Does disk space affect graphics?

[zaftxx]

Is there any correlation between graphics and the amount of disk space?
in other words does more storage space= better graphics?

 

[xatnys]

No, there isn't a correlation. You can have a fantastic looking game on the equivalent of a DVD and a horrible looking game on the equivalent of a BD for example.

It can have a linear effect on how much content you have in a game. This includes art assets; things like asset variance, texture size, texture amount can be storage bound. The smaller the capacity, the more of a balancing act this becomes.

 

[sunscar]

For reference, this video is of a procedurally-generated world that was built from ~ 4KB of data. It'd fit on a floppy disk 256 times over.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE

 

[Prophecy2k]

I'm under the impression that increasing storage media capacity allows for more assets, higher quality sound and FMV (pre-rendered cutscenes etc) and generally more game content. These are generally the benefits allowed by being afforded lots more storage space on your optical disc.

Again it's not that black & white and there are many more factors that come into play. If however the same dev studio with the same base hardware designed a game around DVD and then did the same for Blu-Ray, I'm very sure they could take advantage of the increased storage capacity to the betterment of the game, be that by enhancing the graphics or other means (it just depends on the game technological demands). Any other comparison is apples to oranges.

However, as with ID's ID Tech 5 game engine (Doom 4 & Rage's engine) using a virtual texturing system (therefore almost eliminating the console RAM deficiency problem), having more space available on your storage medium can certain allow for higher quality textures and such being stored on the disc.

With traditional game enigines however, generally amount/speed RAM tends to be the biggest factor.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Most games in this generation have not really had the budget to produce enough art assets that would overflow a single DVD. Even MW2 and AC2 have been perfectly fine with a single disc and those were the best selling HD games of the last holiday season.
FMV and sound files are the only thing that could require such a high level of compression that reduces quality. And even there, we should keep in mind just how much music and speech GTA4 has managed to pack on a single disc. MGS4 may have superior sound quality in theory but I doubt that more then 1% of console gamers can hear the difference.

And virtual texturing is still an exception at this point, we may see the first games this year but that doesn't mean that it's going to be the norm. The art budgets for such games are going to be astronomical.

So I'd rather say that disc space can have an effect on variety, but only in AAA games that rely on extreme amounts of content.

 

[assurdum]

It can, no needs to be a game developer to said that. More space means more data, it's natural. Probably in this generation the console haven't 'enough' power to do a big difference. However more space is ever an advantage. I'll never understand the assumption 'but dvd is enough'. No one said the opposite but surely a BD player on 360 wouldn't be a bad thing.

 

[Dr. Nick]

Is there any correlation between graphics and the amount of disk space?
in other words does more storage space= better graphics?

It does not automatically equal better graphics but can play a role depending on the priorities of the guys developing the game. Most games haven't had a problem but there are some that could have used it.

 

[Prophecy2k]

Most games in this generation have not really had the budget to produce enough art assets that would overflow a single DVD. Even MW2 and AC2 have been perfectly fine with a single disc and those were the best selling HD games of the last holiday season.

This is an assumption based off the fact that we haven't seen many. I would strongly propose that had the 360 been initially released with a Blu-ray drive, the landscape would have been different.

FMV and sound files are the only thing that could require such a high level of compression that reduces quality. And even there, we should keep in mind just how much music and speech GTA4 has managed to pack on a single disc. MGS4 may have superior sound quality in theory but I doubt that more then 1% of console gamers can hear the difference.

But you're ignoring the fact that GTA4 for the most part certainly didn't have the very best image quality in it's cut-scenes. Contrast that with a game like MGS4 and Uncharted 2 whose dev teams weren't limted by the size of DVD, and it's clear as day how much more crisp and clean the cut-scenes for a game can be with a greater storage capacity.

When you look at multiplatform games, your perspective will automatically be marred by the fact that over half the publishers consumer base is limited by DVD capacity, therefore trying to argue that DVD is enough because "we haven't seen many games requiring more" is a pretty moot point.

And virtual texturing is still an exception at this point, we may see the first games this year but that doesn't mean that it's going to be the norm. The art budgets for such games are going to be astronomical.

Indeed i agree with the first part, given that i made no indication whatsoever that they were going to be the norm. I was merely making reference to a technology which could allow for a situation where a larger capacity storage medium could most definitely grant the opportunity for a greater graphical fidelity given on the same HW platform. I merely answered the OP...

The second bit about art budgets is something i'm not convinced of, and i don't really think one could make such a blanket statement. After all ID wouldn't care to develop ID Tech 5 into a commericially available product license if they did not see as something that could benefit current game developers with current budgets. Afterall aren't most source art assets made for current gen videogames, of a higher quality than those seen in current gen games? Would it "cost" a dev/pub more to not have to compress their textures or reduce their assest quality as much as they currently do?

So I'd rather say that disc space can have an effect on variety, but only in AAA games that rely on extreme amounts of content.

You're correct if you only look at this current gen and don't expand beyond that, however that wasn't a contraint laid down by the OP when he asked his question.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This is an assumption based off the fact that we haven't seen many. I would strongly propose that had the 360 been initially relieased with a Blu-ray drive, the landscape would have been very different.

I disagree. The principle restriction is the cost to create all this content. In the event you ahve lots of assets, you then hit the issue of disk-access speeds. Being limited by RAM, we'd need to stream content, and being limited to how fast(or rather, slow) you can load stuff from the drive, all that content couldn't be streamed into a free-roam level (at least prior to ID Tech5 which we're still waiting on), so you'd either have to create a very linear 'corridor' game or spread all those assets over lots of space, meaning a bigger game rather than higher quality. And if you install content to get the speed advantage of an HDD, you can do with that DVDs.

In theory, we can answer the title question with a 'yes, it does' as obviously if we were still capped to CDs, we'd have very different games now. In practice, given other limits this generation, I doubt it makes much difference for in-game created graphics, though of cause it will enable better prerecorded cutscene quality.

 

[Prophecy2k]

I disagree. The principle restriction is the cost to create all this content. In the event you ahve lots of assets, you then hit the issue of disk-access speeds. Being limited by RAM, we'd need to stream content, and being limited to how fast(or rather, slow) you can load stuff from the drive, all that content couldn't be streamed into a free-roam level (at least prior to ID Tech5 which we're still waiting on), so you'd either have to create a very linear 'corridor' game or spread all those assets over lots of space, meaning a bigger game rather than higher quality. And if you install content to get the speed advantage of an HDD, you can do with that DVDs.

But then you're not disagreeing with my (very general) statement, and taking into account all of what i said above there's no contention.

In the end i was only really speaking about a hypothetical situation where both consoles were equipped with "higher than DVD capacity" storage media. Of course things like RAM and disc speed would be additional factors/limitations devs would have to balance, and so i reiterate that it would really depend on the game being developed.

In short you're right. ;-)

 

[George]

This is an assumption based off the fact that we haven't seen many. I would strongly propose that had the 360 been initially relieased with a Blu-ray drive, the landscape would have been very different.

But you're ignoring the fact that GTA4 for the most part certainly didn't have the very best image quality in it's cut-scenes. Contrast that with a game like MGS4 and Uncharted 2 whose dev teams weren't limted by the size of DVD, and it's clear as day how much more crisp and clean the cut-scenes for a game can be with a greater storage capacity.

When you look at multiplatform games, your perspective will automatically be marred by the fact that over half the publishers consumer base is limited by DVD capacity, therefore trying to argue that DVD is enough because "we haven't seen many games requiring more" is a pretty moot point.

This is how I see it as well. You can't say because games don't go over the 1 DL DVD limit that they didn't have the budget to do so. It could simply be they knew the limit and worked to meet it.

Storage space won't directly affect the graphics in a game but it can influence the quality of assets the game has.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

This is an assumption based off the fact that we haven't seen many. I would strongly propose that had the 360 been initially relieased with a Blu-ray drive, the landscape would have been very different.

This is an assumption based on working in the industry and having to work with actual ingame art assets from leading studios. Everything is far, far more limited by runtime resources than by disk space. There's no use in shipping individual 4K textures for every object in a game world if you only have a total of 512MB RAM to display them.

But you're ignoring the fact that GTA4 for the most part certainly didn't have the very best image quality in it's cut-scenes.

GTA4 haven't had FMV cutscenes at all; and I've never seen any complaints about the quality of the speech or the music.

Contrast that with a game like MGS4 and Uncharted 2 whose dev teams weren't limted by the size of DVD, and it's clear as day how much more crisp and clean the cut-scenes for a game can be with a greater storage capacity.

MGS4 doesn't even use FMV, nor Uncharted 2 as far as I know.

And what the hell has FMV to do with ingame graphics anyway??

When you look at multiplatform games, your perspective will automatically be marred by the fact that over half the publishers consumer base is limited by DVD capacity, therefore trying to argue that DVD is enough because "we haven't seen many games requiring more" is a pretty moot point.

There's always an option to ship the X360 version on two discs.
And we actually have seen games with content cuts on the X360 anyway - but it has never had any effect on ingame graphics, only on FMV and such stuff (like the TV shows on GTA4 that were slideshows on the 360 and FMV on the PS3 AFAIK).

Edit: also let us not ignore how most multiplatform games have reduced texture resolution on the PS3.
It clearly demonstrates that the runtime storage (RAM) is a far bigger problem than the background storage (DVD vs BR).

The second bit about art budgets is something i'm not convinced of, and i don't really think one could make such a blanket statement.

Once again this is not a blanket statement, I have actual experience in 3D art asset production and my assumptions are based on this. What's the basis for yours?

After all ID wouldn't care to develop ID Tech 5 into a commericially available product license if they did not see as something that could benefit current game developers with current budgets.

Id's engine development is mostly driven by what Carmack finds interesting. There has never been any commercial need for the Doom3 tech back then, and I don't really expect Tech4 to score significant license deals either.

Afterall aren't most source art assets made for current gen videogames, of a higher quality than those seen in current gen games? Would it "cost" a dev/pub more to not have to compress their textures or reduce their assest quality as much as they currently do?

You clearly have no idea about the technical details of this question.

 

[Prophecy2k]

Having given it some thought i would actually go as far as to say that had the xbox360 been equipped since launch with a blu-ray drive, than many the games we see could have very well been considerably enhanced graphically*.

*Graphics encompass more than just what a gamer see during "real-time" gameplay sequences. Of course "real-time" gameplay graphics are the metric by which the majority would measure a game's overall graphical presentation, however even by having much improved higher resolution FMV a game's overall graphical presentation can be enhanced.

This brings me to my next point... taking games like ACI&II, GTAIV, MW1&2 etc as examples, i would even suggest that without a storage medium capacity limitation, many of the "in-engine" "in-game" cut-scenes could have been super clean 1080p pre-recorded FMVs (ala U2) and would have benefitted as such from being considered to have a greatly enhanced overall graphical presentaion. This in my mind would have been a nice, cheap, quick and easy way for devs to graphically enhance thier game overall with a minimal cost. If anything i sure wouldn't have minded if i only had to deal with frame-rate hiccups and screen tearing during gameplay and not during FMVs.

While i do subscribe to the view that asset costs are a big factor, i would think that it's probably not the deciding factor in most cases in current gen multi-platform game development when judging if the availability of a greater capacity storage media would affect the "graphical fidelity" of a game. (E.g. Ignoring all HW considerations, I'm very sure that Crysis cost Crytek less to make than KZ2 cost Sony. Therefore those HW limitations and developement factors would have been much more significant)

 

[el_rika]

MGS4 doesn't even use FMV, nor Uncharted 2 as far as I know.

Uncharted 2's cutscenes are all video files (not realtime). So, i guess that in Uncharted 2's case Blu Ray really helped as there probably more than 20 GB of video in there.

MGS4 probably could have been done on DL DVD, but in-game assets quality would have definitelly suffered some sorts of downgrades. There's just too much content in there, even if it's realtime.

 

[Dr. Nick]

FFXIII may do what you describe above, doing in-engine cutscenes in video rather than real time. DF suggested that they did this with the FFXIII demo so who knows. It is smart use of all of the extra disk space the game has been given on the PS3. On the 360 it might present a problem. If done in real-time disk space wouldn't be much of a problem because all of the work would be done in real-time but if they continue to use video, obviously giving priority to video, they might need to make sacrifices elsewhere because of disc space. Of course that is just a bunch of speculation on my part.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

FMV still does not have any effect on ingame graphics. Can we please move on?

 

[Prophecy2k]

Again, the OP never specifically constrained his question to being soley about in-game graphics.

Laa-Yosh, no-one here seems to be disagreeing with you in the fact that storage medium capacity probably makes little difference to what a dev can do "in-game", no-one else here is constraining the OP's use of the term "graphics" to mean merely run-time in-game graphics fidelity.

I myself am merely only stating that storage capacity can have some benefits to a game's overall graphical presentation (of which FMVs are a part of).

I really don't know why you seem to be getting so rilled up???

 

[assen]

Given infinite budget, you can make a prettier game, including FMVs, if you have bigger media. OK?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

This site is called Beyond3D because it cares about real time 3D graphics and not pre-rendered FMV quality. That discussion belongs to other sites like CGSociety, but here - at least that's been my impression in the past years - people pretty much tend to constrain such questions to the runtime part.

 

[sebbbi]

And virtual texturing is still an exception at this point, we may see the first games this year but that doesn't mean that it's going to be the norm. The art budgets for such games are going to be astronomical.

Virtual texturing offers many advantages compared to normal texturing systems. The most important one being that it saves huge amount of RAM (as the amount of texture pixels needed in memory is much more closer to the actual screen resolution - the ideal scenario). Additionally you can bake in all your decals offline to save lots of processing power during scene rendering (most games have plenty of decals, not just the super high budget ones). These are two pretty good reasons why virtual texturing is going to be popular in the future.

And most developers create all their textures in higher resolution anyway (we use 2x2 higher res in production), so you can just dump the production quality textures to your virtual texture to get better quality without any extra work needed. The best feature in virtual texturing is that you no longer need to aggressively downscale your textures to fit in your memory budget. The system loads everything automatically in correct resolution, and having higher resolution mips available in hard drive does not slow down the system at all. Artists like this a lot