Streaming Textures from a HDD - How much does it benefit a game?

[babcat]

Hello Everyone,

I have a question. How much of a benefit can streaming textures from a HDD bring to the graphics of a console game verses one that does not utilize the HDD?

Obviously, nothing can truly replace RAM. However, I have heard that by streaming textures from a HDD you can indeed improve performance. However, there are still some questions in my mind.

For example, lets say you have 100MB of space in RAM for textures. Now, that amount of RAM will never *really* increase. But in a "fake" sort of way how high could streaming textures from a HDD increase that number? I know it will not really increase it, but when it comes to the size/amount of textures you can use how much does it help?

Thanks!

 

[taucias]

Hello Everyone,

I have a question. How much of a benefit can streaming textures from a HDD bring to the graphics of a console game verses one that does not utilize the HDD?

Obviously, nothing can truly replace RAM. However, I have heard that by streaming textures from a HDD you can indeed improve performance. However, there are still some questions in my mind.

For example, lets say you have 100MB of space in RAM for textures. Now, that amount of RAM will never *really* increase. But in a "fake" sort of way how high could streaming textures from a HDD increase that number? I know it will not really increase it, but when it comes to the size/amount of textures you can use how much does it help?

Thanks!

Basically you can stream data from a hard drive much faster than a DVD/Blu-ray drive, which is why it is preferable (and one of the big issues devs had with the HDD-less Core unit XB360).

 

[Cheezdoodles]

never mind this post