Crysis could be on consoles from Cevart.

[Neb]

More RAM is better when it's VRAM. The problem is: you can not load something to VRAM directly on PC, so you need at least twice the amount of VRAM as system RAM.

More RAM is better when it is VRAM and system RAM. It is needed and thats why you can't play many games without HDD trashing if you have 1GB of system RAM.

In the case of Oblivion the excessive amounts of VRAM used are just bad memory management, which means you have unneeded data in precious VRAM. What can I say: the Oblivion engine is kind of very slow. One example: Oblivion renders water reflection in every frame, even where is no water in vicinity, and so on

Lol, so you mean that the 1050MB of graphics data loaded is bad management?

Default it barely uses 256MB of VRAM, but since I have installed a lot of 1024x1024/2048x2048 textures and lightmaps it takes up more VRAM/RAM my friend. But it doesn't mather at all since my point was to demonstrate that when you run out of VRAM the system RAM could be used with acceptable framerate!

Neverthless you jump the gun and say that the extra ~800MB of graphics data is bad memory management... *shakes head*

It seems to me that you don't know what you're talking about.
Texture "LODs" are called mip-maps, and they're always available.

Mip-maps are lower-res version of the same texture baked into the main texture.

Right now there are lots of consoles that have much more VRAM, than most of PCs. And when I say "majority" I refer to http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

I hardly doubt it is the current mainstream since many budget cards and G71 cards have 512MB to begin with (but it could be country specific). But that really doesn't matter since it is not what dictates the limits. Thats why a lot of PC games whants 512MB VRAM for highest settings, and that why there exists ingame options so that the lowest denominator don't act as a bottleneck!

,,,,

you see first LOD in 10m from you, starting from there the LODs get more and more aggressive, in 500m from you everything is rendered to a flat surface (sprite if you want to call it that). Like picture, there you see to 3km, but it's all - just a flat picture

Speculations about the distance, but of course LOD will be used and of course vegetation will turn into 2D at one point (applies for all games by the way). But being the PC platform one can always adapt the LOD to ones needs witn console variabels!

I'm talking about very simple thing: you preload stuff from disk in advance, so you can hide disk latency. And you're engine writer, so you know much better than anybody else how to load your data from disk, so if you rely on cache - you're idiot.

And that is why more system RAM and VRAM is better, right!

 

[Neb]

Isn't this an advantage -in comparisson with consoles- when the transfer rate of a SATA2 HDD is 300 mb/sec or higher whereas the one of a DVD/BR is 8-12 mb/sec ?

Of course but the 300MB/sec is only the max speed of the SATA2 interface link. But usual the HDD's real perfomance is somewhere between 40-80MB/sec (higher for premium HDD's).

 

[Albuquerque]

Bad planning, if you plan right, the data will be there at the right moment.

.
Wrong. you cannot ever "plan" for someone to do an immediate U-turn. You can never "plan" for what a person will do with a destructable environment. The best you can do is load everything possible into system ram, and whatever you currently need into video ram, and hope for the best. The more system ram you can load things into, the FAR faster you will be able to recover when the user does something you didn't expect.

Wrong, there is more, but not much more. The various states take very small memory footprint. The main load is renderer and renderer alone.

Wrong. The render is a bottleneck perhaps, but is not the main load. Want an example? Try running a brand new PC game at 640x480 resolution with no AA and no AF. Guess what? System memory still needs to be quite high, because there's still plenty of other things running for that application. Did you forget sound? Did you forget the actual application that handles all input, handles generating all the primitives for output, handles all the AI? Yes, you did.

If you're programming a game engine you KNOW how you will access data. So if you access SAME data frequently - you're idiot. Normal developers do not access same data, if they already have it.

Wrong. Once more, you can never guess what a user might do. he's going 100mph in one direction, so you "think" you can load data for the next 100 miles and be done. But then he decides to turn around and go back. If you ALWAYS anticipated that a user would do that, you'd ALWAYS be using 2x the memory. If you NEVER anticipated a user would do that, then you'd ALWAYS be waiting on the harddrive to load your data when he did.

You're wrong on basically the rest too, but everyone else beat me to it.

 

[psorcerer]

First of all, no their aren't. "Most PC's" i.e. over 50% have 256MB or more of VRAM. Thats comparable to both consoles.

Most consoles have 320mb or more of VRAM.

However as I said before, thats irrelivant since scaling graphical data to fill available video memory is completely trivial. Thus a game can be made to work in 256MB of vid memory but make full use of 512MB or more. Thus, the PC clearly has a video memory advantage from an end result point of view since you can set up any new PC game to use 512MB (or more) of VRAM. And many games do.

Scaling data and making game engine that can not work normally on console - there is "little" difference here, no?
Just a reminder: we're talking about how it's "impossible" to make free-roaming games on consoles without significant degradation. Not about how you can use excessive amounts of RAM.

So your saying a console would gain no benefit from an extra 256MB of system memory? I wonder how mnay devs would agree with you on that.

Console will get lots of benefits. Because you can use this RAM any way you like.

If that extra system memory is of no use, then why does it result in performance improvements?

In most cases: poorly written game engines.

It seems fairly obvious to me that a heirarchical structure of 3 levels is going to be a more effective caching system than one with 2 more constrained levels. And besides, your assuming data can be cached to a HDD first rather than coming direct from the DVD. That certainly isn't always the case with the 360.

I think that system with predictable access pattern and no cache, can be much more efficient than unpredictable - with cache.

 

[psorcerer]

Last time I checked, my HDD access speed wasn't randomly slowing down by 150x for seemingly no reason on a regular basis.

It's simple: 300mb/sec is the speed of interface. Actual speed of the drive is something like 70-80mb/sec. So how can you get more than 80Mb/sec? System cache. But when you launch game you want to use your available system RAM, so system cache is shrinked by OS. So you need your own cache system. And so on.

Why would the OS have to access data on the HDD for purposes unrelated to the game during a game to such an extent? Sure, if im stupid enough to run a virus check or other HDD intesive app at the same time as my game then I would expect slowdown but thats hardly something thats out of my control.

Everything can slow you down: download on the background, icq messages popping out and written in history (I'm not joking here) and so forth.
Just think: your video card renders frames 60 times per second, even slightest delay in data delivery can cause frame drop, slightest.

The bottom line is not all consoles have HDD's as standard. Were they do, they are slower on average than those in a gaming PC and a large majority of the time, games are not completely resident on the HDD and thus some communication with the optical media will be necessary.

There is no problem with optical media either. You just need more buffers.

All of that points to disadvantages without even considering how a large and fast cache like system memory can help things out. Like say, to store commonly re-used assets in the game beyond the level which VRAM is capable of. Are you really saying thats not an advantage?

Yes, that's an advantage, PC has system RAM to cover up disadvantages in I/O predictability.
But consoles do not have this problem, so you do not need system RAM to fight with it.

 

[Albuquerque]

Alright PSorcer, let's hear your feedback: Where it the line drawn? In reading your replies, it seems that you belive system ram is of little consequence. So where do you draw the line? When is there simply not enough system ram to do what you need to do?

What, in your view of the world, is system ram really used for? I'm also really curious if you believe that same amount of system ram is "fine" for every game type ever created too.

 

[psorcerer]

More RAM is better when it is VRAM and system RAM. It is needed and thats why you can't play many games without HDD trashing if you have 1GB of system RAM.

Please, can we set aside these: "everybody does that" arguments?
Technically can you tell me why it's important?

Lol, so you mean that the 1050MB of graphics data loaded is bad management?

Call of Juarez, good example: uses 30Mb of textures per chunk and it can use 2Gb of system RAM and 512Mb of VRAM with ease. How can it be? Simple: you load things in VRAM and forget about them, slowly VRAM gets filled with unused stuff, then D3D memory management tries to free it to make space for more, and you get slow performance. What can you do to hint D3D about which stuff you do not need? Nothing. There is exactly one call: EvictManagedResources that's ALL.
This is lazy memory management: "we have plenty of system RAM and VRAM, why bother?" - this is how majority of games are written on PC.

Mip-maps are lower-res version of the same texture baked into the main texture.

It's texture LOD.

 

[psorcerer]

Alright PSorcer, let's hear your feedback: Where it the line drawn?

Rather simple points:
- you need lots of RAM on PC, because of architecture limitations, it's good to have as much as possible.
- even on PC, more VRAM is much better than more RAM, but again because of architecture you can not have less then twice VRAM in system RAM.
- you do not need this much RAM on consoles to do same stuff.
- it's always good to have more RAM on consoles, you can always optimize speed for space: architecture allows it.

 

[Neb]

Technically can you tell me why it's important?

I can say that it is important for the software needs!

Call of Juarez, good example: uses 30Mb of textures per chunk and it can use 2Gb of system RAM and 512Mb of VRAM with ease. How can it be? Simple: you load things in VRAM and forget about them, slowly VRAM gets filled with unused stuff, then D3D memory management tries to free it to make space for more, and you get slow performance. What can you do to hint D3D about which stuff you do not need? Nothing. There is exactly one call: EvictManagedResources that's ALL.
This is lazy memory management: "we have plenty of system RAM and VRAM, why bother?" - this is how majority of games are written on PC.

You really don't get, reread my previous post again!

"...But it doesn't mather at all since my point was to demonstrate that when you run out of VRAM the system RAM could be used with acceptable framerate!"

It's texture LOD.

Yes Level of detail but it still is a lower res version of the same texture baked in to the main texture in different 'size steps'!

 

[pjbliverpool]

Most consoles have 320mb or more of VRAM.

Not really. Yes both have access to 512MB but a lot of that is obviously used for the system data rather than rendering. A 50/50 split is a reasonable estimate especially since PS3's memory archictecture specifically splits the memory so. So PS3 specifically has 256MB of video memory (less when you take out whats reserved for the OS). It can use system memory aswell but then, so can a PC.

Scaling data and making game engine that can not work normally on console - there is "little" difference here, no?
Just a reminder: we're talking about how it's "impossible" to make free-roaming games on consoles without significant degradation. Not about how you can use excessive amounts of RAM.

We are talking about whether extra RAM is an advantage. And in the context of VRAM, it clearly is an advantage, and one thats heavily used in the PC space. If seemed to me you were trying to make out the PC had no advantage in the VRAM space because *some* PC's still only have 128MB or 256MB of VRAM. im simply pointing out that thats irrelivant because the games themselves can still be made to take advantage of 512MB of VRAM. Key word there: advantage.

Console will get lots of benefits. Because you can use this RAM any way you like.

With 360 fair enough, but you are definatly more limited with the PS3. But regardless of that, im sure even if you asked a dev "what if I can give you the same amount of VRAM your using for your game now, but double what your using for the system, would you want it?" the answer would be yes every time.

In most cases: poorly written game engines.

Im sorry but thats bull. Whether the engine is poorly written or not, the game is still using more system memory than graphics memory which by your logic is impossible. So you make the engine more efficient thus reducing your system memory footprint. What do you do then? You add more features to fill the available video memory of course! Perhaps more rendering data caching or more complex AI/physics etc...

I think that system with predictable access pattern and no cache, can be much more efficient than unpredictable - with cache.

Possibly, but then your claims of unpredictability seem pretty unfounded to me. At least at a level that would overcome the massive advantages of much larger memory sizes and faster transfer speeds.

 

[Neb]

Rather simple points:
- you need lots of RAM on PC, because of architecture limitations, it's good to have as much as possible.

OK then we agree that more RAM is always better, right! No mather if it is becouse of game data or becouse of "limitations" (according to you) MORE is BETTER!

 

[psorcerer]

Not really. Yes both have access to 512MB but a lot of that is obviously used for the system data rather than rendering. A 50/50 split is a reasonable estimate especially since PS3's memory archictecture specifically splits the memory so. So PS3 specifically has 256MB of video memory (less when you take out whats reserved for the OS). It can use system memory aswell but then, so can a PC.

Why do you think it's reasonable to split 50/50? Let's get technical, what would you place in both pools and how much space would it take?

We are talking about whether extra RAM is an advantage. And in the context of VRAM, it clearly is an advantage, and one thats heavily used in the PC space. If seemed to me you were trying to make out the PC had no advantage in the VRAM space because *some* PC's still only have 128MB or 256MB of VRAM. im simply pointing out that thats irrelivant because the games themselves can still be made to take advantage of 512MB of VRAM. Key word there: advantage.

No, no, and no, we're talking here about urban legend that free-roaming games are close to impossible to implement on consoles due to memory limitations.
And that's what I'm talking about, nothing else.

Im sorry but thats bull. Whether the engine is poorly written or not, the game is still using more system memory than graphics memory which by your logic is impossible.

Perfectly possible on PC: you can not load anything in VRAM bypassing system RAM.
Furthermore, most of the game developers use, so called, MANAGED memory pool, which is just two copies of same resource: one in system RAM and one in VRAM.
Why would I need something like that on console?

Possibly, but then your claims of unpredictability seem pretty unfounded to me. At least at a level that would overcome the massive advantages of much larger memory sizes and faster transfer speeds.

Yes, you can always just cache data in massive amounts in system RAM, but again: why would I need it on console?

 

[Albuquerque]

Rather simple points:
- you need lots of RAM on PC, because of architecture limitations, it's good to have as much as possible.
- even on PC, more VRAM is much better than more RAM, but again because of architecture you can not have less then twice VRAM in system RAM.
- you do not need this much RAM on consoles to do same stuff.
- it's always good to have more RAM on consoles, you can always optimize speed for space: architecture allows it.

You didn't answer the question -- what's the LIMIT, where you do you draw the LINE. What precise, exact quantity of memory is where you cross into "too little"? And then, is that limit specific to any type of game, or does it work on ALL games?

Because everything you just finished saying contradicts your argument -- More is better, you can always use more, because you can always optimize the experience further. Higher detail, higher resolution textures, MORE textures, higher quality sounds, MORE sounds, more channels for your sound, more objects viewable, more AI pathing capacity, more terrain choices, more physics abilities.

Oh, and one more thing:

even on PC, more VRAM is much better than more RAM, but again because of architecture you can not have less then twice VRAM in system RAM

Bullshit. You can have a 128mb video card on a 128mb computer system, and use ALL of that video ram. You somehow speculate that you can't have a texture in VRAM without a simultaneous copy in system ram, but you're 100% wrong. Most devs choose to leave a copy, but it is not a requirement neither of the OS nor the underlying hardware.

And further bullshit -- more VRAM is NOT "better" than more system ram in nearly all cases. You talk about balance, but then how are you going to "balance" sound, AI, and everything else that doesn't even have any relation to VRAM? You aren't. Video is part of the equation, but certainly not the majority.

 

[Neb]

No, no, and no, we're talking here about urban legend that free-roaming games are close to impossible to implement on consoles due to memory limitations.
And that's what I'm talking about, nothing else.

I dont think any one said it was almost impossible. But you have to scale the detail according to the amount of VRAM/RAM available and also of course use streamming technique (goes for all platforms)!

 

[pjbliverpool]

It's simple: 300mb/sec is the speed of interface. Actual speed of the drive is something like 70-80mb/sec. So how can you get more than 80Mb/sec? System cache. But when you launch game you want to use your available system RAM, so system cache is shrinked by OS. So you need your own cache system. And so on.

Im not sure that made any sense at all but maybe im misinterpreting what your trying to say.

I know that average throughput of a HDD is going to be much slower than the peak. Thats true no matter what system its in. So if the average for a 300MB/s drive is 80MB/s then in a console the average for a slower drive may only be 40MB/sec.

I don't see how your statement above relates to me saying my HDD doesn't slow down at random intervals by >99% during a game because of the "OS".

Everything can slow you down: download on the background, icq messages popping out and written in history (I'm not joking here) and so forth.
Just think: your video card renders frames 60 times per second, even slightest delay in data delivery can cause frame drop, slightest.

And consoles don't have downloads now? Sure things can access your HDD at the same time as the game but in a well maintained system, this is pretty controllable and can be kept to a minimum most of the time - thus resulting in a reasonable level of predictability in HDD performance.

Oblivion is a great example of this, on the 360 and PC it loads at semi regular intervals in outdoor areas. if you have a low amount of system RAM and slow HDD, you will load more often and for longer, similar to the 360 version. If you have lots of RAM and a fast HDD, the loading points are practically eliminated, at least from being noticable.

There is no problem with optical media either. You just need more buffers.

Umm, no. Optical media is blatently slower than a HDD. Caches won't change that. If your streaming from a DVD then your getting data into the memory pools much slower than streaming from a HDD. Thats just a simple fact.

Yes, that's an advantage, PC has system RAM to cover up disadvantages in I/O predictability.
But consoles do not have this problem, so you do not need system RAM to fight with it.

That simply makes no sense. It barley even addressed my point. Having the ability to store re-usable assetts for a game in a cache (system memory) thats more than a dozen times faster than the cache in another system (HDD/DVD) is nothing but an advantage. And a big one at that.

 

[psorcerer]

You didn't answer the question -- what's the LIMIT, where you do you draw the LINE. What precise, exact quantity of memory is where you cross into "too little"? And then, is that limit specific to any type of game, or does it work on ALL games?

It clearly depends on game.
I do not know where exactly the boundary is.
What I do know: if you can make game on PC with 256Mb video card - you can 100% make it on nowdays consoles with the same detail level.

Because everything you just finished saying contradicts your argument -- More is better, you can always use more, because you can always optimize the experience further. Higher detail, higher resolution textures, MORE textures, higher quality sounds, MORE sounds, more channels for your sound, more objects viewable, more AI pathing capacity, more terrain choices, more physics abilities.

You can always use more, but more on PC and more on console are different "more"s. And that's what I'm about.

Bullshit. You can have a 128mb video card on a 128mb computer system, and use ALL of that video ram. You somehow speculate that you can't have a texture in VRAM without a simultaneous copy in system ram, but you're 100% wrong. Most devs choose to leave a copy, but it is not a requirement neither of the OS nor the underlying hardware.

Eh-eh-eh, are we talking about corridor shooters with 128Mb used throughout whole level, or about free roaming games where you need to load data constantly?

And further bullshit -- more VRAM is NOT "better" than more system ram in nearly all cases. You talk about balance, but then how are you going to "balance" sound, AI, and everything else that doesn't even have any relation to VRAM? You aren't. Video is part of the equation, but certainly not the majority.

Bullshit. Render is the most demanding and the most used part of load equation. Everything else can be used in much slower time frames.

 

[Geo]

Given this is console games, pissing matches over pc stuff would seem to be OT. So please move along. . .

 

[psorcerer]

I don't see how your statement above relates to me saying my HDD doesn't slow down at random intervals by >99% during a game because of the "OS".

It slows down by 100% every time.
The disk is a shared I/O resource, which means that if somebody else is reading disk right now, right this very moment: you won't get any data, you'll get the data after 1/2 second with 80mb/sec speed, but that's not what you need to sync with 1/60 second frame. Do you read me?

Oblivion is a great example of this, on the 360 and PC it loads at semi regular intervals in outdoor areas. if you have a low amount of system RAM and slow HDD, you will load more often and for longer, similar to the 360 version. If you have lots of RAM and a fast HDD, the loading points are practically eliminated, at least from being noticable.

As I've told numerous times: Oblivion is a good example how crippled you can get when writing game for PC, with PC specific decisions and then get a horrible performance on console.

Umm, no. Optical media is blatently slower than a HDD. Caches won't change that. If your streaming from a DVD then your getting data into the memory pools much slower than streaming from a HDD. Thats just a simple fact.

Tell me, how do you make a game like Shadow of The Colossus?
The media reads at 2.5Mb/sec, you have 32Mb of system RAM and you need to do seamless free-roaming world?

That simply makes no sense. It barley even addressed my point. Having the ability to store re-usable assetts for a game in a cache (system memory) thats more than a dozen times faster than the cache in another system (HDD/DVD) is nothing but an advantage. And a big one at that.

Predictable patterns are better.

 

[Albuquerque]

It slows down by 100% every time.
The disk is a shared I/O resource, which means that if somebody else is reading disk right now, right this very moment: you won't get any data, you'll get the data after 1/2 second with 80mb/sec speed, but that's not what you need to sync with 1/60 second frame. Do you read me?

Wrong. This isn't anything to do with a PC vs Console, so I'm going to reply to it... If ONLY a single process could only ever access the drive until it was finished, then a modern operating system would take EONS to load. Here's a newsflash: the OS is smart enough to share If you need to load an 80mb file, you can intermix that read with other files that also need reading. Yes, it really does work that way!

Even better, chances are you don't need the ENTIRE 80mb file, you likely only need a specific portion of it. Here's another great idea that someone figured out EONS ago: you can lread just the piece of the file you need, versus all 80mb of it into memory and then throwing the rest away!

Tell me, how do you make a game like Shadow of The Colossus? The media reads at 2.5Mb/sec, you have 32Mb of system RAM and you need to do seamless free-roaming world?

Here's how: You use very small, very low resolution, very compressed textures. Or better yet, you use one larger (relatively speaking) texture that actually contains multiple smaller textures that can be applied to various surfaces (think of a person -- one texture can be used for clothes, skin, face, hair on a polygon model by simply using different parts of the image).

Then you use simple models, simple terrain, lower-quality mono-channel sounds, a midi music score, a VERY aggressive LOD system, you keep the total visible characters very low, which keeps AI pathing down, and you stuff as much as physically possible into the memory. And you continually run the CD rom pulling anything and everything you can as the character moves or the scene changes.

That's how. Now ask yourself: would that game using 2x the ram (simply because it could) somehow be a waste? What if it was using 4x the ram? What if it was using 8x the ram? At what point do you deem it wasteful?

Predictable patterns are better.

Sure, but that has ZERO to do with a console, OR a PC. Here's a hint: people playing games are only as predictable as human behavior is. And here's another hint: quite a few people out there aren't predictable

 

[pjbliverpool]

Why do you think it's reasonable to split 50/50? Let's get technical, what would you place in both pools and how much space would it take?

Umm, because thats how Sony designed the PS3. If 50/50 wasn't a reasonable expectation of the average split (which obviously varies from game to game) then it would have been a pretty dumb choice would it not? And im sure Sony and the associated experts that were involved in the PS3's design know a hell of a lot more about it than either you or I.

And its not simply about adding up what you put in each pool. Its a case of thats what you have been given, now go and make your code fit there. But 50/50 is a reasonable place to start.

If you want to get technical, try demonstrating to me why PS3's split is wrong and what it should have been. And yes, I know both pools can be used by both processors but its more efficient for each to use its own pool, thus the split would have been targetted towards that.

No, no, and no, we're talking here about urban legend that free-roaming games are close to impossible to implement on consoles due to memory limitations.
And that's what I'm talking about, nothing else.

No thats a complete turn around from what you were saying before. No-ones saying its close to impossible to implement a free roaming game on consoles due to memory limitations. All thats being said is because of the greater available memory, PC's have an advantage. That advantage can translate into larger worlds, higher detail for a given size of world or fewer/shorter load times.

And besides, the specific point that we were addressing in this particular part of the post was were you said consoles have a VRAM advantage over most PC's which while partially true is not relevant to how the games would compare at maximum settings were they scale to take advantage of those (many) PC's that have a huge framebuffer advantage over consoles.

Perfectly possible on PC: you can not load anything in VRAM bypassing system RAM..

As far as I know you can't on the PS3 either but I might be wrong about that. Even in the 360 though I assume data would need to be loaded as system data first in order to be pre-processed and allocated to the GPU by the CPU.

Furthermore, most of the game developers use, so called, MANAGED memory pool, which is just two copies of same resource: one in system RAM and one in VRAM.
Why would I need something like that on console?

Even if thats true, it still leaves plenty of system memory spare on the PC in a 2GB system for additional data caching.

Yes, you can always just cache data in massive amounts in system RAM, but again: why would I need it on console?

Surely thats blindingly obvious. If the data isn't cached in memory and then its needed by the GPU, you will have to wait for it to be loaded from the HDD or worse, the DVD. If its already in the system memory then it will load much, much faster. If you set a minimum requirement of say 1GB of system RAM for your game then you can build the game world around that guarantee of faster loading times thanks to what you can store in the system RAM. Something you couldn;t do on a console with less available RAM for caching data.