Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[Laa-Yosh]

If you're talking about Gears 1, it was famous for the delayed texture loading issue, and the slow movement speed transitions were also quite obvious. It wasn't about Epic being that much clever, or the game being that impressive in this regard.

If you really want to bring up an example for an outstanding accomplishment, choose Halo 1 instead, with its 1-second loading times within the main levels...

 

[Crossbar]

Except it already kind of did in X360 - Xenon is based on the very same Power architecture that the Power 7+ originates from

Not really, see Shiftys post, but that is beside the point. The point is that no console manufacturer want to haver IBM as the only producer of their chips. Your are not in a good position to discuss the price when there is just one seller and that is what would happen if you went with the IBM EDRAM process of today.

 

[Beef Stallmer]

If you're talking about Gears 1, it was famous for the delayed texture loading issue, and the slow movement speed transitions were also quite obvious. It wasn't about Epic being that much clever, or the game being that impressive in this regard.

If you really want to bring up an example for an outstanding accomplishment, choose Halo 1 instead, with its 1-second loading times within the main levels...

True, but bungie had an HDD at it's disposal, epic did not (or chose not to use it in case it was present).

Halo3 also has pretty good loading times, but it can use the hdd, plus the textures are a lot less detailed than gears of war 1 so to me it was less impressive anyway; maybe halo3 textures even fit in the ram without any streaming during a level? who knows..

 

[Laa-Yosh]

H3 didn't rely on the HDD either, there's a GDC talk on it IIRC; and you once again show the prime example of why talking about texture detail is silly - the game had huge open levels that Gears can't even dream about...

 

[Beef Stallmer]

H3 didn't rely on the HDD either, there's a GDC talk on it IIRC; and you once again show the prime example of why talking about texture detail is silly - the game had huge open levels that Gears can't even dream about...

H3 did rely on the HDD, you actually get worse loading times when installing the dvd to the hdd as a result. no GDC talk, rather.. real talk ;-)

No dreaming about open levels; you either have small, extremely detailed environments (gears) or large open levels with are less detailed (halo). Doesn't change the fact* that one of those allows for more texture detail, they both run on the same hardware do they not?

*unless they hire the Ice team, of course.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

The talk was about how they had to made sure to run on an Arcade system. Looking it up could be a good idea?

Texture detail is relative. H3 may use more texture data than Gears...

 

[Arwin]

If you're talking about Gears 1, it was famous for the delayed texture loading issue, and the slow movement speed transitions were also quite obvious. It wasn't about Epic being that much clever, or the game being that impressive in this regard.

If you really want to bring up an example for an outstanding accomplishment, choose Halo 1 instead, with its 1-second loading times within the main levels...

I thought it sounded more like Uncharted 1

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Maybe, but if you look at previous posts, he obviously meant Gears 1

 

[upnorthsox]

While i agree with most of your points, especially one i didnt include in the quote (the one about how to intelligently predict/precache/cover upcoming pieces of assets), i ask you once again to please forget about the "one minute or more" loading on current consoles. It's perfectly possible to load about 240MBs of textures in 14-15 seconds from a 2x blu ray, even faster from better optical drives (9sec) or even a slow hard drive (4sec). Actually, the second approach you mention is pretty much the most practical - you don't just have the opportunity to load in (in the background) textures, but other assets or game related data as well. Of course it's not nearly as optimal as virtual texturing, but for the moment, it's just a more managable way to go.

To be honest, i expect virtual texturing to become mainstream with the first hardware implementation, including I/O, de/recompression, filtering, etc.

Still, even with your numbers 2GBs would take over 72 seconds and 6GBs over 7 minutes to load from optical. These numbers are similar to what I see at work for an in memory database that takes about 20 minutes to load its 16GB into ram and that's coming from 15K rpm SAN drives.

I guess what I'd like to see next is discussion on what are the streaming options and what new techniques are possible for a platform that is designed with these in mind.

 

[Beef Stallmer]

Don't see why 8GB would be out of the question; games could preload a lot of data on that, even if the main ram pool is 4 GB, it would be feasible to have extra ram for preloading.

I am sure naughty dog could make uncharted 4 graphics in an open world environment with 8GB of ram

 

[RudeCurve]

I'm willing to bet that in 2020 4K will be like 2K today....many people will have 2K displays.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

so because e.g. Rage allows a huge lot of texture to go through limited memory, then memory limitation is now a thing of a past? every game will use megatexture or texture streaming?

That's not what I said at all.

one obvious thing is if you've got more memory, you will stream in textures earlier, and will discard them later. so less pop-in and less HDD or CD grinding in a given area.
I don't demean your point, sure there probably won't be 16GB ddr3 and going to war over it is weird.

Have you followed this thread? There's no complaint over an opposing POV, but it's being repeated ad nauseum to the detriment of the whole thread. If erick isn't adding anything new, what's the purpose of the raising the same tired notion if not to just mess up the discussion?

supersampling shaders? why not

You're not helping. erick's suggestion is to spend more money to get a better console. There's lots of discussion about why 4GBs is a valid compromise looking at business reasons, but he still repeats his point "just spend more money to make a better console". The business of how much hardware to squeeze into a console isn't really the subject of this thread.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

And it wasn't just "spend more money" but "spend more money on just the memory and abandon everything else"...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

IF the next gen does come with 8GB+ of RAM, I expect my loudest oponents to ban themselves for 2 years out of shame and for lack of foresight

No-one said 8GBs was impossible, just unlikely. You win no prize for picking one of three/four options and getting it right.

Don't see why 8GB would be out of the question; games could preload a lot of data on that, even if the main ram pool is 4 GB, it would be feasible to have extra ram for preloading.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!! Have you just ignored the last several days of discussion?!?!! About why 8GB is possible and would have benefits but would also have costs that may not work well in the console industry? So &*@#£ what if U4 would look better if it's cost Sony $500 million to enable that? (Don't debate that - it's already been had and this isn't the thread).

This is the subject that wouldn't die, not because there's anything hard about it but that no-one's paying any attention.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

4k resolution discussion moved here.

 

[hoho]

IF the next gen does come with 8GB+ of RAM, I expect my loudest oponents to ban themselves for 2 years out of shame and for lack of foresight

For the record, I never said consoles couldn't come with tons of RAM, just that simply increasing the amount of RAM to be more than what competitors have without also having higher bandwidth and computing power is extremely unlikely and not really cost-effective way of spending HW resources.

I am sure naughty dog could make uncharted 4 graphics in an open world environment with 8GB of ram

GTA3 was running relatively fine on PS2 I believe. It is possible to do open-world games using pretty much any resources you have, it'll just be a question how nice will it play.

I'm willing to bet that in 2020 4K will be like 2K today....many people will have 2K displays.

They might be somewhat common but I'm fairly certain the consoles won't support those resolutions by default. Assuming the consoles will have high enough bandwidth to display device to actually drive the 4k screens then maybe some devs do support it but at the cost of other stuff.

 

[V3]

Oh why stop at 8 GB, lets just make it 64 GB. So that the memory pool can fit the whole BD50 with room to spare for multiple frame buffer and other buffers, graphic engine may need. That way games won't have anymore loading time after the initial load time. That would be awesome to be honest. The console can do loading in the background while you're playing the game. Everything will be in memory after a few minutes. You won't need SSD with that much RAM.

 

[fehu]

Oh why stop at 8 GB, lets just make it 64 GB. So that the memory pool can fit the whole BD50

and what if they use holografic media?

 

[V3]

and what if they use holografic media?

Doesn't matter, cause most will be filled with 4k movies Those can be streamed from disc no problem. Game dataset will be less than 50 GB even on HVD.

Remember even with two generations of GPU improvement, GPU won't be able to handle 50 GB worth of data all at once. So even with HVD game dataset will be a lot less than what the disc can handle.

 

[hoho]

Game dataset will be less than 50 GB even on HVD.

Nah, let's just do as erick suggested and have devs distribute games with 4kx4x textures, it won't matter that 99% of the time the GPU will ignore the two highest resolution mipmaps