Next Gen bottlenecks (Volition interview)
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I don't get how hdd transfer speeds would not help..?
What is the transfer rate of 360/ps3 hdd? Seems to me it should be well above 12xdvd and 2x BR. Aside from that issue he's basicly saying he needs more ram and that they tapped 90% of 360's power and that their next game will blow SR out of the water
How is that possible if they are currently "utilizing 90%" of the systems power?Only thing I can think of is they are using 90% but they are not using it very efficiently and hence the 90% figure is a bit misleading sorta like saying I'm 90% busy at work but 30% of that time is drinking coffe, eating snacks, and browsing the net.
as much as i respect the volition guys, those CPU figures citation was rather hanging in the air. the only thing it tells us is that their cpu resource does something other than idling 90% of the time. which taken in the context of SMP indicates that your threads across the cores are not suffereing from (too much) false concurrency. but that's about all. IOW they may be looping mindlessly altogether and you'll get a nice 100% 'utilisation' with little job done : )
>>What is the transfer rate of 360/ps3 hdd? Seems to me it should be well above 12xdvd and 2x BR.>>
The transfer rate is not actually that much higher. These are 5400 RPM drives. The largest improvement is in seek times.
Also, 360 sports a 12X DVD while Xbox had what, 4X? So there has been an improvement. (Wiki lists the Xbox DVD speed at "2-5X", what does that mean?). Probably not enough to keep pace though is the rub. RAM increased by 8X. Also I understand speed increases in optical disc drives are not linear, so 12X != three times 4X read speed. Anybody have an idea of the true increase from 4X DVD to 12X?
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The transfer rate is not actually that much higher. These are 5400 RPM drives. The largest improvement is in seek times.
Also, 360 sports a 12X DVD while Xbox had what, 4X? So there has been an improvement. (Wiki lists the Xbox DVD speed at "2-5X", what does that mean?). Probably not enough to keep pace though is the rub. RAM increased by 8X. Also I understand speed increases in optical disc drives are not linear, so 12X != three times 4X read speed. Anybody have an idea of the true increase from 4X DVD to 12X?
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Not sure anyone outside Sony knows what exact model number of harddrive will be, but a 40MB/platter drive's going to be pretty damn pathetic as far as transfer rate's concerned. At least by modern standards. And we're talking 5400RPM spindle speed too I'll wager, not 7200. There's even slight loadtimes on the 360 when starting up certain arcade titles...
Yeah, it'll be faster than that. Personally, I don't know what the dude's on about, if they need to throw out data faster than the DVD unit in the 360 can shovel it in (and 12x DVD is faster than 2x BR), then they're doing something wrong. They'd run out of disc space in way less than an hour at 12x DVD speed, that wouldn't make for a very long game...
If they could stream a continuous world on PS2 in the Jak / Ratchet games, then surely streaming is perfectly possible on 360 and PS3 as well. They need to do more algorithmic stuff if loadtimes are holding them back.
90% in a first-gen title? *COUGH*bullshit*AHEM*and that they tapped 90% of 360's power and that their next game will blow SR out of the water
If their next game's going to blow this thing out of the water, then per definition they're not tapping 90% out of the damn thing already.
That, or their art for this game sucks even though the tech might be outstanding, and I don't think they'll freely admit to that! Having built streaming games.... it's hard.
I suspect what they are getting at is that your graphics end up constrained by what you can read rather than what you could draw. There are a lot of ways to approach it, and I suspect that doing it the obvious (easy) way on something with a DVD drive and 512Megs of RAM would be hideously constraining.
I suspect what they are getting at is that your graphics end up constrained by what you can read rather than what you could draw. There are a lot of ways to approach it, and I suspect that doing it the obvious (easy) way on something with a DVD drive and 512Megs of RAM would be hideously constraining.
It is and they are doing that but they had a complaint about streaming on 360 and ps3 , I just don't remember what it was exactly.
Edit
Ah here it is
http://www.gamegeeknews.com/?p=245
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True, but the BD disc is supposedly very good at streaming (very consistent data flow across the disc), and most of the good games on the PS2 did a lot of streaming already, so at least in the console world, streaming is a well established technology. There was in fact an interview with some people from the Assassin's Creed team discussing this when asked about whether they would support the HDD. They said that their engine was all about streaming and they were very happy with the BD's performance with that, so they wouldn't need the HDD there - but they did think it would offer some nice possibilities for stuff like recording replays of your game.
I translated this a while ago from an interview with the Dutch OPM2, I think I even posted that somewhere on this forum so if you do a search you might find it around here somewhere.
ShootMyMonkey
Veteran
Are you suggesting that there's no reason for modern games to have more content? I suppose resolution doesn't cause an exponential increase in texture sizes, or that higher polycounts don't linearly increase the size of geometry, or that having more more texture layers and material complexity doesn't multiply the number of assets associated with a single object, or that having more complex bone structure and numerous animations doesn't really affect how much data is associated with a character.
Ummm... I'm lost as to how length of game translates into quantity of content. A streaming engine isn't constantly streaming new data which had never been touched before at every single second of gameplay.
I think you have a distorted image of just how fast optical drives are. The fastest a 12x DVD can go is still nothing to be proud of. And a 2x BR is still faster than the worst case for a 12x CAV drive, though quite a bit worse than the best case -- and it's nothing great either.
Hmmm... well, if we were to measure against the PS2, that means we need at least a 32x DVD reader with seek times and access times on par with a hard drive, if you buy this guy's ratio of having 8x the content.
Oh wait... I keep forgetting, there's this magic wand we have called compression, and it performs miracles. Nothing up my sleeve... presto! Oblivion fits on a floppy disk.
Sounds more like he wants 4+ GB of physical RAM so that streaming isn't really necessary.
The PS3 is likely worse at streaming data from optical media than 360.
The transfer rates are more or less comparable, but the Bluray seek times are much worse on the last set of benchmarks I saw.
Streaming games generally spend more time seeking for data than they do actually reading it.
Could he, by 'transfer speed', be referring to the general problem of getting the right data off the DVD within a reasonable amount of time? I’ve seen several developer comments referencing having to use extensive content duplication on the disc to bring load times under control because seeking is so expensive. The latest being Prey, for which they mentioned going from load times of ~5 minutes to <45 seconds. Of course, the tradeoff is less unique content, and even with a HD the loading times will still tend to be significantly slower than on a PC.
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Load times are just a packaging issue, if you have load times of 5 minutes you have a real problem. Your either loading thousands of individual assets or you have something in your load sequence that is taking a long time. Most like the former.
In a streaming game some data will likely be duplicated, the question is what data and how you duplicate it. Given the large memories (relatively) of X360 and PS3, you'd probably want to keep some sort of semi permanent large cache to work from. If you have data with none obvious lifetimes and unpredictable load sequences this can be a real problem to optimise for.
Personally I've seen little benefit from duplicating entire "streamed blocks" on the disc.
But you have some room for redundancy, I'm sure. Besides, the BD can actually be used in two different modes, one optimised for better seek times, one for better transfer speeds. Did the set of benchmarks you saw take that into account?
Resistance is going to be an interesting test-case to watch, as from the interviews (and videos, imho) we can see that they're using a fair amount of data, so I'll be interested to see how well they can stream stuff. I'm betting on that they'll be able to do so pretty well, considering their pedigree.
And ShootMyMonkey, actually the 360, having only a 7.4Gb DVD at its disposal, then the improvement in drive speed should normally get you better load-times compared to the Xbox, imho. That a game doesn't probably means too little time to optimise this part in the coding stage, just as the team from MotoGP admitted they lacked time for and were embarrassed about.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
I cannot say how much i totally agree with that.
be it for Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii or PS3.
I so very much hope that in the following generation, we move to solid-state media.
something like this: no more slow optical discs, no matter what speed they are, they're always slow. let harddrives and/or solidstate take over the role of optical media. let external RAM take over the position of hardrives, and let on-die memory take over the position of external RAM. follow what I'm saying? every stage of transfer needs to get faster, not just CPUs and GPUs.
edit:
applauds wildly
16 GB of RAM for next-gen please
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Disk capacity isn't quite the issue for load times. It's filling up the RAM. The Xbox only has 64MB to fill up. The Xbox 360 has 8x that much to fill but only with a drive rated 3x faster. Even if you don't need to fill up the entire 512MB to start playing, a fair chunk of it would likely still have to be loaded due to increased texture sizes.
ShootMyMonkey
Veteran
For an equal amount of data, sure. And if you were playing an Xbox game on a 360, I think it's fair to say that would be the case. But loading 8-10x the content with only a 3x faster drive which has seek times probably less than 20% better than Xbox or PS2... Particularly when streaming, and seek times are going to hurt you the most -- it doesn't really mean much to be able to read 1 MB in 1 ms if it takes 200 ms to actually get to where that 1 MB is located.
It's another presumed magic wand in my book. It's one of those things that is utterly fantastic for a tiny percentage of problems.
The example of landscape geometry is a good one... landscape textures.... not so much. Works to an extent -- makes a good starting point, but in 100% of cases, a skilled artist can do better.
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