Compressed VS Not Compressed?

[Arwin]

You may want to listen to nAo more attentively. He is actually working on a game for the PS3, some ditty you may know as Heavenly Sword, and that won't be smaller than 20gb either. He may know what he is talking about.

 

[Danalys]

compressed data will be better as long as you have CPU cycles to spare (for decompression). in the case of PS3, where you have this ridiculously multi-threaded CPU, you could easily reserve a thread or two for decompression. as far as textures go there are very few cases that you wouldn't want to have them compressed in some format that the GPU can use natively anyway.

there's never really anything spare really. it's just a balencing act with timing. if you can free threads with out impacting load time too much, then they will be used for other things.

 

[Sis]

You may want to listen to nAo more attentively. He is actually working on a game for the PS3, some ditty you may know as Heavenly Sword, and that won't be smaller than 20gb either. He may know what he is talking about.

Even with non-lossy compression, it doesn't make sense. I'd love to hear nAo expand on what's on the disk taking up that much room, with lossless compression (note the updated article states it isn't the music or audio, which would've been my guess).

Besides, the Insomniac guy's quote reads like a Sony talking point, with regards to stating they couldn't put it on a single layer HD DVD. So what? There aren't any consoles that have an HD DVD drive, so the comparison is silly. And even if there were, just stick it on a dual layer, which has a 5 gig advantage over the single layer Blu-ray. But obviously the point is to spread the meme that Blu-ray is superior.

Note that I have no doubt that a game can consume more disc space than DVD offers; the question has always been whether it needs to.

 

[archie4oz]

Well the HD-DVD could be potentially slower

 

[Fafalada]

General rule of thumb is that uncompressing something is MUCH faster than loading it.

Indeed - usually by an order of magnitude (or more). The little 300mhz R5900 unpacks LZW variants at well over 50MB/sec, the fastest achievable read speed from PS2 DVD was ~4.2MB/sec, and this difference only gets much bigger with this generation.

but, those titles took about 90 seconds or so to load a room, so the 45sec wait was still pretty cumbersome.

A load, even if you loaded raw uncompressed data to fill entire PS2 memory(which they aren't), should not take longer then 10seconds. Something taking over a minute to load means that they are either having a horifically bad data layout on the disc, or do something really stupid during loading, either way, it's an example of poor software engineering, nothing to do with disc transfer speeds.
(The third option is that your disc/drive was damaged, but I ruled that out since you say HDD loads were also shitty).

Even with non-lossy compression, it doesn't make sense.

Care to elaborate why?

the question has always been whether it needs to

I hope that's a rhetorical question. It's akin to asking if XBox games needed to use 64MB.

 

[Sis]

Care to elaborate why?

Because I'm not a game developer? Which is why I asked for a more defined answer as to what lossless compression of textures and geometry would get us given 21 gigs of data. It doesn't make sense to me, but I'd love to be educated.

I hope that's a rhetorical question. It's akin to asking if XBox games needed to use 64MB.

Of course it's rhetorical. All you have is what you have. This one is not specific to game development; all development fits the space that's available. Specifically, the question is whether or not games produced for the PS3 that utilize more disc space would be feasible on the Xbox 360. This seems fundamentally different than a memory limitation.

But to the other point I said: do you agree that comparing Blu-ray and HD DVD in the gaming space is silly, given that no other console uses HD DVD? Any thoughts why this called out by the interviewee?

 

[patsu]

Note that I have no doubt that a game can consume more disc space than DVD offers; the question has always been whether it needs to.

Judging from various posts, I suspect that given sufficient time and resources, a diligent developer can (re)design the game and "strip" the data to fit on a DVD.

The questions in my mind are:

* Will the extra space bring additional tangible benefits to the end users (e.g., More varied and refined visuals, even faster load time, multiple languages on the same disc, ...) even if they don't think they need it right now. Is the game industry mature enough to reuse assets (trees and environments, dialog, animations, ...) across games over the years ? So after say 5 years, the environment becomes cummulatively varied..

* Will the extra space save _enough_ development time and allow the devs to focus on other part of the gaming experiences (The same argument as Xbox 360's "easier-to-program means potential for better game") ?

 

[see colon]

there's never really anything spare really. it's just a balencing act with timing. if you can free threads with out impacting load time too much, then they will be used for other things.

i can't wait for all of the PS3 games to come out that tap the full power of cell while simply loading uncompressed data from BRD to RAM/HDD. sure, in game there is a resource budget to be mindful of. but even then, games of this generation (PS2/XB/GC) streamed/decompressed data on the fly, and even PS1 games did it. but somehow, this generation with multi-core CPUs that excel at parallel processing will somehow not have enough cycles to spare.

 

[Rolf N]

Because I'm not a game developer? Which is why I asked for a more defined answer as to what lossless compression of textures and geometry would get us given 21 gigs of data. It doesn't make sense to me, but I'd love to be educated.

Compression accelerates loading times (if physical storage is the bottleneck, which it currently always is). And, obviously, it increases effective storage space, even if the raw amount may already seem abundant.

21 gigs with compression just partially applied could have been a dual-layer disc without compression. Moving across certain thresholds can be expensive.

But to the other point I said: do you agree that comparing Blu-ray and HD DVD in the gaming space is silly, given that no other console uses HD DVD? Any thoughts why this called out by the interviewee?

It's called out to artificially make the comparison more "even", for one reason or another. If you compare DVDs against Bluray it's much more clear and agreeable which format is better.
I agree it doesn't make much sense as long as this is the official line.