Speculation: lack of a next gen media format may be a big problem

Because I was discussing the technical aspects of compression in space saving. People can quote differet devs left and right about how they find storage, but that doesn't give any insight into the technical problems and solutions, and this board is supposed to be focussed on that rather than being a game of Top Trumps with dev comments.

"I have 4 dev quotes saying storage is a problem on DVD."
"Ha! I Have five comments saying it isn't. I win. Gimme your card. Now, what about graphic power..."

 

Good point Shifty - technical achievement and possibility are important to discuss, but as followers and "students" of such tech for some time, it is also part of the thought process to determine to what extent specific techniques or technologies will be adopted. As many have pointed out in many other threads in many other posts, intelligent use of technology is not always employed to their full advantage or in some cases, at all.

 

So you're saying that ERP's comment that disc space is not a limiting factor for his artists is irrelevant?

This isn't about trumping quotes, it's about listening to people who actually know what they're talking about. Budgets, ram & read speed are the current main limitations, not disc space.

I don't know why you'd cherry pick quotes RE compression performance (which still doubled) and ignore one that is much more meaningful to the discussion at hand.

 

Earlier...

So 2x very weak = very strong? Or just weak? How much decompression power can next-gen bring to the matter of handling compressed files?

My response and selected quote was entirely about compression and not storage requirements. You made the claim that this gen CPU's were too weak to do much decompression; a situation much improved next-gen, but present no evidence supporting that claim. I cite a reliable source, the only one we have on next-gen's performance, that happens to be that things aren't improving a great deal in some situations, so compression can't be relied upon. If ERP had said 'next-gen handles decompression an order of magnitude faster' I would have quoted it in support of your argument.

But I wasn't saying DVD was or wasn't enough space, and so why would I need to find any sources on the matter?

 

Arstechinca weighs in

Sony's PS3 gamble: should the optical revolution have been optional?


http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/PS3-gamble.ars/1

As much as many people loathe AT around here , I beleive this is a good perspective on the issue.

Is Blu Ray and it's disc size welcomed? absolutely... is it going to hurt games to use DVD9 before the release of the next, next-gen? I think not.

 

Glad to see someone agrees with me! I like the last point, with the new background download system, you could download any additional content onto the HDD, online while playing the game. Then you wouldn't even need to swap discs, just load off the HDD. Of course they'd still have to provide a 2disc system for all those non-hdd gamers.

I didn't say they 'couldn't do much compression', and i didn't say 'much improved' either, stop exagerating.

I said that when you have more available power you can compress things you couldn't otherwise, my 'evidence' was the xbox vs ps2 example where xbox saved over 2gb due to the ability to decompress mp3's on the fly. That was a result of whatever relatively small difference there was between ps2 and xbox. You pointing out there's only a 2x increase in power does nothing to refute that idea, it's still a signifigant increase.

 

Those are some valid points but one of the links that AT uses http://www.gamesfirst.com/index.php?id=1132 has inaccurate information. They base all the statistics on 8.5 GB but there is only 7 GB available to use for games on the 360.

 

Man, what's up with Arstechnica now days? Now they're even trying to cater to idiots explaining that resolution and storage requirements aren't linear...

Even so, the argument about PC gamers playing HD content for years despite the medium being CD-ROM doesn't exactly bare any relevance when most games are highly compressed and installed to the harddrive and require storage space on the HD way beyond the optical medium's limit.

 

I wouldn't rip on them for "catering to idiots", we all have to start somewhere.

And I'm also not aware of many PC games that uncompress to over 9GB?

 

New arstechinca article says:

Average Xbox game used 3.2 GB in 2005, up 77% from 2001.


So far 360 games use about half capacity.

http://www.gamesfirst.com/index.php?id=1132

 

Of couse they were as the target media was a single layer DVD.

 

Xbox used DVD9.

Also single layer DVD's support 4.7 GB not 3.2.

 

Did it? I remember the data was read backwards from the xbox game discs.
Is it still according to DVD9 standard if data is read backwards?
I'm nitpicking, as I'm not questioning you or whether it was 4.7 or 3.2 GB, but me and if the discs were strictly DVD9 standard.

 

I dont know I'm just going of the gamesfirst article which among other mentions Rallisportchallenge used 6.19 GB (they said this was the biggest xbox 1 game they know of). Obviously that had to be in DVD9. Also I recall it being in the Xbox specs, although maybe they used single layer disks unless more was needed or something. And I have no clue on the read backwards thing..

 

Really. How else am I supposed to understand this...

...

Not in so many words, but your meaning was clear, at least in how I read your comments. You said this gen didn't have much decompression power (see above). Then you say of next-gen...

which implies the situation is much improved, if we can compress stuff now with our new processors that previous processors were too weak to do.

 

Xbox does support DVD9, but single layer disks are cheaper and when you are selling a lot of games it adds up.

Yeah, as when people target something that has a limit they generally work finish up safely bellow that limit.

 

Both these points seem to suggest that DVD9 should be a fine solution. Given what you say above, wouldn't you agree that DVD9 is good enough for the new generation?

 

Kind of off subject. I don't know if any of you can shed some light. I keep hearing developers talking about "streaming" data off a disk. Does the disk capacity matter in that case? As far as I know DVD-9 streams data faster. I saw this quote a few places from an Assasin Creed Dev

" Our focus is 100% BluRay, so I cannot compare with HD-DVD. I can only say that the new BluRay disc format is truly awesome. The capacity is immense, and the Data Transfer Rate is way beyond what we are used to. And that's really important, because Data Streaming (OPMED: where the console constantly loads new data from disc) is truly the only way to push next-gen games to the limit"

If Blu-Ray streams slower how is it better than DVD?

 

It isn't necessarily...

What are they used to? 12x DVD drives? Or 4x? It could well be they were saying it's much improved from previous gen, but had they used a 12x DVD drive too they may then have said 'BRD's data transfer rate is way beyond what we are used to, and 12x DVD is even better!'

The rate of data streaming is tied with seek rate than transfer speed, and depedns on what you're streaming and how it's laid out on the disc. Larger capacity gives the option for duplicated data to reduce seek time, but other than that doesn't affect streaming performance. A 1 GB disc at 56 Mb/s and 200ms seek time is going to stream just as fast as a 100 GB disc at 56 Mb/s and 200ms seek. Actually, tell a lie, a large capacity disc has the option to fit datatracks closer together. A 9 GB game will span the entire area of a DVD, so the head will be travelling up to some 2" from centre tracks to outer tracks. The same game on BRD would be kept to the inside tracks only reducing maximum head travel to maybe half an inch. That'll improve seek times. But, as the motors need to be more accurate, they may not be as fast, and thus seek times may be reduced. There's also the issue of dual-layer. I don't know about modern DVD drives, but PS2 certainly had some trouble reading the second layer on some dual-layer games. If seek times are increased for the second layer, that'd be an issue to for anything over 4.5 GB on DVD, but not a problem for BRD until >25 GB. Someone more knowledgable than I would need to comment on dual-layer access though.

 

Can we use a little common sense? 'way beyond' clearly indicates he's comparing it to PS2 or XBOX read speeds, how can you possibly interprete it any other way?