I don't follow...what do you mean?
RAGE : It Deserves its own thread now!
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I don't follow...what do you mean?
Ah ok. Storage is clearly a problem for them hence they had to go with two dvd's, but as he says there are additional benefits to doing that. I guess it's glass half full vs glass half empty thinking. Some will read JC's comments and assume that he automatically gimped the PS3 version. Others like me will read it and think he will pick the optimal setup, all factors considered. If losing 5% here gains 10% there, then maybe it's worth it. Being on the outside we have no clue what hurdles they are hitting in the grand scheme of things, but I assume they will make choices to best benefit the game.
This. Also, my sig.
Another factor people have to take into perspective is that unlike all other games today, Rage's total storage size will be completely driven by the MTs size. Even in ETQW which only uses them for terrains, the MTs already represent 2/3's of the total install size. I wouldn't be suprised to know they make up 90%+ of the total storage requirements of Rage and any mandatory install is composed of the rest of the game while leaving the MTs on blu-ray. Even if you cache some MT on HDD you're looking at copying quite a few gbs of data, as a background process, while the rest of the game is also either streaming stuff or increase loading times which are also highly dependent on BR read speed.
About the all PS3's have HDDs. While true, the original 20GB HDD will probably not be big enough to install Rage, let alone if you already have other games installed. You wouldn't want the early adopters getting screwed over because someone somewhere decided that was a better idea than to implement a more aggressive compression that wouldn't normally be noticeable unless it was pointed out to you (again, as per id's earlier comments about this matter).
Perhaps we'd never have NAO HDR if everyone thinks the glass is half empty.
The devs may have more variety stored on the Blu-ray disc but still keep the same amount in memory. There is a range of things they can do in-between. Gaming is one of the few tech domains that thrive on creativity and art. Please do cherish it. ^_^
TimothyFarrar
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BTW, you might all want to read this intel/id paper on streaming,
http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/UserFiles/en-us/Image/1221/Real-Time%20Texture%20Streaming%20&%20Decompression.pdf
My guess is that the HDD factor is much more important than the throughput or latency advantage that the DVD has over the BR depending on where on the disc one is reading from (outer vs inner throughput is different). Remember, number of seeks per second is the primary determination of effective disc bandwidth, so if the HDD is taking many of those seeks, disc+HDD easily wins over disc only.
Say as you stream in BR content, you write this content to a large HDD cache. Also when you have gaps in streaming from BR, that you use the extra throughput to speculatively cache more data on the HDD. Now when one is walking around in a level, some percentage of stream in requests will be of 100% unread content (U), the rest will be a re-stream-in of seen content (S). My guess is that in a majority of cases (S) is much > (U). And in (S) cases, one can pull that data from the HDD at a much lower latency and much higher throughput. Note that with a HDD one should be able to keep the BR throttled with speculative streaming all the time... which means lots of possible unseen content would have already gone to the HDD.
One interesting note from that paper is that a Intel 2.9 GHz Core 2 wasn't able to keep up with stream-in from a throttled DVD without resorting to a parallel threaded implementation. So all this stream-in is going to be CPU costly. Assuming that they SPU this work, the PS3 might have an advantage there.
Even if you want to install full game it doesnt exceed 20GB ... It is 2 DVDs ; one DVD is 7GB so 14GB for full game ... Lets say 15GB , it will definetly fit on 20GB HDD even if you want a full install ... Or just install MT tstuff on HDD , load videos and not-related-to-MT-stuff from Blu-Ray ... Or even you can install - delete stuff on HDD in the beginning of a level , one by one ... Install first level's stuff in the beginning of level and while begining to 2nd level , delete 1st levels data and install 2nd's ... Or install one DVD worth data and in the middle of the game delete it and install second part data ... I'm not a dev so I don't know if these are possible or not but if I were I'm sure that I could find a better way than downgrading ...
Come on , he is the one , right ?.. He better push tech to the limits and show his talent again or he'll be a thing of past ... I wont be surprised if he cancels RAGE after all these as he did with Darkness [ 1.5 years of dev time ] ...
No, not quite.
Unless this game is dramatically more linear then PR insists so far, seek times(where BR has the advantage) should be at least as major factor (and possibly more so) as peak transfer speed. Like in well - pretty much every open world game that uses streaming.Richard said:
And if the game-data really occupies majority of disc-space as speculated, DVD doesn't have overall transfer speed advantage to begin with.
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I have the same opinion. Why to limit ps3 version like 2 dvd how 360 when bluray offer a lot of space?It seems on ps3 will be just a porting of 360 version and no more.
Negatism Begets Negatism. I think enough PS3 games have unfairly bit the bullet of the "inferiority complex" and been overlooked due to such.
In this case to complain about a concession on the PS3 and assume it is a port is to disregard everything id has stated to this point. In fact it has been said more often than not the PS3 has been the "gotcha" and least common denominator. The game engine has been co-developed on all 4 platforms at once. There are bound to be concessions on each platform as well as some plused on each, some more than others depending on what tradeoffs and interest there is to maximize leftover resources.
It's the other problem. I think they are zeroing on only one point highlighted by id.
Id is the one who raised the "cutting out content" decision on at least 2 occasions. Hence, some people felt that they have been short changed. If the info wasn't leaked by Id, well... too late to talk about it now.
JC criticized about Cell's programming model and especially the limited memory. Now he added that Xbox 360's GPU is a little faster. OTOH, more memory has been reclaimed from the PS3 Game OS since his first vent. I wonder what they do with the additional memory now, plus a little more processing power. In any case, the article says the team has 6 more months to decide what to do with the Blu-ray space. They should also be very familiar with PS3 now too.
As long as he aspire to creates a uniform game for all platforms, the team won't be able to take advantage of individual platform's strength fully.
BTW, does the MT concept work well with deferred rendering ? (There are probably memory contention issues but what else ?)
I wish people would stick with term "deferred shading" because "deferred rendering" can stand for things well beyond rasterization and shading.patsu said:
And in this context particularly - shader deferral is largely irrelevant, but doing scene-capture rendering deferral can be quite beneficial for delayed data delivery schemes, which MT probably falls under.
inferiority complex for what? Because most of them have two more pixels added or a boat reflex in the water? Nah, personally those things not complex a 'nomal' user imho. My point is another: JC said to porting first on 360 and two dvd then on ps3. I haven't said ps3 it's the gotcha, but limited that to two dvd when bluray would be a great resource on ps3, 'compromise' only that version and no 360 version in any case. So why? Where is the benefits for both platforms? It's a maximize? While a 360 has better/faster memory you penalize ps3 media storage to respect 360 advantages compromise? I think the only reason is economy and no more.
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I think you're twisting his words/intention around. Let's take the 360 out the equation. The PS3 load issue has to be address. So, a solution is to compress the data on disc and decompress upon reading, giving you a quicker read. So how much should you compress the textures? Well, let's said that compressing it down to somewhere near 14GB gives you good load time with decent quality. But what if he decides at even at 14GB it's too slow...what if he needs to compress it 10GB, after all we're talking about an open world here.
Id hired some top notch PS3 devs, so it's not like they're brainless noobs trying to hack it on the PS3.
It's not like they downgrading the PS3 to the 360. For all we know, they did their testing to found that compressing the PS3 textures down to 2 disc resulting the same look as the 360 but is still slower at loading, but are willing to live with that, because someone is going to scream bloody murder if they compress it even further to get it to 360 load speed.
That is assuming the PS3 version uses the same MT sizes as the XBOX version which is (apparently) where id is heading EXACTLY. This whole conversation started because some people feel since the PS3 does not have the storage problem the game should use up as much BR space as needed. If that happens then the game will require an install size that's larger than the 20gb PS3 can provide:
Willits said:
That's even ignoring the fact you never have the full 20gb what with the binary-decimal conversion.
It would work for "regular" games. id Tech 5's MT is a completely new paradigm. You could have a 5gb MegaTexture that's composed entirely of all the textures used by all the NPCs in the game from start to finish. The textures aren't sectioned by "levels" because the world isn't broken by levels. All you have is "texture data".
No argument there. I have no idea what the seek times BR vs DVD (on the consoles in question).
Again agreed but that's a secondary problem when XBOX games can't require an HDD install in the first place! I'm sure devs would gladly deal with DVD transfer speeds if all XBOX sku's came with an HDD.
With regards to performance impact, never storage space issues. In fact, our own (B3D's) analysis of the MegaTexture tech specifically states the storage space issues from our detached and (by then) almost ignorant position. When id Tech 5 was first demonstrated at Macworld 2007 JC specifically stated that little demo (a 64K^2 racetrack) used around 20GB of texture data and that it would eventually have to be compressed down for release.
All the content decisions removal were about artists not having to worry about whether introducing a new texture for this wall here would make the game go over the video ram budget, whether a new texture would increase batch counts and whether they could author the texture data at ridiculous resolutions because MT only loads the tiles (and mip-map levels) it needs, instead of the whole texture and mip-map pyramid. The removal of these decisions is still in effect and artists can still "go wild".
He also said the PS3 had a faster "CPU".
Even if Sony brings down the OS memory use to zero it still doesn't change the fact you have 256mb MAX of ram for the game to use up which is lower than any of the other three platforms.
Very early on, id hired people from Naughty Dog and few other "PS darling studios" to work on the PS specifics.
This whole conversation started because they're specifically targetting the different platforms (compressing more on the PS3 to compensate for the BR read speed - notice there's no XBOX involvement here).
There is no port! One of the advantages of id Tech 5 is that you take a shared raw texture data file and then process it to play to each platform's strengths and downplay their limitations! This is much harder to do with regular texture mapping! For regular games your artists need a texture budget to guide their efforts, the level designers need a "max texture variety" so they don't go over batch-budget, content managers need to know, before hand, the downsample sizes to port the content to so it fits the video ram, etc.
No. You optimise to downplay the BR's read speed. You also optimise to downplay the DVD's limited space. They're 2 different problems that just HAPPEN to have the same solution. There is no connection. They are NOT using the same solution to appease the fanbois.
They are faster on BR across the same logical distance (eg. a 100MB seek is faster on BR then DVD) - it's simple physics at work of course, due to BRs higher data density.Richard said:
Indeed. Ultimately the read speeds won't be anywhere near maximum throughput of any optical drive.Again agreed but that's a secondary problem when XBOX games can't require an HDD install in the first place! I'm sure devs would gladly deal with DVD transfer speeds if all XBOX sku's came with an HDD.
However - like TimothyFarrar explained in his very eloquent post, HDD equipped unit will tend to have a significant advantage in streaming scenarios, without requiring an installation. There are realworld examples of exactly what he talks about, out in the wild already.
So if I had to guess, if you will want optimal Rage experience on 360, you better get a HDD if you don't have one already (this wouldn't be the first title to have "recommended/required" specs for the console).
SedentaryJourney
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Are you saying this is a bottleneck? I've heard people cite the 256MB VRAM as a handicap for the PS3 even though main ram is usable by RSX. Never really hear the reverse complaint that CELL is hampered by the split RAM pool.
Carmack said in one of his annual QuakeCon rants that, due to MT's relatively low VRAM requirement, they actually had extra VRAM that they wished could be repurposed to the CPU (because their PS3 builds tended to run out of memory) but instead were thinking of filling with less compressed textures.
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