Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2010]

[Billy Idol]

I wonder the following:

often PS3 games feature high quality sound on the BRD...does this fundamentally increase the burden on the streaming?

if so, this could be the reason that PS3 does not benefit from HDD that much, as the additional bandwidth is burned on high quality sound?!

 

[Gitaroo]

I was listening to a podcast, they mention also that no more heroes load alot faster on PS3 than 360, but both are quite bad, one weird thing is theres an optional install for PS3 but if you choose to install the game takes longer to load than wihout the install. And Fist of the north star also load alot faster on PS3 than 360, but I think theres a small mandatory install. SSF4, and those 2 are all JP games, seems liek JP dev found some trick to make loading quicker?

 

[Mastperf]

I'm fine will longer load times as long as nobody else tries the MGS4 approach ever again. Did anyone ever figure out why they had to do it that way?

 

[Trejser]

I'm fine will longer load times as long as nobody else tries the MGS4 approach ever again. Did anyone ever figure out why they had to do it that way?

Probably becouse m. install limit is 5GB, that's why every chapter had to be installed over the previous one, BUT there shoud be option to install the whole game, I don't know they didn't do this.

 

[Mastperf]

Yeah, that's probably why. We know the Blu-ray drive isn't that slow so it was an odd choice. I really wish they had taken more time to make it a more enjoyable experience. It really makes you think twice about replaying it down the road.

 

[mrcorbo]

Doesn't the 360's larger and contiguous memory pool allow for more pre-cacheing and less need overall to stream from disk, both hard and optical?

 

[TheWretched]

Doesn't the 360's larger and contiguous memory pool allow for more pre-cacheing and less need overall to stream from disk, both hard and optical?

Since we are talking of closed systems, I don't think the contingency is really problematic here. Everything can be tuned to "perfection". RAM size however makes a slight difference. Not just the bit more free RAM, but also the eDRAM which saves quite a bit too. I doubt though, that there'll be much of a difference for the streaming system overall. I can't really qualify that, though... this is just my gut talking (and me being a PC only programmer for now^^)

 

[Rurouni]

I have a question that has been nagging me for a long time. If a dev lead on PS3 and utilize RSX close to 100%, can Xenos match the output?
This is all assuming that the CPU isn't a factor.

Basically if it is the other way around, it would be hard to judge since it's possible that a dev choose to utilize all the shader for pixel operation (or vertex) and/or abuse the EDRAM thus there's no way for RSX to match it. But based on most multiplatform games, it's probably fair to say that RSX can't match Xenos.

Btw, I tried to search the forum but I've got "token has expired". I already refreshed the page, but still got the same message when I try to search. Is it just me?

 

[Sigfried1977]

Yeah, that's probably why. We know the Blu-ray drive isn't that slow so it was an odd choice. I really wish they had taken more time to make it a more enjoyable experience. It really makes you think twice about replaying it down the road.

More a psychological barrier than a real hindrance, though. The chapter install times in MGS4 are barely longer than the time it takes to start Uncharted 2 with the chapter selection. The biggest downside is that I tend to follow Snake's example and light myself a cigarette.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I have a question that has been nagging me for a long time. If a dev lead on PS3 and utilize RSX close to 100%, can Xenos match the output?
This is all assuming that the CPU isn't a factor.

If SPU's aren't involved then for the most part I'd say yes. Some items may or may not be faster, but doubtful anything would perform that much worse on Xenos that it would require CPU assistance.

Regards,
SB

 

[ihamoitc2005]

If SPU's aren't involved then for the most part I'd say yes. Some items may or may not be faster, but doubtful anything would perform that much worse on Xenos that it would require CPU assistance.

Regards,
SB

Probably some games can use Xenon CPU for vertex ops no?

Also, why is Uncharted 1 looking so good compared to other games? Digital Foundry always say how amazing it is.

 

[Fafalada]

Far too many examples to the contrary for this myth to stay alive.

The part I stated about arbitrary-direction streaming having a significant advantage with HDD+Optical over Optical is a fact, not a myth.
The rest was meant in jest.

All game tests I've ever seen, for multiplatform games, have shown that streaming from X360 DVD is faster in general

I wasn't referring to load-times, and streaming isn't exactly testable unless you have internal knowledge of a game. Anyway, for the streaming-case I refer to above, the performance of the two drives is as good as the same from the tests I've seen.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

There have been tests with streaming however. Digital foundry tested how long it took to stream in textures on COD: MW2, and the X360 I believe was faster, even though PS3 had a mandatory partial HDD install. With a full install on X360, it wasn't even close. Either Digital Foundry or Lens of Truth also tested texture streaming speed in Borderlands I believe.

In the cases where PS3 requires a partial install just to match and/or still be slower than X360's DVD only, it does bring into question the efficiency of the PS3's onboard HDD/BRD controller. Compared to an optional game install to HDD, there's nothing the PS3 can currently do to match loading or streaming times. It's a bit fortunate for Sony that MS chose not to include a HDD with every machine, otherwise things wouldn't even be comparable.

Perhaps someday if/when Sony allows optional full installs of BRD games to HDD we'll get to compare HDD only loading/streaming times. I have a feeling they'll still be behind even when data sets are equal.

Regards,
SB

 

[Trejser]

There have been tests with streaming however. Digital foundry tested how long it took to stream in textures on COD: MW2, and the X360 I believe was faster, even though PS3 had a mandatory partial HDD install. With a full install on X360, it wasn't even close. Either Digital Foundry or Lens of Truth also tested texture streaming speed in Borderlands I believe.

In the cases where PS3 requires a partial install just to match and/or still be slower than X360's DVD only, it does bring into question the efficiency of the PS3's onboard HDD/BRD controller. Compared to an optional game install to HDD, there's nothing the PS3 can currently do to match loading or streaming times. It's a bit fortunate for Sony that MS chose not to include a HDD with every machine, otherwise things wouldn't even be comparable.

Perhaps someday if/when Sony allows optional full installs of BRD games to HDD we'll get to compare HDD only loading/streaming times. I have a feeling they'll still be behind even when data sets are equal.

Regards,
SB

Nope, MW2 has no install on PS3.

My list from the previous post:

From LoT analysys:
http://www.lensoftruth.com/?p=14394

There are just few examples where games with m. install have worse loading times than 360 vers. from DVD. Most games have the same or better loading times. There are even games with no m. install that have better loading times

 

[Rangers]

In most cases no install vs no install though, I believe the 360 comes out ahead.

 

[patsu]

Is load time on PS3 still a problem ? The only recent case is Modnation Racer, which has a completely open level. Most of the levels would be on the HDD (user created levels). Patch v1.02 is supposed to reduce load time by 30% in the game.

There are usually more data to load from PS3. Some developers use Blu-ray to stream multiple media in the game in parallel, like dialog, music and textures (together with HDD for other high priority textures). I think most PS3 developers would focus on Cell + RSX work and leave storage issues till later.

For people who worry about load time, many have already implemented "No/zero load time" policies anyway.

 

[(((interference)))]

In most cases no install vs no install though, I believe the 360 comes out ahead.

What I want to know is, how does the game running on a non-HDD SKU compare to the PS3 version, which always has a HDD it can use to cache data.

The fact that the 360 can run games like RDR straight from DVD with no HDD while looking and performing better than the PS3 version is somewhat astonishing.
Because it should be quite a large handicap

 

[assurdum]

What I want to know is, how does the game running on a non-HDD SKU compare to the PS3 version, which always has a HDD it can use to cache data.

The fact that the 360 can run games like RDR straight from DVD with no HDD while looking and performing better than the PS3 version is somewhat astonishing.
Because it should be quite a large handicap

In my opinion is just bad porting on the ps3, because not have so sense... imho.

 

[szymku]

In my opinion faster loading times on Xbox also leads to very high DVD drive failure rates in this console, because of extremly intensive usage.
So everything has a price

 

[Arwin]

What I want to know is, how does the game running on a non-HDD SKU compare to the PS3 version, which always has a HDD it can use to cache data.

The fact that the 360 can run games like RDR straight from DVD with no HDD while looking and performing better than the PS3 version is somewhat astonishing.
Because it should be quite a large handicap

For the 360, running from DVD is a requirement because of the Arcade unit. However, there are various caching libraries that will automatically use caching on the 360 when a HDD is available. For the PS3, there are no such requirements, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are also no automatic caching to HDD libraries, which I'm guessing means that multi-platform games will either typically run straight of the BD with no HDD caching at all, or you'll get the 'install part of the game to HDD' that you see so frequently.

Naughty Dog has shown that it is not very hard to use streaming from BD and HDD together, and particularly use the HDD as a kind of cache for BD streaming (for instance stream textures from BD to HDD way in advance during gameplay and then from HDD to memory when actually necessary). However, for keeping different builds on different systems as similar as possible as many multi-platform developers want to do to make code-sharing and testing easier I suspect, multi-platform games tend not to use this a lot - just copying some of the files to the HDD is much easier and gets them close enough to the 360 version in general.

What I'm interested in is if there are any good testing numbers for games running from DVD only running on an actual HDD less 360, and comparisons between that and a 360 that does have a HDD, to see how much auto-HDD caching is used on the 360. I can't remember if that was ever done.