Epic fought for an Xbox 360 with 512MB memory

groper

Regular
I hope that this is not old news.
http://www.news4gamers.com/xbox360/News-12934.aspx
The newest blogcast from Major Nelson, reviels that Epic fought for an Xbox 360 with 512MB memory. Microsoft first wanted an Xbox 360 with 256MB memory, Epic called Microsoft and showed them Gears of War with only 256MB memory.

Then Microsoft announced the final hardware, with 512MB memory. Epic then became the first developer that had to work with the final Xbox 360 hardware. Later that day, Microsoft's 'Chief Financial Officer' called Epic and said: "You guys just costed me $1 billion", and Epic's Mark Rein responded with: "No, we just did 1 billion gamers a favor".

So Epic is the reason that i bought a 360 as there was no chance to buy a console with 256mb ram... :smile:
 
256MB of total RAM in these spec-obsessed times certainly would not have gone over well, that's for sure. I remember when the rumors began that MS might be upping their inclusion to 512MB - from the leaked 256MB figure - exciting times, those!

On the side, I find it a little disconcerting that Microsoft's CFO can't use the word 'cost/costed' properly in a sentence. Or - perhaps that's an error made by Rein or the article author in the recounting... but, it's an inexcusable error nonetheless! :)
 
I hope that this is not old news.
http://www.news4gamers.com/xbox360/News-12934.aspx


So Epic is the reason that i bought a 360 as there was no chance to buy a console with 256mb ram... :smile:


I think you'll find more than just Epic campaigned for more memory.
Buit I'd be willing to bet that the final decision was made about the same time it became clear what Sony's memory configuration was.

Interestingly the memory in Xbox (the fact it has more) was a significant barrier to cost reduction later in it's life (memory costs fall slower than other silicon costs apparently), so MS were very retiscent to end up with more memory than their competitors this time.
 
I wonder what Sony's reply was?

Epic: We need 512MB of Ram to make GeoW look great. See how it looks with 256MB of RAM.

Sony: Ok, we'll send a few of our console developers over. We'll show you how to do good memory management and streaming for consoles. *wink* We could do that on 256 MB of ram, and you can have this and that too.

Sony: We'll be saving 1 billion dollars on memory, and still achieving our goals.

Sony: Sorry that this will cause you some "pain" on the development/research side, but you gotta put some work in to achieve results on the PS3.

Speng.
 
I think you'll find more than just Epic campaigned for more memory.
Buit I'd be willing to bet that the final decision was made about the same time it became clear what Sony's memory configuration was.

Interestingly the memory in Xbox (the fact it has more) was a significant barrier to cost reduction later in it's life (memory costs fall slower than other silicon costs apparently), so MS were very retiscent to end up with more memory than their competitors this time.

Wasn't the standard HDD another costly and hard to cost-reduce item in the XBox ? I remember reading some interview with Moore where he mentioned that, which was one of the reason for the Core 360, IIRC... Also, it was 512MB or standard HDD for MS this generation.
 
:???: Sony PS3 has 512MB of memory.

He didn't say otherwise. He just stated which would would be the case if Sony originally planned to give only 256MB of RAM to the PS3, and Epic asked them to double it...I think you get the point :smile:
 
From the Xbox 360 Uncloaked:

“Competitive intelligence suggested that we needed to be flexible on the amount of memory,â€￾ said Greg Gibson.

The game developers wanted more. The average amount of main memory in a PC was rising. They argued that Microsoft had scrimped in other ways, making the hard disk drive optional and including a DVD drive instead of an HD DVD or Blu-ray drive. Tim Sweeney, the graphics wizard at Epic Games, lobbied hard. He created a series of screen shots for what Epic’s game, Gears of War, would look like with 256 megabytes of memory, and what it would look like with 512 megabytes. Clearly, the 512-megabyte solution looked far better. With it, Epic could implement “high dynamic rangeâ€￾ images. These were images that improved the realistic feel of games because they could show both low-light and bright-light images in the same picture. The effect could create images such as the rays of the sun shining through some dark clouds.

...

It was a $900 million decision. Microsoft would have to make arrangements with both Samsung and Infineon Technologies, two of the biggest memory-chip makers, to produce more GDDR3 chips. When the crew at Epic Games heard the decision, they hooted in celebration. But again, rather than spend more money over the life of the program, Microsoft decided to find cuts in other parts of the program. It scaled back some of its other plans in the spreadsheets, and then moved to make more decisions. Nobody knew it at the time, but by doubling the amount of memory, Microsoft had made one of the most fateful decisions on the entire Xbox 360 program.

http://www.spiderworks.com/books/xbox360.php
 
I think you'll find more than just Epic campaigned for more memory.
Buit I'd be willing to bet that the final decision was made about the same time it became clear what Sony's memory configuration was.
Quite frankly, I don't think there was a single dev who said 256 would have been fine. For that matter, I don't think there were (or even still are) very many things anybody is really satisfied with -- but then, saying that about a console is kind of redundant. It's just very natural of Epic to egomaniacally think it was their doing. BTW, they weren't the only ones who got the "You guys cost me $1 billion" email either, that actually went out to a lot of developers who were working on 360-exclusives.

(memory costs fall slower than other silicon costs apparently)
You seem as if to suggest that's a curious phenomenon. Considering that they don't advance or go through process shrinks as often and generally have more transistors per package than any other electronic component, and in general, aren't available in supplies to meet demand the vast majority of the time (excluding, of course, otherwise obsolete DRAM architectures) why should they drop in price as quickly as other silicon?
 
If they already knew that the Hard Drive would be optional and that DVD would be the medium what else could Microsoft have scaled back on? GPU, Memory, or CPU speed?
 
Yep he did.

What I understand from this post

I wonder what Sony's reply was?

Epic: We need 512MB of Ram to make GeoW look great. See how it looks with 256MB of RAM.

Sony: Ok, we'll send a few of our console developers over. We'll show you how to do good memory management and streaming for consoles. *wink* We could do that on 256 MB of ram, and you can have this and that too.

Sony: We'll be saving 1 billion dollars on memory, and still achieving our goals.

Sony: Sorry that this will cause you some "pain" on the development/research side, but you gotta put some work in to achieve results on the PS3.

is that it's all about a "what if" scenario. I don't think he said that PS3 has a total amount of 256MB of RAM, but IF the PS3 had that total amount of 256MB RAM that would be the supposed dialog.

We probably understood the post in a different way...
 
is that it's all about a "what if" scenario. I don't think he said that PS3 has a total amount of 256MB of RAM, but IF the PS3 had that total amount of 256MB RAM that would be the supposed dialog.

We probably understood the post in a different way...

Well I think speng only counts the vram to be usefull or something like that. Post number 7 further clarifies that.
 
I wonder what Sony's reply was?

Epic: We need 512MB of Ram to make GeoW look great. See how it looks with 256MB of RAM.

Sony: Ok, we'll send a few of our console developers over. We'll show you how to do good memory management and streaming for consoles. *wink* We could do that on 256 MB of ram, and you can have this and that too.

Sony: We'll be saving 1 billion dollars on memory, and still achieving our goals.

Sony: Sorry that this will cause you some "pain" on the development/research side, but you gotta put some work in to achieve results on the PS3.

Speng.

While that would be a cool response, really looking at how they responded to similar complaints about the PSP, they could just as well have said ... hey, you know what? You're right. How about we make it 1Gb? (PSP originally was 8mb afair)
 
(PSP originally was 8mb afair)

Wasn't it 16 ?

Back on topic, I'm very surprised that DVD-9 and no mandatory HDD were already decided when going to 512MB was decided. On what they decided to scale back, isn't Xenos a 64-ALU design, with 16 (one quad) cut of for redundancy ? Perhaps Xenos was initially thought to ship with all 64 ALUs enabled ? Perhaps they intended a larger EDRAM daughter-die (enough to do 720p with 4x MSAA without tiling) ?
 
Back
Top