*merge/rename* The Importance of an H.D.D. (e.g. caches, streaming etc)

Ok, it's a series of installer screens, not a screen saver. It seems to introduce the (old) DMC characters. Do you need to play the previous DMC games to understand this one ? I have not played a single one before.

 

I watched it once through. But it keeps looping over and over. The install is that long.

I think your thinking of Nero. Nero is the young punk in DMC4. Dante is like a middle aged man in this one. He has a more grown up attitude now. While still staying a very arrogant show off.


I'm liking it a lot so far. Played it past the 2nd boss fight now. The graphics are just jaw dropping at times. It's really quite an impressive sight.

The demo was essentially the very beginning of the game minus the cut scenes and the "training" level. But the big difference is the demo character was fully upgraded with all the skills as far as I can tell. Your intro character is pretty weak in comparison.

It does carry over one problem that the other games had though. And that is that some times I just get very lost! I was running around aimlessly for about an hour not able to figure out what to do. Only because a bad camera angle obsuced a key gameplay object from me!

The accomplishments on the PS3 version seem quite well done. You can see your accomplishments as well as the time/date you got them in a section they call "History". And they also let you look at the "History" of anyone on your friends list. There is a world wide ranking like Ninja Gaiden Sigma. I don't know if it's cross platform or just PS3 players.

 

We have now been told by Insomniac Games that the use of streaming from the HDD has allowed them to almost double their texture budget.

I think that it's becoming obvious that streaming textures from the HDD is CRUCIAL.

Also, I think it's now obvious that some of the developers that complain about the PS3 having less available RAM than the 360 don't want to work on a texture streaming system.

http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/articles/1107/texture_streaming.php

 

You're completely misinterpreting the presentation.

Whether you have textures on the HDD or the optical disk doesn't matter. You need to have all necessary textures in the RAM at the same time to render a scene because a hard drive isn't fast enough for single frame latencies.

That means to use HDD's speed advantage over BR, you have to either install all the game's texture data to the HDD in an initial install step or you have to copy all of a level's texture data to the hardrive before each level, thus resulting in longer loading times than streaming directly from disk.

What Insomniac did was first stream the low res textures from BR to RAM, so the level can start, then start streaming the high res textures to the HDD (again it's from BR) in the background. You also have the currently needed high res textures going from the HDD to the streaming buffer in the RAM when they appear, but these are limited by the BR transfer, so you'll still have pop-in identical to a HDD-less console.

A minute into the level when this is done you won't need to load any textures from BR for the level, but the advantages of this are small. The streaming buffer has the high res maps of the areas around you. As you move around, the furthest high-res textures are removed and those for the distant region in the direction of travel are loaded in. Whether these are loaded by BR or HDD doesn't really matter (see below for more).

Nowhere does Insomniac say that the HDD allowed them to double their textures. Streaming is what did that, and you can stream directly from BR if you want to.

Texture streaming does nothing to address the amount of textures that you can have access to for any given frame, which is what determines the maximum quality of the textures that you will see on the screen.

The difference between BR/DVD streaming and HDD streaming occurs when moving very rapidly, i.e. the appearance of new data on the horizon due to player movement is faster than the BR/DVD bandwidth available.

So even with the best streaming, more RAM for the streaming buffer will improve image quality.

 

Maybe I don't understand but doesn't this streaming framework mean that artist are able to make more varied game levels/environments because now they have access to more textures that can be streamed in on time to give the user a seemless experience

Something that is not possible with only the bandwidth of an optical drive?

 

That only happens when you need new data at a very high rate.

R&C has 300MB of textures per level. Lets say you can only get 5MB/s out of the optical drive for textures. Can you really move your character's radius of high-detail visibility through the whole level in one minute? This is what I mean by fast movement.

Whether you stream from HDD or BR, you will still have data pop into RAM. The devs/artists are supposed to make this pop-in invisible, i.e. behind currently visible objects or too distant to notice. BR will take a couple seconds longer than a HDD to get it done, but you'll only see this difference if that area becomes visible in that time.

 

Mintmaster,

You made a very good point. I was mistaken about a couple of things. First, Resistance Fall of Man used no texture streaming whatsoever. Secondly, the texture streaming mentioned in the article is indeed using both the Blue Ray and HDD.

However, I disagree with you about one thing. It's clear to me that by almost doubling your texture budget you can dramatically improve the quality of a game.


http://www.videogamer.com/news/16-11-2007-6901.html

VideoGamer.com: Moving onto Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction, am I right in thinking you've used an enhanced version of that engine?

BH: Yes. There were many major tech improvements between the two games. In addition to the ones I mentioned earlier, Ratchet & Clank on the PS3 uses texture streaming which allows us to get about 150 MB of extra VRAM in each level. This allows for much higher resolution textures than we used in Resistance, as well as more texture variety. The tech team also created much more advanced shader technology than what we had a year ago, and that has made a huge improvement to the look of our characters and environments. Improvements to lighting technology also helped a lot. Even though we weren't going for ultra-realism, the improved lighting really helps the overall look. There are literally hundreds of tech improvements I'm not listing here, including the massive optimizations that allowed us to run at 60 frames per second. The amount of action we're able to put on the screen at 60 frames per second really dwarfs what we were able to do a year ago at 30 frames per second. What's most exciting is the way things are headed right now I think we'll see just as big a leap from our second generation engine to our third as we did from the first to second.

 

Well put it this way, streaming textures from HDD will make room for more streaming bandwidth for BD. Its not just textures that need streaming. You should get quality improvement overall.

 

I never said it doesn't help. Texture streaming is very, very important for good graphics, especially in very large worlds.

What I am saying is that it doesn't replace VRAM. In that quote he is effectively saying a 512MB PS3 with texture streaming is about equal to a 662MB PS3 without texture streaming. However, this is a useless comparison, because all consoles - including both this hypothetical 662MB PS3 and the Xbox 360 - can use texture streaming.

You can't compensate for less available RAM with a standard HDD except in very limited scenarios.

 

That's true, and I made sure to mention this in my previous posts.

The usefulness of this, though, is hard to quantify and certainly doesn't affect a lot of game scenarios. It all depends on how fast data enters the periphery of your current window in a virtual world. A racing game with a level too big to fit into RAM but small enough to cover in a short time is one possibility.

 

While that is true, the amount of texture data that needs to be accessible for any given frame is orders of magnitude lower then what existing data structures afford us for the same quality.

Current hw does allow to change data representations to the point where quality limitations are dictated by external rather then internal storage. Whether that's the best way to go or not is debatable though.

 

Someone is betting a fair amount of cash (id) that it could be the best way to go .

 

Just to be clear, I don't mean the exact amount of data needed in a given frame, as per Carmack's blurb a while ago talking about virtualization and bytes per pixel. I'm talking about the amount of data that could be visible within a timeframe of about a second or so (so that means in all directions, and maybe with zooming).

In that context I'm pretty sure more RAM is still useful to achieve texel-per-pixel fidelity. Then there's things like game state which can gobble up a lot of space too, especially in expansive worlds with persistent interactions.

 

Well ultimately you have to decide if you have time coherency or not within the given context. If not, there's no way to go around what's physically in ram anyway, but IMO most games don't impose such restrictions by design.
Ie. ok, zooming but within some reasonable limits

That much is obvious. As I noted, the tradeoffs that you get by pushing limits to external medium are debatable in the first place.

There is no question it works very well under some scenarios, but that's not exactly what I meant by "the best way to go".

 

Sorry to crash the thread, however.

I always wondered why from PS2 onward that niether company has included standard Ram into the console for a buffer. Why didn't the 360 or PS3 just throw in 1GB DDR2 (about $30) for caching? A buffer from System/Video Ram to the Hard Drive/Optical Disc would seem like a logical step to improve detail and load times.

I wouldn't mind waiting 1-2 minutes when I turn on a game so that I never have to wait again and the game is more visually appealing. To me throwing large amounts of cheap ram onto a console has more benifits then the cost of adding 20GB extra for hard drive storage.

Dregun

 

$30 is A LOT.

$30 times 100 mln PS2s = 3 billion dollars

$30 means you have to sell three more games per console to justify the expense. Do you think the Guitar Hero / Singstar / Wii Sports crowd (casual gamers with few games) will buy three additional games just because their favorite one was with crisper textures?

 

This is a very important consideration for the design and speccing out of all consoles - what hardware do you put in at what price? Traditionally companies have gone with expensive, cutting edge hardware for both performance (due to competition) and longevity. If they could get away with cheaper hardware I'm sure they would. Why did XB360 have 512 MB RAM and PS3 have 512 MB RAM? Because for both of them, the other did. The advantage of having more RAM at more expense would be offset by the losses due to a higher price or greater losses per unit. So it's a balancing act. Do you go with less RAM and have inferior looking games? If so will that downgrade affect your machine enough to seriously impact sales? Do you chuck in more RAM to secure the best-looking system? Will that win over enough custom to justify the large costs?

I think the case for an HDD as standard is far better justified now with download content. It's not just a game improving mechanic even though it has benefit with streamed content, but a revenue generating mechanic too. The case for other improvements, faster GPU, more RAM, etc. are far harder to justify as the benefit to games, their only benefit, doesn't come with as much revenue generating potential.

 

I think I misread you. If you agree with me that more RAM is needed to achieve the best quality, then why do you think current consoles are able to move limitations to external storage?

 

I wasn't saying Sony should eat the cost of the ram, console manufacturers (besides Nintendo) eat enough costs on these machines as it is. However looking back at the Card Reader and 2 extra USB ports it would seem as though replacing that with RAM would have been the better trade off. I'm also sure they wouldn't have had to pay $30 for 1GB of RAM, just like they don't pay $25 for a card reader and $15 for USB ports. This conversation isn't really geared toward the casuals anyways as the games that will benifit the most from these improvements are the ones where these "people" want that extra detail.

Again I think if the consumer had to pay $15-$20 more for the PS3 because it had 1GB of Cache ram it wouldn't be that hard of a sell, considering the cost of the console to begin with. I think Sony, MS and Nintendo would be hard pressed not to include some sort of high speed cache (general ram) into their next consoles. How much better would games be now if we had 1GB of cache available to feed the expensive and fast system and video ram we have today compared to the lowly optical drive and slightly faster HDD?

 

I think the harddrive definitely was the better investment here. Together with the BluRay it offers a lot of streaming options that really improve load-times. Especially the HDD I think should help not having to keep as much in RAM as you'd otherwise have to. And of course it has all those other advantages that Shifty mentioned.