Meeting with Phil Harrison today

[London Geezer]

Tejstar is a very respected member at the AVforums, and he is meeting Phil Harrison today.

He opened a thread on the AVforums 2 or 3 days ago asking what we wanted him to ask him, and he will post the results of his meeting on the same forum.
You might as well skip to the end, it's just full of people giving him questions, and Tejstar still hasn't posted anything, not sure what time the meeting was, but this is the thread, and it's definately something we should keep our eyes on!
His avatar is also easy to spot, i usually scroll through threads fast and stop when i see his avatar, so as to avoid the noise.

UPDATED EASIER LINK: starts from here

Have fun!

 

[xmu]

He's posted some replies now, such as HDD confirmed (once again ).

 

[Titanio]

It's a pity he didn't provide direct quotes. I can't believe they went from not confirming the HDD in every box, to confirming it, in the space of one week Methinks there was more subtlety to that answer.

 

[London Geezer]

Nice, it's easier to follow this link then

 

[xmu]

Heh yeah.. I've seen so many contradicting statements from numerous sources that personally I'm totally lost whether or not the damn thing is included with every PS3. A friend in the press said he got confirmation after the KK presentation that the HDD is in, guess I'll believe him for the time being as he's been right on these things before.

The in-game advertising part worries me a bit.. I hope they won't go totally overboard with that. I can handle subtle product placement of some sort, e.g. Adidas shoes in a football game, as stuff like that sort of adds to the overall experience.

 

[archie4oz]

FWIW, David Jaffe was at my GF's office for most of yesterday... I tried to get her to get him to sign her boobs, but no dice...

 

[London Geezer]

Uhm this is kinda... weird... Never seen such a ratio been used...

Additional content on Blu-ray disks to take advantage of content

Very coy about this, they did say that they need 50GB disks for launch titles, however wouldn’t comment how much of that will be used for games initially.

They made a point that Microsoft’s fundamental flaw with the 360, is to do with the disk storage/on board memory ratio is completely skewed.

What they were saying is that the PS3’s on board memory is 512mb, however it’s game disk storage space will be 50gb i.e. a ratio of 98x. However, with the 360, the on board memory is the same as PS3 (512MB) but the capacity of the optical disks is 9GB i.e. a ratio of 18x.

Sony argued that the right balance for a successful console is around 100x (which both the PS2 and Xbox had). The other console to ‘score’ as low as the 360 was the Dreamcast, Sony feel MS have made a big mistake by not uptaking the use of a HD format.

 

[trinibwoy]

Uhm this is kinda... weird... Never seen such a ratio been used...

I don't know about the ratio - seems kinda arbitrary, but if developers are able to generate enough good content to fill 50gb and max out the potential of the PS3 then they would have a point.

Does Oblivion fit on one 360 disc?

 

[Titanio]

Uhm this is kinda... weird... Never seen such a ratio been used...

The point was historically this has been the 'sweet spot' in terms of the disc:ram capacity ratio.

 

[ector]

Does Oblivion fit on one 360 disc?

Oblivion is just over 4 gigs, so ... yes, easily

 

[ROG27]

Awesome! HDD confirmed, kinda.

 

[ROG27]

Oblivion is just over 4 gigs, so ... yes, easily

What worries me is that there is so much compressed data on that disc that one of the Xenon cores is almost completely wrapped up in decompressing it all the time. That seems like an inefficient use of resources IMO.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You need compressed data to get faster loading of optical storage. Without that it'd be HDD only. Which would have been preferable I'm sure.

 

[liolio]

sony guys are really the kind of PR bullshit.
Now they speak about ration ram/rom (BR).
Math for ignorants 2X flops, 18 X ram/rom,
Anyway if true, HDD standart is a good new.

 

[ROG27]

You need compressed data to get faster loading of optical storage. Without that it'd be HDD only. Which would have been preferable I'm sure.

Perhaps this is what Sony is doing with the inclusion of a standard HDD? This might allow for caching and then streaming of uncompressed data more easily...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It'll help in that respect, and has a lot of other advantages, most noticeably giving customers somewhere to buy downloadable content onto!

 

[Ben-Nice]

The point was historically this has been the 'sweet spot' in terms of the disc:ram capacity ratio.

But what affect if any does this have on games?

 

[Titanio]

But what affect if any does this have on games?

We'll see in the next 5 years Some things are immediately obvious - better audio for example - whereas we could debate all day and night at this stage about how much capacity is required for assets like models and textures, levels etc, or the impact of better seek-times.

You need compressed data to get faster loading of optical storage. Without that it'd be HDD only. Which would have been preferable I'm sure.

This is very true, and worth remembering. I wonder, though, with increasingly aggressive compressions, where the point is where you stop compressing to improve load time, and are compressing to fit things on the disc.

 

[scooby_dooby]

What worries me is that there is so much compressed data on that disc that one of the Xenon cores is almost completely wrapped up in decompressing it all the time. That seems like an inefficient use of resources IMO.

it was like that on Kameo, an XBOX port and it had super fast load times, like 2-3 seconds max. The game wasn't designed to be multithreaded so they probably just used the CPU power where it was easiest.

 

[Qroach]

Originally Posted by ROG27
What worries me is that there is so much compressed data on that disc that one of the Xenon cores is almost completely wrapped up in decompressing it all the time. That seems like an inefficient use of resources IMO.

Why are you worrying about development decisions instead of playing games?