Meeting with Phil Harrison today

[expletive]

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.

How do you know a whole Xenon core is being used to decompress data? Or are you saying a % of one Xenon core is being used to decompress data? The way you worded it sounded like you are saying that 33% of the total 360 CPU power is being used to decompress data...

Does anyone know how much space the PC version takes up? Is it the same?

 

[dskneo]

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.

well thats weird because i saw videos and counted >20secs loading time.... never saw 2 secs

 

[hey69]

How do you know a whole Xenon core is being used to decompress data? Or are you saying a % of one Xenon core is being used to decompress data? The way you worded it sounded like you are saying that 33% of the total 360 CPU power is being used to decompress data...

Does anyone know how much space the PC version takes up? Is it the same?

oblivion is one dvd

 

[ROG27]

How do you know a whole Xenon core is being used to decompress data? Or are you saying a % of one Xenon core is being used to decompress data? The way you worded it sounded like you are saying that 33% of the total 360 CPU power is being used to decompress data...

Does anyone know how much space the PC version takes up? Is it the same?

I didn't mean a whole core. I said, "one of the Xenon cores is almost completely" meaning a large percentage of the one cores resources are dedicated to streaming decompression, which is rather hardware intensive IIRC.

 

[Mordecaii]

Oblivion takes up 4.5 GB on my hard drive. Additionally, all the files (textures, sounds, etc) are compressed together. For Morrowind, the textures and sounds were not compressed into a larger file... I wonder if they did it due to space concerns or due to finding it easier to manage less files...

 

[ROG27]

Does anyone know if decompressing textures has anything to do with the stuttering in the LOD in a game like Oblivion?

 

[Mmmkay]

Does anyone know if decompressing textures has anything to do with the stuttering in the LOD in a game like Oblivion?

"Meeting with Phil Harrison today"

 

[Shifty Geezer]

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.

Well on PS3, the moment you compress anything!

 

[Titanio]

Well on PS3, the moment you compress anything!

I think you mean the opposite i.e. probably never! Or maybe I should say, when do you start compressing beyond the norm to fit stuff on a disc versus improving load-time?

My guess is some have already crossed that point on 360, and it'll probably be the case generally and increasingly, fairly soon. Compression is likely to only get more aggressive.

 

[superguy]

Dont forget that Blu-Ray will likely be 2X in PS3, meaning about twice as slow streaming as the 12X DVD in Xbox360.

 

[Titanio]

Dont forget that Blu-Ray will likely be 2X in PS3, meaning about twice as slow streaming as the 12X DVD in Xbox360.

Streaming is a function of seektime and bandwidth.

A 12x DVD has more bandwidth than a 2x Blu-ray drive, but not twice as much, and there's the question of whether Blu-ray's would be a constant read-rate versus perhaps a jumpy dvd transfer rate which bound you to its minimum.

Seek time could be significantly lower on Blu-ray with data replication.

 

[DUALDISASTER]

Does anyone know if decompressing textures has anything to do with the stuttering in the LOD in a game like Oblivion?

This could very well be the case. Same thing happened with Halo 2...well kinda! But i could see processing time for the decompressing of the textures could result in lagging in the LOD code.

 

[Phil]

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

Perhaps because this is a technology orientated forum?