also try to keep similar objects nearby in the virtual texture and optimize our loads in many ways, but as our game is guaranteed to be installed to HDD or memory units (flash based memory) our seeking problems (and solutions) are limited compared to these two other disc based games.

...

I personally think the biggest problem in virtual texturing is the currently popular disc DVD/BR based storage that has awful seek times. Hard drives are fast enough to load everything before you can notice the missing detail, and new flash based (SSD) memories make virtual texturing even better (super low seek times).

Emphasis mine. It's worth noting that despite sebbi's optimism regarding mechanical HDDs (in the final sentence of the quote) that even with a full HDD install on Xbox 360 and with an 8GB compulsory install on PS3 that Rage still has some pop in issues - though no doubt enormously reduced from optical only levels.

So anyway, there you go. Seek time. Not bandwidth.

 

[hoho]

So when was the last time that first one to implement something rather radically new and different worked perfectly and didn't need any refinement with future revisions?

Tbh I'd mostly blame the horrible lack of RAM for how badly Rage worked. They seemingly made the algorithm to work "good enough" for them and didn't bother making it work better on PCs that have several times higher amount of it to do far better buffering.

 

[function]

My google-fu turned up a few non-flash ROM chip prices, which were cheap but incredibly low capacity.


Mask-programmed ROM is impractical, since it would be creating and fabbing multiple unique chips per game. Other standard types are too small and too slow in manufacture and performance.
For the sake of mass-production, it would probably require EEPROM memory.


However, an EEPROM with sufficient capacity that can be written fast enough to be practical for mass manufacture or download is able to do so because it will collect its bits into arrays or pages in order to "flash" many at once during a write operation.

This gives us the flash part of "flash memory".

Soooo ... it looks like flash or bluray as our only physical distribution? And flash is the outsider because of cost. It'll be disappointing if the rumours come to nothing and everyone just ends up with a bluray drive like everyone was expecting.

There is little reason to run everything of the Optical drive when you have a big harddrive in the Console, and the data we found earlier inducated around 10 watt for a 12xBlu-Ray drive, which doesn´t have to pure CLV. Besides do we have some math on the rotation speed vs transfer speed?

That's the thing - optical seems to require a HDD in a next gen system. And a 12X bluray drive had better allow sizeable installs because it'll be spinning way faster than the 360's DVD drive which was already very unpleasantly noisy. Seriously, I lived with one before MS enabled the full disk installs and it was horrible. It made a high pitched whine and a low frequency drone that pissed off the people in the room downstairs and it made my desk vibrate. All the pre-S 360's I've used are more or less as bad. Fuck going for that again!

I can't work out how transfer speeds vary across the storage on a CAV drive. By position on the disk should be pretty straight forward but by proportion through total storage (which is the more relevant part) ... no I can't do it. Sorry.

Just a note, i have a i7 PC with a dual SSD Raid 0 setup and i saw texture LOD problems in rage as well, i guess the Cache om my Graphic Card was the problem.

Rage doesn't seem to work perfectly on anything, which is a great pity as it looks great. Modern PCs should really beast it.

 

[-tkf-]

Soooo ... it looks like flash or bluray as our only physical distribution? And flash is the outsider because of cost. It'll be disappointing if the rumours come to nothing and everyone just ends up with a bluray drive like everyone was expecting.

That's the thing - optical seems to require a HDD in a next gen system. And a 12X bluray drive had better allow sizeable installs because it'll be spinning way faster than the 360's DVD drive which was already very unpleasantly noisy. Seriously, I lived with one before MS enabled the full disk installs and it was horrible. It made a high pitched whine and a low frequency drone that pissed off the people in the room downstairs and it made my desk vibrate. All the pre-S 360's I've used are more or less as bad. Fuck going for that again!

6 8 or 12, whatever they choose would mostly reflect the installation time,and i doubt they go for something like the 360, it´s sony afterall.

I can't work out how transfer speeds vary across the storage on a CAV drive. By position on the disk should be pretty straight forward but by proportion through total storage (which is the more relevant part) ... no I can't do it. Sorry.

Rage doesn't seem to work perfectly on anything, which is a great pity as it looks great. Modern PCs should really beast it.

From my looking around on the forums, when i way playing "get the ATI card to work", it seemed that the more onboard ram the cards had, the less popup, if even noticeable. But it should be said that on the PC you can really flick the mouse and that puts the streaming system at it´s max. For the major part if the game, it just looks fantastic.

 

[eastmen]

I have every right and reason to blame others. Without Microsoft putting money behind what was a dead format HD-DVD would have been out of the game before it even got serious. They made people believe in a dead format, and many invested in the hardware and software only to be left with no future and tons of gloating Blu-Ray fans. There is plenty to point fingers at Sony for and you have valid points, but the HiDef war was all about Microsoft and the 360.

and to this day my first gen hd-dvd player loads movies faster and the interactive web portions are more responsive and faster loading than even a brand new sony 3d bluray player.

If anything while hd-dvd had lower capacity , it was ahead of bluray in every way. Perhaps we should be blaming sony and the bluray partners for saddling us with a crappy user experiance.

 

[eastmen]

If you bothered to read the link(post from dev) you would realize virtual texturing is highly predictable. Good cache outside optical(like ssd or hard drive) would take care of random access just fine. And it's not a memory hog either

Care to give the maths how flash carts work against 25GB single layer blu-rays. Blu-ray manufacturing cost + shipping including profit for replicator is 1.03$ per 25GB disc. Let's assume reasonable blu-ray drive would add 20-30$ to a consoles price and it would consume less than 10W. Let's not go over 4x or 6x drive whichever hits the 20-30$ mark. Where I look at it 1 or 2 20GB launch games for 2014 will tip the scale for blu-ray if cost is issue and you want to have highspeed flash media. (and that's not including the money needed to build those factories to replicate flash memories)

$30 times 65 million consoles = 1,950,000,000.

For 2B you can build quite a nice flash fab i'd say.

I think your also forgetting other costs .

A bluray drive might cost $20-30 to include but hey now we need a bigger hardrive due to bluray's short commings. Now we need a bigger case to cool more components , now we need a bigger power supply to run all this stuff , now we need a bigger box to put this all in , now we need more ink to make the box pretty , now we need to pay more to ship it and so on and so forth.

I rather pay $5 or $10 more per game to have a better user experiance , then save $5-$10 per game and get stuck with a psone experiance or hell even worse another ps3 experiance. MGS 4 was one of the worse console experiances I've ever had and that is due to that massive hardrive install .

 

[-tkf-]

and to this day my first gen hd-dvd player loads movies faster and the interactive web portions are more responsive and faster loading than even a brand new sony 3d bluray player.

If anything while hd-dvd had lower capacity , it was ahead of bluray in every way. Perhaps we should be blaming sony and the bluray partners for saddling us with a crappy user experiance.

I must admit i hardly use any of the new cool features so i really can´t comment on that, but my movie experience is fine and do i love how 3D movies proved my point with the extra space requirement

 

[-tkf-]

$30 times 65 million consoles = 1,950,000,000.

For 2B you can build quite a nice flash fab i'd say.

I think your also forgetting other costs .

A bluray drive might cost $20-30 to include but hey now we need a bigger hardrive due to bluray's short commings. Now we need a bigger case to cool more components , now we need a bigger power supply to run all this stuff , now we need a bigger box to put this all in , now we need more ink to make the box pretty , now we need to pay more to ship it and so on and so forth.

I rather pay $5 or $10 more per game to have a better user experiance , then save $5-$10 per game and get stuck with a psone experiance or hell even worse another ps3 experiance. MGS 4 was one of the worse console experiances I've ever had and that is due to that massive hardrive install .

Come up with some numbers instead of just making claims, do you expect the harddrive to be 3TB or 250GB? Do you expect consoles to be without harddrives? And the power argument is pretty weak, USB can drive a 2.5 inch harddrive, and a 12xspeed Blu-Ray takes 10 Watt. 15 watt more to cool is NOT going to be a problem in a package with 200+ watt or whatever we end up with.

And sorry to say, but $10 dollars is not worth saving time on an install, that is just crazy, with my limited collection of games i would be spending hundred of dollars on fast installation?

 

[Rangers]

Sweeney talked about it

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-03-13-an-epic-interview-with-tim-sweeney

Q: With Microsoft and Sony not too far away from announcing new consoles, there have been all sorts of rumors. One is that Microsoft may be going away from discs and using solid state storage. I'm curious, what is your reaction is from the tech standpoint?

Tim Sweeney: Rumors aside, you can look at different storage devices from a purely technical point of view. You see that spinning optical media has about 250 milliseconds of latency. If you want to get some bits from somewhere else on the disc, you have to wait a quarter of a second for the little mechanical elements to move the head around so they can read it. A hard disc is about 20 times faster than that, and a solid state drive is tens of thousands of times faster. It's basically the speed of electrons that limits the solid state drive.

One of the major things a game needs to do in a world with a large environment and lots of graphical resources is continually go out and pull new textures and sounds and 3D models from different places in the storage media. So solid state drives have a really dramatic advantage from that point of view. It would certainly be desirable for the working storage to be solid state or some other extremely fast medium. But that's a completely separate question from distribution media. Solid state drive costs are fairly expensive.

You couldn't ship a game on a cartridge that's a solid state drive itself. It would terribly prohibitive economically. You could potentially envision downloading a game from the internet to a solid state drive, or taking it off of optical media and installing it on a solid state drive. There are lots of ways to get a game onto optimal media for playing the game. If you look at decoupling the distribution media, whether it's internet or storage from the streaming medium (which is used during gameplay), you see far more flexibility than just in current console games. If all you have is a spinning drive, you just have to go out, load a resource, and wait for a drive to go out and do its mechanical work.

Seems basically like his opinion, carts a no-go, but flash cache seems a no brainer.

 

[Prophecy2k]

$30 times 65 million consoles = 1,950,000,000.

For 2B you can build quite a nice flash fab i'd say.

I think your also forgetting other costs .

A bluray drive might cost $20-30 to include but hey now we need a bigger hardrive due to bluray's short commings. Now we need a bigger case to cool more components , now we need a bigger power supply to run all this stuff , now we need a bigger box to put this all in , now we need more ink to make the box pretty , now we need to pay more to ship it and so on and so forth.

I rather pay $5 or $10 more per game to have a better user experiance , then save $5-$10 per game and get stuck with a psone experiance or hell even worse another ps3 experiance. MGS 4 was one of the worse console experiances I've ever had and that is due to that massive hardrive install .

you must have money to burn then cuz i'm quite sure that if you surveyed 10 gamers on the street, 9/10 would choose to pay less for their games and have to wait a few extra minutes for their game to load, than have to shell out more money for games. Plus, in the age of publishers trying to monetise everything by cutting out content to sell as DLC and other such shady tactics, do you really think that the vast majority of gamers would be happy to pay even more on top for their games? Nah, i didn't think so.

Afterall, I'd rather pay £1000 for a console with uber 8GB of DDR4 system RAM, a 1TB SSD and BR drive with super-quiet liquid cooling and noise suppression systems, and pay less per game on bluerays. However i believe that both you and I are in the minority, as most people would likely rather pay less for both the console and the games (but especially the games).

 

[Gubbi]

We've already seen a modular approach to consoles this gen with the XBOX S Arcade and 250GB units, where the HDD is a small black brick you just insert.

I don't see why this approach couldn't be extended to optical drives as well. Have a slim optical drive encased in a box with vents that ensure that it gets the required cooling when inserted into a console.

This way they can release an arcade-SKU with a modest amount of solid state storage (64GB flash) and you can later upgrade the unit as you go along. The manufactures could sell various pre-assembled SKUs: HDD, optical, optical+HDD.

The console vendors hit the entry level price point and consumers aren't stuck with a console they can't upgrade.

Cheers

 

[jonabbey]

Of course, game publishers are not likely to be fond of having their games cost more due to the need to pay for carts. And if MS goes for carts and Sony goes for BD, MS would have to make sure that the games were compelling enough on the 720 to make it worth the customers' while to pay more for games on their platform.

But maybe publishers would be willing to make less money per game on the 720 if used sales weren't a factor.. blah.

I don't envy business folk the problems they have to solve.. they're having to do an incredibly tough job in a complex environment with lots of smart mammals all trying to eat their lunch.

Engineering is much easier. :smile:

 

[function]

6 8 or 12, whatever they choose would mostly reflect the installation time,and i doubt they go for something like the 360, it´s sony afterall.

That's true. Sony were prepared to skip a lowest cost, HDD less system this time and they may well do this next time too.

Just to be clear again, I see the main advantage of carts as i) possibly tackling the u$ed market and ii) keeping the cost of the base unit down while allowing a high quality experience; no noisy optical drive, fast starts, good texture streaming, highly reliable small bedroom friendly system (because consoles aren't just for the living room!). A bluray drive paired with a HDD, with both feeding into a large fast cache would be unbeatable for games, but it locks you out of the area where a $99 Wii can still sell 200,000+ a month despite being over 100 years old - and that's important for the next part ...

MS must be thinking that a cheap Kinect box (small, quiet, cool and well behaved) could turn into a killer Live, Zune, Netflicks, Apps, Tv on demand box. Just image if you could combine the Xboxes "core gamer demographic" and revenue generating online services with a polished Kinect interface and the Wii's incredible widespread acceptance (young, old, man, woman, fat, not so fat, rich, not so rich). I think this is what MS are going to try and do next generation - give themselves the maximum range of targets for their online service and multiple-adverts-per-screen delivery system.

From my looking around on the forums, when i way playing "get the ATI card to work", it seemed that the more onboard ram the cards had, the less popup, if even noticeable. But it should be said that on the PC you can really flick the mouse and that puts the streaming system at it´s max. For the major part if the game, it just looks fantastic.

I've been holding off Rage because I want the PC version but post-Rage graphics drivers crash on the desktop several times a day. So I'm kind of thinking about the console version - the 360 demo really did look nice and run well - but I always ending thinking I should buy the PC version and chickening out of the purchase.

My 560 TI really doesn't like anything after the 275 drivers. That's before Skyrim too.

We've already seen a modular approach to consoles this gen with the XBOX S Arcade and 250GB units, where the HDD is a small black brick you just insert.

I don't see why this approach couldn't be extended to optical drives as well. Have a slim optical drive encased in a box with vents that ensure that it gets the required cooling when inserted into a console.

If the base console is small enough you could connect the optical drive underneath like the Mega CD or SNES CD - that way the base unit can be really quite small and ship in smaller boxes etc, and the front of the system's box won't need a PC style blanking plate sat there grinning at you.

I think a modular approach is ideal for someone like MS: lump DVD playback licence costs, Bluray playback licence costs, drive costs and drive bulk into a peripheral and sell it only to people who want it.

 

[Rangers]

With pitcairn coming in at 212mm and a reasonable power envelope there's really no excuse to do anything less than that. No excuse at all.

That's almost as small as Xenos die even sans daughter die.

 

[Prophecy2k]

With pitcairn coming in at 212mm and a reasonable power envelope there's really no excuse to do anything less than that. No excuse at all.

That's almost as small as Xenos die even sans daughter die.

Wrong thread Rangers ;-)

 

[manux]

I'm talking about a real, actual game!

And is implementation in rage perfect? Based on the amount of whining on internet rage seems like a huge technical failure on many ways. The "streaming" didn't work even on pc's having nearly infinite memory.

What about some other games like BF3, does it suck there so bad too