Gamespy leaks Xenon specs (?)
- Thread starter Titanio
- Start date
Yes, BDRom on PS3 will be great for me, cause then i won't need to buy a separate player until the standalone ones come down in price, but for games it is just not needed. Devs will find ways to fill the discs up obviously, but it is not needed. Especially when 2 DVD9s get up to slightly less than 20GB, you can see that we can still fit a whole lot on current formats.
I do not believe the BDRom drive in PS3 will feature recording abilities, but i'd love to be proven wrong later on in the year.
I do not believe the BDRom drive in PS3 will feature recording abilities, but i'd love to be proven wrong later on in the year.
Name a PC game that was designed from ground up to ship on DVD.aaronspink said:
Outside console ports TO PC, there basically aren't any.
Moreover - there's a very different set of requirements for a game that installs to HDD, or a game that will run off the optical disc. And as you may have noticed, HDD will NOT be standard fare in this generation of consoles.
A common PS2 game easily takes up around 1GB of disc space for in-game assets only. Scale the assets for main memory size 32MB->256MB(or worse, 512MB like some people wish for), and you're basically hitting the limit of DVD9 right there.
As I've said before, the situation is similar to PS2 launch, where many early games could still ship on CD. It took a little over a year for those kind of games to basically completely dissappear.
aaronspink
Veteran
crystalcube said:Xenosaga II already comes on 2 DVD and dont think its considered massive by any standard. There are possibly more.ninelven said:That must be one massive game.
It only comes on 2 DVDs because the hardware is crap ass requiring them to pre-render pretty much the whole damn thing. All the cut scenes, almost all the fight moves, etc. It they had a decent engine on decent hardware they could probably fit into half of a single layer DVD.
Tex Murphy and Wing commander games came up wards of 8 CDs but again, that was because they contained so much FMV which future games will not.
Aaron Spink
speaking for myself inc.
I wouldn't be surprised if some movie tie-in games next gen would actually require a whole movies' worth of filmed cut-scenes
I think there'll be:
Spiderman 3 DVD Widescreen/Fullscreen Editions
Spiderman 3 DVD 2 disc Special Edition
Spiderman 3 Blu-ray High definition Edition
Spiderman 3 Blu-ray PlayStation3 Standard Definition Edition, with sections of the movie playable as a game in PS3 with "seamless" integration to the movie feature.
I'm not too excited either by games based on movies, actually I haven't bought a single movie tie-in game this or last gen. But those games sell well anyway.
I think there'll be:
Spiderman 3 DVD Widescreen/Fullscreen Editions
Spiderman 3 DVD 2 disc Special Edition
Spiderman 3 Blu-ray High definition Edition
Spiderman 3 Blu-ray PlayStation3 Standard Definition Edition, with sections of the movie playable as a game in PS3 with "seamless" integration to the movie feature.
I'm not too excited either by games based on movies, actually I haven't bought a single movie tie-in game this or last gen. But those games sell well anyway.
aaronspink
Veteran
All my current games are "high-def". In addition, they have several different complete sets of textures, models, etc. They all fit on a single DVD. And would require even less space if they shipped with only 1 set of texture/world data.z said:
This is some nice historical revision. PS2 is jack all for DVD as a format. Not even a drop in the bucket.
Who wants to upgrade a console to play movies? When high def movies become popular, people will go down to fry's and buy one for $30-50 that will give much better quality than a console will.
Aaron Spink
speaking for myself inc.
This originated from the xbox.com forums
The Xbox 2 CPU is no longer valid
Affirmed that the Xbox 2 CPU is no longer the anticipated tri-core 3.5 GHz processor. Recent happens at IBM and across the net suggest that it may actual include vector based cores similar to the cell in its CPU and capable of 3.0Ghz+ with it actually coming closer to the 5Ghz range. personally i find it scary if they found a tri-core 3.5 PPc was not enough, i can only imagine what they are going to throw inside the thing.
http://forums.gaming-age.com/showthread.php?t=38765
-----------
How much salt does this come with?
The Xbox 2 CPU is no longer valid
Affirmed that the Xbox 2 CPU is no longer the anticipated tri-core 3.5 GHz processor. Recent happens at IBM and across the net suggest that it may actual include vector based cores similar to the cell in its CPU and capable of 3.0Ghz+ with it actually coming closer to the 5Ghz range. personally i find it scary if they found a tri-core 3.5 PPc was not enough, i can only imagine what they are going to throw inside the thing.
http://forums.gaming-age.com/showthread.php?t=38765
-----------
How much salt does this come with?
How "recent" the "happens" can be so that IBM could've made a new CPU design to replace the previously rumoured tri core design in xbox2?
I find it hard to believe, that if IBM (and MS) had already designed a custom tri-core CPU for xbox2, they'd be able to design a new custom chip to replace the previous design so soon. Especially if xbox2 is going to launch this autumn.
How would sucha a sudden change affect the Ati chip design, and other hardware decisions? Not to mention the games already in development.
I find it hard to believe, that if IBM (and MS) had already designed a custom tri-core CPU for xbox2, they'd be able to design a new custom chip to replace the previous design so soon. Especially if xbox2 is going to launch this autumn.
How would sucha a sudden change affect the Ati chip design, and other hardware decisions? Not to mention the games already in development.
aaronspink
Veteran
Fafalada said:
actually most are. The issue is that the publishers for some unknown reason want to ship on cds.
yes, you actually have to a spin location optimization pass. next.
I don't think your scaling is correct.
Thats what happens when you let developers go crazy with crappy FMV. FMV should be pretty much banned by contract on the next gen. It serves no purpose.
gokickrocks
Regular
rabidrabbit said:I wouldn't be surprised if some movie tie-in games next gen would actually require a whole movies' worth of filmed cut-scenes
I think there'll be:
Spiderman 3 DVD Widescreen/Fullscreen Editions
Spiderman 3 DVD 2 disc Special Edition
Spiderman 3 Blu-ray High definition Edition
Spiderman 3 Blu-ray PlayStation3 Standard Definition Edition, with sections of the movie playable as a game in PS3 with "seamless" integration to the movie feature.
I'm not too excited either by games based on movies, actually I haven't bought a single movie tie-in game this or last gen. But those games sell well anyway.
last thing we need is more special editions...just think, with the size of BR, we can get 10GB of commentary and also commentary that have been cut out from the dvd edition that can only be found on the BR edition
crystalcube
Newcomer
aaronspink said:
Its not the question of why. The point is that some developer needed two DVD in this generation and as others have pointed out that next-gen will have HD content so its safe to assume that next-gen content will possibly require more media space and hence HD-DVD/Blu-Ray will help there.
Some speculation, since these specs are pretty close to the leaked specs.
If the R500 has 48 ALUs and capable of 8 pixels per cycle,
1. Fillrate @ 500Mhz ~ 4 Gpixels/s
2. 8 Pixel pipelines/shaders max., each a cluster of 6 ALUs.
3. These would be deep pixel pipelines outputting high quality pixels.
4. Because of unified shaders and these pipelines seem too deep for the vertex pipelines, they would be re-configurable to say 24 vertex pipelines/shaders, each consisting of 2 ALUs each.
5. If this is true, the load balancing would be for chunks of 6 ALUs creating the following shader combinations,
E.g.
8PS|0VS or 7PS|3VS or 6PS|6VS or 5PS|9VS or 4PS|12VS or 3PS|15VS or 2PS|18VS or 1PS|21VS
0VS > VS is done on CPU
0PS is not possible.
The above configurations should give some idea of an internal bus layout on the R500 with eDRAM.
If the R500 has 48 ALUs and capable of 8 pixels per cycle,
1. Fillrate @ 500Mhz ~ 4 Gpixels/s
2. 8 Pixel pipelines/shaders max., each a cluster of 6 ALUs.
3. These would be deep pixel pipelines outputting high quality pixels.
4. Because of unified shaders and these pipelines seem too deep for the vertex pipelines, they would be re-configurable to say 24 vertex pipelines/shaders, each consisting of 2 ALUs each.
5. If this is true, the load balancing would be for chunks of 6 ALUs creating the following shader combinations,
E.g.
8PS|0VS or 7PS|3VS or 6PS|6VS or 5PS|9VS or 4PS|12VS or 3PS|15VS or 2PS|18VS or 1PS|21VS
0VS > VS is done on CPU
0PS is not possible.
The above configurations should give some idea of an internal bus layout on the R500 with eDRAM.
Nope. As I said, dump previous concepts of pipelines. NV4x has already decoupled the ROP's from the fragment pipelines, Xenon will be abstracted even further.
aaronspink said:
The reason is that there is still too many PCs without DVD drives. I built my PC 2 years ago and already had a DVD drive on my laptop so I got a standard CDRW on my PC (because at the time DVD/CDRW combo drives were close to $100, whereas the CDRW was $40). It was not until this summer that I added a DVD drive.
It is cheaper/easier for the publishers to push out a single product that will work on EVERYONES machine.
But if you go and look at all the major games from the last couple years they have shipped on multiple CDs. Just thinking of games off the top of my head: HL2 (I got it in Steam, but it is like 4GB), Farcry (mine has like 5CDs), D3 (3CDS), BF:V (3CDs) and so forth.
And note that ALL of these games are meant to be played at 1024x768 or higher.
Like I mentioned earlier: Most people have HD devices, and have had them for years. It is called a computer monitor. And PC developers have been making HD games for many years and in very few cases have they exceeded 6 CDs.
As for HD Cut scenes--if DVD9 prevents this I am all for it. Next gen games should look GREAT, and I prefer how scripted cut scenes using the game engine look. And it also opens the doors for interactivity AND for variations. You could have 5 variations of the same scene based on how the income of an event turned out (or what choice was made) and it would be very small (tens of MBs) whereas to do that in HD video would take oodles of space. Not to mention cut scenes often disrupt the flow of the game by taking you into a prettied up environment that does not match the game.
I am not saying every single game will fit on 1 DVD9 disk, but I think developers can reasonably fit most games, without skimping, on 1 DVD.
As for Sony, with their investment in BR, movies, and music, it is only common sense for them to include BR. It gives them a strategic advantage to get their format into the market. But it will also cost them a lot at the beginning which either means they will be taking a bigger hit to the bottom line at launch or will have to sacrifice elsewhere inside.
And whoever said that those expecting more memory, and not just hoping, were nuts I agree. I want more, but consoles are not PCs, And while I believe memory will be a bottleneck on all 3 systems if they are at 256MB, the price of fast memory is not something that can just be ignored. Look at the PS3: It has already beens stated that XDR, as a top range product, will extract a premium price compared to competiting products.
That said, rereading the Gamespy info makes me wonder how accurate it is. We will find out soon I guess.
What DaveBauman said.
There's no such thing as pipelines any more. Stop talking about pipelines. It's meaningless. The next-gen chips no longer have X pipelines each with Y texture units attached to them.
What you have in a next-gen chip is A number of shader ALUs, B number of pixels "in-flight" at a given time, and C pixels retired per clock, where A is typically in the multiple dozens, B is in the hundred or hundreds range, and C is in the high single digits, or low double digits.
Fillrate is no longer interesting. What is interesting is your max shader ops throughput per clock.
The reason pipelines were done away with is memory latency. You don't want a shader memory fetch to stall an entire pipeline and waste all that hardware.
What you want is a shader ALU to queue the memory access and drop the pixel it is working on back into the pool of in-flight pixels. Then you want it to find a pixel that's just come out of a memory-wait, and start working on it as quickly as possible.
If you keep your pool filled with enough in-flight pixels, you'll always find work for your ALUs to do, instead of having them stand around twiddling their thumbs waiting for memory.
Think of it as a hundred-way hyperthread.
There's no such thing as pipelines any more. Stop talking about pipelines. It's meaningless. The next-gen chips no longer have X pipelines each with Y texture units attached to them.
What you have in a next-gen chip is A number of shader ALUs, B number of pixels "in-flight" at a given time, and C pixels retired per clock, where A is typically in the multiple dozens, B is in the hundred or hundreds range, and C is in the high single digits, or low double digits.
Fillrate is no longer interesting. What is interesting is your max shader ops throughput per clock.
The reason pipelines were done away with is memory latency. You don't want a shader memory fetch to stall an entire pipeline and waste all that hardware.
What you want is a shader ALU to queue the memory access and drop the pixel it is working on back into the pool of in-flight pixels. Then you want it to find a pixel that's just come out of a memory-wait, and start working on it as quickly as possible.
If you keep your pool filled with enough in-flight pixels, you'll always find work for your ALUs to do, instead of having them stand around twiddling their thumbs waiting for memory.
Think of it as a hundred-way hyperthread.
Similar threads
