Some presentations from GDC08
- Thread starter nAo
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Truly if anything, that slide speaks better for the 360 than the PS3 as it highlights memory constraints, where the 360 has a little more room to maneuver in terms of both available pool and pool unity. Of course though, the presentation highlights use of streaming to manage the constraints on consoles.
What does active memory consumption have to do with Blu Ray for this generation, or do you mean beyondHigh capacity discs will no doubt be important - if not for those megaton RPGs, then for data redundancy to reduce random access/seek times.
The diagram shows a disproportional increase of the asset memory footprint from the previous gen consoles to the current one.
If that is anything to go by there should be a significant increased demand for room on the storage media to store those assets compared to the previous generation as well.
And yeah, the megaton RPGs may be the first ones to gobble up those extra GB and perhaps some PS3 exclusive FPS games implementing efficient streaming of detailed environments. Not to mention simulation games: racing, flying etc.
I think the diagram is probably pretty valid for the memory use of the PS3 as well, those memory resourses are just distributed over the two pools, where by default a lot of the graphic assets will end up in the GDDR3 memory pool.
There where quite a few slides discussing how textures had to be reduced to fit within the memory of the consoles. If getting HL2 to fit on a 512 MB console was such a hassle I wonder what it will be like to port Crysis to a console.
Hopefully I'm not sounding rude, but my guess would be that the HL2 engine wasn't exactly high-tech in terms of data streaming and multi-core support, whereas I'm guessing the Crysis engine was all about that even on the PC.
I could be wrong, but that would be my guess.
HL2 didn't even use SPU's on the PS3 version, so I don't think it's tech must be that great by current standards.
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HL2 didn't even use SPU's on the PS3 version, so I don't think it's tech must be that great by current standards.
I hope you're not basing that on that discredited "interview" with a supposed developer of HL2?
It uses Havok for goodness sake, which is optimised to use the SPUs. I seriously doubt the SPUs are untouched but feel free to show me the errors of my ways.
[on topic] Fascinating presentations from GDC these, although I'll admit a bit over my head. Thanks for providing the links.
Mintmaster
Veteran
Without any info about how much of the discs held assets last gen, it's quite presumptuous for you to think BR is necessary to match the RAM increase.
Not only did DVD space often go unused last gen, but much of it was used for FMV which is now readily being replaced with realtime cutscenes. You could easily have 10+ times the space devoted to assets on a 360 game disc vs. a XBox1 game disc, despite equal total capacity.
Or the extra space is used to hide the loading of data by using prerendered/prerecorded video streaming.
Would have to be a special game considering that many XBOX1 games took up more than 700MB.
700 MB total? Because Mintmaster's comment was 10x the assets, in terms of models and textures etc. In a 2 GB XB1, if 1 GB was video, and 500 MB was audio and 'stuff', that'd be 500 MB of game assets. Lose the video, keep the audio and tart up the assets for the 360, and that's 6 GB all next-gen-ness.
Naughty Dog have made their presentations available right here: http://www.naughtydog.com/corporate/press-events.html.
inpHilltr8r
Newcomer
So here's the rough count for a certain popular PS2 game I happen to have intimate knowledge of: MPEG-2 video 5GB, ADPCM audio 2.5GB, game data 1GB. Roughly 1/3 of which is duplicated data.
My back of the envelope calculations say that if we did the same game in HD, it'd take up roughly 20GB
ShootMyMonkey
Veteran
Still, out of that 20 GB, how much of that is attributable to the fact that the 5 GB of FMV would balloon way up in size? If you did those FMVs as in-game cinematics, those several GBs would come way down to something pretty small. I also can't think that 1/3 duplicated data will still be "1/3" when all assets are brought up a generation.
inpHilltr8r
Newcomer
About 10 of the 20 was accounting for MPEG. The individual files would be more than twice as large, but we'd have less of them, as we were anal-retentive enough to have separate versions for 4:3 and 16:9.
I fail to see why you think there'd be less duplicated data though (unless you actually meant that there'd be more). They're there to allow us to stream without loading screens (and without audio streams dying mid-load). Removing MPEG doesn't help, as you never seek back and forth across an MPEG anyway, they're just too big. Larger file and audio buffers helps, but the files get larger by roughly the same amount, so the seeks get longer, and seek times are still bad. Plus you need to do at lot fewer seeks than before, because the data rate didn't increase to match asset inflation, so you need to interrupt data loads to service audio streams a lot less, preferably not at all. That's kinda tricky, as we could have music, ambience, and dialog all streaming at once, while a level was loading.
To be honest, there's so many variables involved, that I really can't do better than a rough guess at this point in time. I suspect I'm guessing under on game data, and over on audio data though.
ShootMyMonkey
Veteran
I don't mean that there would be less *stuff* that gets duplicated, but that not everything would scale equally, and the stuff that gets duplicated may not necessarily grow as much as some other stuff, and so the net fraction in bytes wouldn't likely be as much. Audio, in particular comes to mind as something where you can afford quite a bit more compression than you could on the PS2, and in most cases, audio assets will be smaller now than they were a generation before (at least, it's been that way FWIW so far compared to PS2). It's also quite common for people to find alternate ways to achieve something because you have the freedom to do so (e.g. multitexturing) that may mean more files but not necessarily larger individual files. We often have cases where artists find a way to get effective texture resolutions around 6144x6144 through some nice blending operations and still keep the net asset size down under 128KB.
It's rather scary to think how much we have in assets for TRU, and how much less it comes out to when actually creating a disc image. As it is, DVD capacity isn't a concern, but that's not saying much with the lack of final artwork pretty much everywhere. Still, that's something considering that the raw data set is already large enough that we're stretching for hard disk capacity...
inpHilltr8r
Newcomer
Oh right. I was seeing roughly a 1/3 in each category, so that didn't really come into it. The thing that may well reduce duplication this time around, is using the hard drive as a cache. I have no idea what audio is going to end up as, although I do know it's going to be the first thing to get the compression cranked up on.
...and I forgot about texture streaming, which we didn't do on PS2. That's going to add another stream to be serviced, and another data set on the disc. Now I remember why a lot of games just don't bother. :neutral:
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