*merge/rename* The Importance of an H.D.D. (e.g. caches, streaming etc)
- Thread starter deepbrown
- Start date
I'm not exactly sure what you want with this topic, its on the borderline to trolling.
Texture streaming can be done perfectly without a HDD, its just a matter of how fast paced your game is, and how big textures your using.
Having a HDD is of course faster, given that you actually install the games on the console before you play.
There is however one big problem with a HDD, and that factors in when you start doing price reduction. The cost of manufacturing a HDD will "never" go down, unlike silicon chips, the manufacturing costs is pretty much the same, no matter what you do.
Edit: NOTICE THAT TOPIC STARTER EDITED AND COMPLETELY REVAMPED THE FIRST POST (where he questioned MS competence by releasing something without a HDD and so on) SO DONT GIVE ME A NEG REP.
Texture streaming can be done perfectly without a HDD, its just a matter of how fast paced your game is, and how big textures your using.
Having a HDD is of course faster, given that you actually install the games on the console before you play.
There is however one big problem with a HDD, and that factors in when you start doing price reduction. The cost of manufacturing a HDD will "never" go down, unlike silicon chips, the manufacturing costs is pretty much the same, no matter what you do.
Edit: NOTICE THAT TOPIC STARTER EDITED AND COMPLETELY REVAMPED THE FIRST POST (where he questioned MS competence by releasing something without a HDD and so on) SO DONT GIVE ME A NEG REP.
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inefficient
Veteran
Time will tell.
But we do already know Uncharted and Ratchet and Clank Future will have zero loading times once the game initially loads. There are no loading transitions between levels. So PS3 games are already reaping the benefits of the built in HD with regard to streaming.
But die hard 360 owners could shrug off having to wait a few seconds for a level to load. Hell, most of them swear that they are not even going to be bothered when they have to insert disc 2 of 3.
But we do already know Uncharted and Ratchet and Clank Future will have zero loading times once the game initially loads. There are no loading transitions between levels. So PS3 games are already reaping the benefits of the built in HD with regard to streaming.
But die hard 360 owners could shrug off having to wait a few seconds for a level to load. Hell, most of them swear that they are not even going to be bothered when they have to insert disc 2 of 3.
SOcean2forever
Newcomer
where does the blu-ray drive come in the picture again?
Great
Life's all about compromises.
Some people are happy with the constant disk swapping and never ending load times on the 360, while some people don't seem to mind the PS3's "last gen" blurry textures.
PC owners have resolutions, textures and IQ that crush "next gen" consoles into the ground, but they have to be prepared not to mind games crashing before they have even been run, or having to upgrade their PC every level of every game.
Wii games don't even have graphics.
Right, I've done my bit to speed this thread on its way to its inevitable conclusion, who wants to take over?
Life's all about compromises.
Some people are happy with the constant disk swapping and never ending load times on the 360, while some people don't seem to mind the PS3's "last gen" blurry textures.
PC owners have resolutions, textures and IQ that crush "next gen" consoles into the ground, but they have to be prepared not to mind games crashing before they have even been run, or having to upgrade their PC every level of every game.
Wii games don't even have graphics.
Right, I've done my bit to speed this thread on its way to its inevitable conclusion, who wants to take over?
You don't have to install the whole game, can't you just cache the textures? I think they mentioned this in the Drake video.
Since the number of people who play a 360 without a HD is probably very very small they should have just made it standard, but marketing won out over engineering.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
IMO this topic should be closed.
Caching textures is exactly the same as installing.
You store stuff on the harddrive. You might not call it "installing" but thats whats happening.
Not necessarily true. If the game writes textures to the HDD on the fly, it's not installing. Temporary data is specifically a cache - copy files as needed from optical disc to HDD, and load from HDD as needed into RAM. When you switch off, these files are erased, or stored until some other game overwrites them.
Trolling. It was a serious question about texture streaming and whether an HDD is needed for it. So your opinion is that you don't need it and there can be no popin without an HDD?
So if the game is 20GB on the BD you have to install all 20GB to the HD?
Sorry I wanted this to be a serious discussion. One I cant find being discussed anywhere else. I have editted my post to reflect this
But it's happening on the fly or in parallel to avoid the negative effects of "normal" streaming which is exactly the texture pop in or late load you see in current games.
Don't take his comment out of context. Install a game or use a cache on the HDD it is still a write operation, data is written to the HDD.
A cache is meant to be a buffer to speed up loading of data, PC has the whole game installed on the HDD which is faster than if it would have to stream from the DVD(s), consoles uses cache for on the fly caching of used data for that level/scene. Some games for xbox360 supports the HDD to improve the loading speeds of the game like Oblivion.
But becouse it is not default it means that the devs cannot expect all to have HDD and thus can't use it for other than speed up loading times.
True the console reads both from the media disc and the HDD and thus there are 2 streams, and 2 streams to load in data from is better than 1. Neverthless the xbox had HDD and used the HDD for HALO2 and yet it had texture pop-ups. I think this was mainly becouse the HDD wasn't fast enough.
After what I've seen so far including the latest game show presentations i must say QFT!
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There's a new interview with a guy from Naughty Dog...and he mentions caching and he also mentions Blu-ray discs.
In fact lots of interviews here...and gameplay (but very poor quality) http://uk.gamespot.com/events/scea07/videos.html?tag=onthespot;more
scooby_dooby
Legend
Lol, and you think that's strange?
I think most normal people would fall into that category of not really being bothered by swapping a disc every 10+ hours.
Also, it's pretty amusing that you have to be a 'diehard' gamer, to deal with 2-3 second load times
I guess the 100million PS2 owners are pretty hardcore!For the record, I do think seamless games are great, and a standard HDD is very useful, games that use the HDD like Halo did are better for it. For example, the way Halo kept every single body, weapon, grenade, scorch mark intact for the entire level really improved the immersion factor.
I just had to comment on your silly assumptions/comments.
Your kinda over reading my statement, my point was that caching and installing is the exact same operation, YOU STORE INFORMATION in order to stream it from the HDD instead of an alternative media format, it being done on the fly, being permanent or temporary doesn't really matter.
What?
Of course this topic is borderline to trolling, the whole way its written is basically asking if MS sucks for not implementing HDD as standard.
Your even asking if MS did bad doing so.
Editing your post now, and then acting like you don't know what im talking about is kinda silly
Having a HDD is of course an advantage in terms of streaming.
As far as asking if my opinion its needed or not without having popin or not is rather silly, there are games that are streaming without having pop-in and not using the HDD. Its just a matter of having texture's of a bad enough quality that streaming is quick enough, or have a slow enough paced game that the streaming can keep up.
Having a HDD storing textures, lets you have higher texture quality\reduces pop in.
Crackdown has 0 pop-in. Which of course results in worse texture quality\lod\drawline or whatever .
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