Possible memory expansion for GC/IGNCube

[Guden Oden]

I did say first "person shooters". I also didn't say streaming altogether isn't useful.

What's so unique and special about FPSes that makes them unsuited for streaming? Can you please explain that, because I would really like to know.

And this "what if Flipper needs something NOW" sillyness, you accused me earlier of inventing reasons, well aren't you doing exactly that?

How often do you access your entire memoryspace on a per-frame basis anyway, know of ANY title that does that? If you need something NOW, be it a texture, a model etc (which software developers of course could control when and how it would be used and make sure it is present in memory ahead of time), it would be a relatively SMALL piece of data.

Remember when we used to play games with dual voodoo2 boards sitting on a PCI bus? As I remember, those boards ran Q3A pretty well most things considered, and they had LESS bandwidth available to them (per card) than Flipper has from A-RAM. It wouldn't take long to fetch, say, a model for example.

 

[Fafalada]

yes I know... you can't get more data the the disk will let you access. which is why GTA 3 allowed a car to go faster then they could load the textures.

That sounds more like an oversight in game design to me, but anyway, point was that the memory speed is basically irellevant when you are streaming data from external drive which is several orders of magnitude slower.
ARam is slow, but it's still 30x faster then GC's drive.

I did say first "person shooters". I also didn't say streaming altogether isn't useful.

The benefits for a FPS are the same as for any other game - larger, seamless world. If your game design doesn't need a large or seamless world, you don't need to stream, but that has little to do with choice of camera.

 

[Clashman]

What I meant by accessing graphical data at 81 megs per second was what if flipper needed something right away.

Well, adding ARam might not be as good has having an extra shitload of uber fast DDR2 w/ 20gb/s bandwidth, but I fail to see how it would be worse than streaming off of the disc, which is much slower. If Flipper needed something right away, and needed to stream it off the disc, no matter how you slice it, it seems as though it would be FAR worse than uploading it off of ARam. Or am I missing something here?

 

[Tagrineth]

Remember when we used to play games with dual voodoo2 boards sitting on a PCI bus? As I remember, those boards ran Q3A pretty well most things considered, and they had LESS bandwidth available to them (per card) than Flipper has from A-RAM. It wouldn't take long to fetch, say, a model for example.

Actually a single Voodoo2 has 2.4GB/sec across the whole board, and Voodoo2 SLI has 4.8GB/sec, quite a lot more than Flipper.

But, Voodoo2 has no texture cache, no bandwidth saving techniques...

V2 is more limited by its 8MB texture memory, at least in Q3A (runs 60fps one notch below full textures - but full textures bring it to about 20).

*resident 3dfx geek*

 

[nobie]

Remember when we used to play games with dual voodoo2 boards sitting on a PCI bus? As I remember, those boards ran Q3A pretty well most things considered, and they had LESS bandwidth available to them (per card) than Flipper has from A-RAM. It wouldn't take long to fetch, say, a model for example.

Actually a single Voodoo2 has 2.4GB/sec across the whole board, and Voodoo2 SLI has 4.8GB/sec, quite a lot more than Flipper.

But, Voodoo2 has no texture cache, no bandwidth saving techniques...

V2 is more limited by its 8MB texture memory, at least in Q3A (runs 60fps one notch below full textures - but full textures bring it to about 20).

*resident 3dfx geek*

I got the impression he was talking about bandwidth across the PCI bus, in other words about 128 MB/s. But yeah, thrashing textures over PCI is a sure way to make any game chug. Even with AGP 8x it's a performance killer.

 

[Guden Oden]

Actually a single Voodoo2 has 2.4GB/sec across the whole board

Well, that's not quite what I was talking about...

 

[Bohdy]

I found Teasy's post quite clear and easy to understand..... am I the exception or is Qroach?

Anyway, yes more A-ram would not be a bad thing for all the reasons Teasy and Guden metioned... but its doubtful if it will ever be a reality at this point in time. IMO Nintendo should have spent the extra $$ to have more from the get go despite the possible manufacturing cost increase; it would have payed off in the long run.

 

[Guden Oden]

I don't see Nintendo releasing just a memory expansion, they might do it if it is in combination with some other peripheral, a harddrive that goes in the same slot as the GB Player maybe. Though I find it doubtful Nintendo will actually release something like that, especially this "late" into the console's life. Still, it would be an intriguing concept, and I think developers would be intrigued too if it meant having 48MB of A-RAM. That's not a resource you just ignore because it's a bit slow.

 

[Tahir2]

More ARAM?

What a waste of time that would be.

Above post awarded the "knee-jerk response of the day" prize.

Congratulations, Tahir! It was surely well deserved!

*hands over trophy*

I dont want a trophy.. gimme money man!

And the fact stands that more ARAM would be a total waste of time... thank you very much.

 

[Guden Oden]

And the fact stands that more ARAM would be a total waste of time...

Why is that a "fact"? Especially considering that quote from Retro regarding A-RAM, etc.

 

[Tahir2]

Ah it is not a fact at all but me being an eejit
I guess it would eliminate disc load times considerably etc. but other than that I think Nintendo got it right with their initial configuration of 16MB of A-RAM, considering the cost and return of adding an additional amount of A-RAM.

 

[Squeak]

It would be quite unlike Nintendo to make it impossible to have a fully equipped machine all the time. I mean if they released another piece of hardware, that uses the High speed port, it would be very clumsy to have to plug in another peripheral every time you wanted to use the other function.
So I think by the release of the GameBoy Player, the high-speed port is effectively occupied, and is not going to be used for any future extra hardware.

That leaves the serial port (btw. does anyone know the speed of the different ports underneath the Cube?), which is not fast enough for graphics hardware or RAM.
Maybe we’ll get some advanced new controller, or similar to plug into that.

 

[Fox5]

yes I know... you can't get more data the the disk will let you access. which is why GTA 3 allowed a car to go faster then they could load the textures.

That sounds more like an oversight in game design to me, but anyway, point was that the memory speed is basically irellevant when you are streaming data from external drive which is several orders of magnitude slower.

I don't know about the PS2 versions, but in the PC versions with a fast computer, just turn off vsync, and while I don't think the game plays any faster, you still go fast enough that the textures and sometimes the environment don't have time to load. In fact, it will usually take quite a while to load if you go really far. If you go to far before letting it load, the game will crash. Also, with MultiTheftAuto, as you're teleported around the city after death, you will spawn and get to watch the game load textures.

BTW, at least the n64 ram expansion pack expanded system ram. A gamecube ram expansion would have even less benefit, as it seems the only thing it could be used for it so reduce load times, not really a worthy upgrade to split the user base over.(I guess they could sell it as an optional accesory and games could either have load times, or not have load times, though it would be useful it nintendo wanted to release more emulated n64 games on gamecube)

 

[cthellis42]

Most PC devs probably don't pay as much attention to CD steaming, though, since they always have the hard drive to install onto. (And there are a myriad of CD/DVD-ROM drive types to cover.)

 

[Colourless]

Not only do PC devs need to cope with different types of drives, they also need to cope for the badly configured systems with the cd drives set to PIO mode. Trying to stream from a PIO drive is a very easy way to make your game unplayable.

 

[darkblu]

Not only do PC devs need to cope with different types of drives, they also need to cope for the badly configured systems with the cd drives set to PIO mode. Trying to stream from a PIO drive is a very easy way to make your game unplayable.

.. and i thought the typical pc dev mindest was 'cram everything in core and hope for fewer page misses' : )

fact is, sreaming on a pc is tough, as your streaming is as good as the accuracy of your access-times predictions, and the 'pc platform' (i suspect an oximoron) being the "king" of predictability, one could easily see why that mindset prevails (or at least used to not many moons ago).

 

[Megadrive1988]

Nintendo should have opted for 48 MB of 1T-SRAM instead of 24 MB.

 

[oli2]

Nintendo should have opted for 48 MB of 1T-SRAM instead of 24 MB.

Could you detail, please ?

Would there have been a bigger gap than PS2 using 64 Mo Rambus or Xbox using 128 Mo ?

Thanks

 

[Guden Oden]

"Mo"?

 

[GameCat]

"Mo"?

MegaOctet. It's the french abbreviation for megabyte. I have no idea why french speaking people use french abbreviations when speaking/writing english, but thats what they do. It's the only reason I know what Mo means, I certainly don't speak french.