regarding HDTV games....and next gen.

[AlNom]

I found this over at the Bizarre Creations forums.... quoting one of the graphics devs for PGR2

One of the biggies is memory... now a 640x480 32-Bit screen takes up 1.2Mb... to render a scene you need a front-buffer, back-buffer and a Z-Buffer... that's 3 buffer's each taking up 1.2Mb of memory (total 3.6Mb)... now try switching to 1080i which is 1920x1080... that's 7.9Mb per buffer... times 3... (total 23.7Mb)... at this point your talking about using almost half the consoles memory just for the screen... this might be Ok for some games but we're trying to squeeze as much as we can into the 64Mb... and to fit the whole of Gotham2 into about 36Mb would be impossible... (you couldn't fit just the city data into that let alone the cars, code, sound, etc)...

How much does 720p take (altogether) ?

I have some (unorganized) thoughts...I'll just spit words out...

1. eDRAM, is it really needed ? why?
2. HDTV a standard for nex gen consoles due to all the extra RAM (eDRAM or not) ?
3. better uses for the available ram (besides texture resolution) ?
4. effect on MSAA ?
5. multiple graphics settings for the different resolutions (to take better advantage of the differing amounts of available RAM) ?

 

[akira888]

It seems as if he is responding to an inquiry to HDTV support in Xbox1 (the 64MB comment in particular). I would think, however, that fill rate and main memory bandwidth would kill you wrt HDTV resolution before the frame buffer size would. :?

Dave Baumann hinted in one of his obscure posts that ATI is implementing some sort of tiling system in XGPU2. If this is true then some of the footprint issues would be greatly alleviated - no need to store each subsample or the Zbuffer in main RAM.

As for 720P:

1280 x 720 x 32 bpp = 3.52MB per buffer, 10.55MB for three buffers.

 

[AlNom]

ah... ok.


and thanks for the 720p thing.

 

[zurich]

Don't forget that the XB2 could also include a nifty video scaler to accommodate HDTVs that aren't 720p native.

 

[London Geezer]

Don't forget that the XB2 could also include a nifty video scaler to accommodate HDTVs that aren't 720p native.

That would be just toooooooooo simple, easy, cheap, nice and perfect to include.

 

[AlNom]

I can't exactly find those words in the Microsoft Dictionary...maybe they're spelt differently?

 

[KnightBreed]

Don't forget that the XB2 could also include a nifty video scaler to accommodate HDTVs that aren't 720p native.

The Xbox only needs to support 480i/p, 576i/p, 720p, 1080i/p.

Virtually ever HDTV will accept one of these as input and scale as necessary for their native resolution. Quality scalers from Faroudja and Pixelworks are not cheap and I would rather they spend the money on something more useful like more RAM. The scaler in my display is likely better than anything they're going to bother putting into a home console.

 

[Guden Oden]

The scaler will be integrated into the GPU itself, if the rumors are to be trusted. There's no reason to believe its cost would be anything other than negligible, nor that its quality will be inferior. We simply don't have any data pointing either way.

 

[London Geezer]

*crosses fingers*

 

[AlNom]

now....if only I had an HDTV......