More on next-gen games disk space: DAVID BRABEN (Frontier Developments)
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inefficient
Veteran
The PC version of UT2004 takes up ~6GB of HD space. I have it installed right now.
The PC version of Morrowind takes up only 1GB of HD space.
I don't want to have to repeat what has been said many times before. But when you double texture resolutions, your space requirments go up 4x. You should not expect linear growth in space requirments when thinking about the jump from this generation to the next.
I think the 2+disc xbox360 games are something we are just going to have to deal with.
The PC version of Morrowind takes up only 1GB of HD space.
I don't want to have to repeat what has been said many times before. But when you double texture resolutions, your space requirments go up 4x. You should not expect linear growth in space requirments when thinking about the jump from this generation to the next.
I think the 2+disc xbox360 games are something we are just going to have to deal with.
inefficient said:
I would like to see how that actually is. Everyone is thinking that it IS linear. Why exactly is there a 4x growth?
inefficient
Veteran
BlueTsunami said:
256x256 = 65536
512x512 = 262144
1024x1024 = 1048576
See where this goes? The growth is quadratic.
Not to mention we will have addtional space requirments due to extensive use of normal maps.
inefficient said:
Thing is, are Texture Resolutions for current PC games going to doubled for consoles? I would think that they would use the same resolutions for textures that would be used for PCs on these consoles. Unless developers such as Epic are proactivley using double the resolution of current PC texture sizes in their next gen games. If thats so and since, as you said, the growth is quadratic then even at 15GB your almost hitting the ceiling with certain games.
mckmas8808
Legend
Alpha_Spartan said:
I wish I could bet you $1000 dollars that you will be wrong. And instead of saying 10GB you should say more than 8GB. It seems to me that the people that are actually PROGRAMMING on the X360 are the ones saying this stuff. I haved seen one PS3 dev say it yet. So tell me Alpha and Scooby, if X360 devs see themselves needing more space with 1st generation games, why won't other devs in 2006 or 2007?
mckmas8808 : You place too much emphasis on what ends up in reports and interviews.
There are >100 games for XB360 coming out, and we've heard from like a handful of devs, no? That's not statiscally representative of the entire development community. And it could also be that various journalists at various shows got talking with various devs and scoped out which one's had something to say that would make for interesting reading (which leads to forum arguments!). Perhaps out of 50 devs spoken to, they found only 2 who said that storage would be a problem. In which case, they'd interview those two and get some material. No point interviewing the other 48 who boringly say 'yeah it's fine, we've got no problems with XB360.'
I'm not saying anything about whether space is an issue or not, but how much faith you place in journalism. Please remember that the expressed opinions of a few devs cannot sensibly be taken as indicative of the conseus of the whole development community. The more voices raised in support of an opinion, the more weight is given to it as a general developer-wide opinon. 1 or 2 saying DVD isn't enough is just their POV. 6 or 7 is something to to think will have more impact. 15+ means it's definitely a major concern. At the moment we only have a few individual's personal opinions.
There are >100 games for XB360 coming out, and we've heard from like a handful of devs, no? That's not statiscally representative of the entire development community. And it could also be that various journalists at various shows got talking with various devs and scoped out which one's had something to say that would make for interesting reading (which leads to forum arguments!). Perhaps out of 50 devs spoken to, they found only 2 who said that storage would be a problem. In which case, they'd interview those two and get some material. No point interviewing the other 48 who boringly say 'yeah it's fine, we've got no problems with XB360.'
I'm not saying anything about whether space is an issue or not, but how much faith you place in journalism. Please remember that the expressed opinions of a few devs cannot sensibly be taken as indicative of the conseus of the whole development community. The more voices raised in support of an opinion, the more weight is given to it as a general developer-wide opinon. 1 or 2 saying DVD isn't enough is just their POV. 6 or 7 is something to to think will have more impact. 15+ means it's definitely a major concern. At the moment we only have a few individual's personal opinions.
mckmas8808
Legend
Shifty Geezer said:
Shifty you and some others sometimes take what I say out of context. My respond was in reference to what Alpha said. He said no more than 5 games will be more than 10GBs. I on the other hand disagree.
I brung up the x360 devs because 3 of them have already stated that more than one DVD9 would be used if they had the oppurtunity too (obviously not in those exact words). So too me his no more than handful goes right out of the window. How can three different teams say what they said before the system comes out and Alpha's prediction number still be correct?
There's no way that he can possibly be right. There is 0.00001% that he maybe right. Maybe even less than that. But yes I realize that the ratio for devs raising concerns is pretty small.
Yes I s'pose so. If three games already are limited by DVD, that suggests plenty more will follow. But at the same time it could be only a small percentage of the total number of games. 'Handful' is too subjective to be argued 
mckmas8808
Legend
Agreed.
chroniceyestrain
Newcomer
I think its highly unlikely that consoles with 512MB of RAM will be using ultra large textures that pc games will be using.
Mordecaii said:
There are cards out now with 512MB of RAM, and cards coming soon (apparently) with 1GB of RAM. Most games probably won't take advantage of that in the near term, but some may have special modes to do so. Over the lifetime of these consoles, more games on PC certainly will take advantage of that space "from scratch".
Ok, let me ask you this... What percentage of cards out there do you think have 512 MB of RAM? Even those cards that do also have 256 MB versions that are cheaper and run the exact same speed in games so obviously having enough space for textures is not a problem on them. Heck, 128 MB cards still run great in most games.
aldo said:
Yea this is a bad thing really... MS should have made the hd standard in my opinion... But The PS3 will have this problem too considering it dont have a hard drive plus blueray has a slower transfer rate than DVD drives.. That said the additional space on blueray does allow for more uncompressed video, audio and textures.....
shred5 said:
The XBox also has this problem since not all XBox's will have a HD.
It's been mentioned here a couple of times that the transfer rates is not the problems. It's the seek times. And the BR player should have a huge advantage there since it can have a lot mure duplicate data because of the extra storage.
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