What are the odds that 9 GIGs WON'T be enough for Next Gen?

[BenQ]

What is your opinion on the Xbox 360 only using DVD 9's?

Do you believe that will become a major problem? Sure maybe 9 Gig's will be enough for now, even for a couple years, but by 2009 don't you think 9 GIGs might start seeming a little small?

If 9 GIG's will always be enough then that's good, but WHAT IF it proves to be not nearly enough? ONE of the reasons why the Dreamcast failed was because of those GD-ROMS.... one GIG was just flat out NOT enough space for THIS gen of games.

You can't just add more discs to every kind of game either.

Does anyone have any solid reasoning as to why 9 GIG's won't become a limiting factor?

 

[Gholbine]

I figure that developers will be able to squeeze their games onto 9gb in most cases, but it's just a limitation and I think Microsoft would have been better off supporting HD-DVD from the get-go. Japanese developers especially will prefer having a lot more space since they like to use FMV, and it will be all HD FMV next generation, which will take up loads of space.

 

[BenQ]

I figure that developers will be able to squeeze their games onto 9gb in most cases, but it's just a limitation and I think Microsoft would have been better off supporting HD-DVD from the get-go. Japanese developers especially will prefer having a lot more space since they like to use FMV, and it will be all HD FMV next generation, which will take up loads of space.

That's true. Any game that is HD-FMV heavy will easy eat up far more than 9 GIGs. Although I have to wonder just how popular FMV will be when they have hardwre to use which can provide ingame cutscenes that actually rival some FMV's.

 

[jvd]

What 9 gig limit ?

first off I believe its more like 7.4 gigs avalible . Aside from that if you need more room just put a second dvd and u got 14.8 gigs

Only way this will fill up is with fmv . Which i'm hoping they ditch as its not needed and just takes away from the experiance

 

[Magnum PI]

with new codecs like H.264, video takes less place, so HD FMV might not be a problem on DVD.
i read R520 had hardware acceleration for H.264 decoding.

 

[Powderkeg]

I think the better question is which would be more financially sound:

Going to a next-gen drive, be it HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.

Allowing the few developers that might actually produce games that exceed the 9GB limitation to use multiple disks.


There will be games that could be over 9GB if you allow the developers the room. It's only a problem if you have no solution, but a next-gen optical drive isn't the only solution.

 

[Gholbine]

I would be thinking about a game like next-gen GTA where, should it take more than 9gb, swapping discs is not an option. Massive worlds are going to be a running theme next generation, and you have to wonder whether 9gb is enough to facilitate these types of games.

 

[quest55720]

What is your opinion on the Xbox 360 only using DVD 9's?

Do you believe that will become a major problem? Sure maybe 9 Gig's will be enough for now, even for a couple years, but by 2009 don't you think 9 GIGs might start seeming a little small?

If 9 GIG's will always be enough then that's good, but WHAT IF it proves to be not nearly enough? ONE of the reasons why the Dreamcast failed was because of those GD-ROMS.... one GIG was just flat out NOT enough space for THIS gen of games.

You can't just add more discs to every kind of game either.

Does anyone have any solid reasoning as to why 9 GIG's won't become a limiting factor?

If you made a list of 100 things that killed the dreamcast not enough storage would not make the list. By the time the dreamcast was dead most PS2 games were still using CD-roms.

 

[PC-Engine]

with new codecs like H.264, video takes less place, so HD FMV might not be a problem on DVD.
i read R520 had hardware acceleration for H.264 decoding.

Wouldn't really matter since Xbox 360's CPU could handle software MPEG4 decoding all on its own...

 

[Farid]

Wouldn't really matter since Xbox 360's CPU could handle software MPEG4 decoding all on its own...

Exactly, adding hardware support for video decompression in a console would be a pure waste of transistors.

 

[Shogmaster]

If you made a list of 100 things that killed the dreamcast not enough storage would not make the list. By the time the dreamcast was dead most PS2 games were still using CD-roms.

Lack of DVD drive contributed significantly to DC's failure, but not the way he is thinking.

DC "failed" when Sega ran out of operating capital because sales of DC in Japan just suddenly dried up when PS2 came out in Japan. Japanese gamers were buying PS2 over DC not because of PS2's launch games, but because of DVD playback (PS2 was the cheapest DVD player by a decent margin over there when it launched). And when DC's marketshare stopped growing over there and PS2's started to bloom thanks to it's DVD playback, the Japanese developers started to abandon the DC. From there, it snowballed to the rest of the world, and Sega had no choice but to abandon the DC when there was simply not enough cash in the bank to keep operating as a hardware company.

So lack of DVD drive did kill the DC, but not because GD-ROM was too small for game capacity.

 

[BenQ]

I would be thinking about a game like next-gen GTA where, should it take more than 9gb, swapping discs is not an option. Massive worlds are going to be a running theme next generation, and you have to wonder whether 9gb is enough to facilitate these types of games.

I agree with that, but it's questionable if a Next gen GTA would actualy require more than 9 Gigs. GTA : SA is only around 2 gigs..... LOTS of space left for improvement.

 

[nickguy94]

I'd say developers will easily be taking up more than 9 Gb's, in fact I'd say developers could easily use 20 Gb's of space. I mean, come on people, we're no longer going to be using 64X64 or 128X128bit textures anymore. Most games will run textures of 1024X1024, some possibly 2048X2048. And then when you consider that models will consist of many layers of textures, for Normal Maps, Bump Maps, Transparency and Translucent Maps, Displacement Maps, Specular Maps, and so on, all on the same model.

Then when you take into account next-gen features like large seamless worlds and customizable things in games such as armor, weapons, etc....all at high-res, you can easily see why games are going to take up more than 9 Gb's of space. I'd be surprised if Gears of War doesn't come on two DVD's simply because of all of the Texture Maps on the characters and environments. I mean, almost every model in that game has at least 3 different texture maps, including a Normal Map which takes up more space than a normal texture map.

And then people say, so what, just put it on two DVD's. Well, that double the cost to manufactor the copies of the game, which means it cost the publishers more money which directly cost the developers money.

 

[Sonic]

Dreamcast did not fail because it had a GD-Rom format. That is an absurd way to think. The Dreamcast would have been much costlier to produce had it a DVD drive from the very beginning. And that might just make SEGA quit earlier

I see no reason why a standard DVD drive is too little for next generation. There are codecs available that take up far less space than MPEG2 and can get the job done just as good. And I'm sure there will be even newer codecs developed that could take up less space. They might require an extensive amount of processor power, but the Xbox 360 is no slouch in that department.

If a game like PGR3 doesn't require more than two discs then I doubt a version of GTA will. Sure it uses less space, but it does give us an estimate.

 

[BenQ]

I'd say developers will easily be taking up more than 9 Gb's, in fact I'd say developers could easily use 20 Gb's of space. I mean, come on people, we're no longer going to be using 64X64 or 128X128bit textures anymore. Most games will run textures of 1024X1024, some possibly 2048X2048. And then when you consider that models will consist of many layers of textures, for Normal Maps, Bump Maps, Transparency and Translucent Maps, Displacement Maps, Specular Maps, and so on, all on the same model.

Then when you take into account next-gen features like large seamless worlds and customizable things in games such as armor, weapons, etc....all at high-res, you can easily see why games are going to take up more than 9 Gb's of space. I'd be surprised if Gears of War doesn't come on two DVD's simply because of all of the Texture Maps on the characters and environments. I mean, almost every model in that game has at least 3 different texture maps, including a Normal Map which takes up more space than a normal texture map.

And then people say, so what, just put it on two DVD's. Well, that double the cost to manufactor the copies of the game, which means it cost the publishers more money which directly cost the developers money.

But PC games are already "High definition" and have been since....ever. The average PC game has texture resolutions much higher than console game resolutions ( on average ), and yet, PC games are on average no bigger than console games.

...... How do you explain this?

And the cost of an extra disc is insignificant. I can remember playing PS1 games that came on 5 discs.

 

[scatteh316]

Has'nt the creater of DOA already stresed that the storage space on 360 is inadiquate??

 

[scatteh316]

But PC games are already "High definition" and have been since....ever. The average PC game has texture resolutions much higher than console game resolutions ( on average ), and yet, PC games are on average no bigger than console games.

...... How do you explain this?

And the cost of an extra disc is insignificant. I can remember playing PS2 games that came on 5 discs.

Has he said above, textures above 1024x1024 and 2048x2048. How many pc games do you know with textures at that resolution????. and while laucnh games might be ok, what about 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th generation games?????? How much space will they take up??

 

[Magnum PI]

Wouldn't really matter since Xbox 360's CPU could handle software MPEG4 decoding all on its own...

like could my athlon 2400 XP..
but this is H.264 that we are talking about.

but you are probably right the processor should be able to decode some HDTV FMV with H.264 or another codec like microsoft's VC-1.

 

[BenQ]

Has'nt the creater of DOA already stresed that the storage space on 360 is inadiquate??

No, he said that he had alreay come very close, or has filled the disc. But this wasn't because the game itself was too large, it was because of all the HD-FMV. It takes up ALOT of space.

He also comentd on the HD DOA 4 trailer, saing that if the trailer was encoded to an acceptable level to him, that it would have easily been 2+ Gigs.

I already KNOW that any kind of HD-FMV is gonna take up ALOT of space, but I'm not so sure that next gen games themselves will actually require more than 9 gigs. There are people on this board who talk about some kind of amazing new codec that will eliminate this problem.... but I don't know anything about that..... and I don't care..... FMV's are not something I would miss.

 

[Gollum]

We've been through this before. There are two main scenarios that eat up 9GB really fast:
1) Extensive use of HD FMV sequences, though using good codecs can help a lot
2) Multi-lingual versions, up to 5 languages (audio, video and all) shipping on the same disc

Raw gamedata might take years to really exceed the DVD barrier IMO. This generation's games have hardly been trying to use the space a DVD offers effectively. Compression can do wonders, especially in combination with a multi-core CPU and a HDD. So for most games and several years to come, DVD media won't be a significant hurdle IMO.

That being said, there will be games that won't fit on a single DVD sooner or later. Fitting really complex games with lots of content onto a single DVD might also be more work for the developer, compared to developing the same game for BR or HD-DVD media. There are drawbacks, nobody's arguing that, but its hardly a crippling disadvantage...