What improvement would you most like to see, in Xenon?

[nAo]

In the mean case a single strip can be 5-15 vertices long. To join strips in a unique strip on current hw (except PS2) yuo need to insert some extra vertices (2 or 3..) to create degenerate triangles between each strip.
To be fair each modern hw (except PS2) supports indexed primitives, and thus a vertex index can be used by the hw to cache and tag transformed vertices. Post transformed caches help the hw to keep the number of trasnformed (not rasterized!) triangles per second up with the number of transformed vertices per second.

ciao,
Marco

 

[aaaaa00]

Here's another interesting reference from Nvidia:

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/newsletter_tip_archive.html#6

 

[Fafalada]

Aren't the 2 numbers supposed to always be different, since a polygon is made of 3 vertices at least (2 with strips)?

No, strips or fans have optimal ratio of 1:1 - and that's what is normally quoted.
Indexed mesh have an optimal ration of 0.5:1 (though that's not counting overhead from index arrays).

 

[DopeyFish]

The lack of "higher capacity optical medium" forced me to vote for more ram. damn you

 

[Guden Oden]

If it was possible to fit Metroid Prime on a 1.4GB GOD, you must be a damn sucky developer if you can't fit a next-gen game on a 9GB DVD... :?

There's such a thing called "compression"...

 

[Polarbear53]

If ps3 does have blue-ray built in that would be a big plus. That would be nice if someone would pick a format and they just used that. For a while I just assumed it would have the next dvd format, I hope it does but O well.

 

[j^aws]

The trend seems to be along "more ram" which falls inline with my recent poll "What would you sacrifice" . Everyone loves RAM! Consoles have always been deficient in RAM due to their low selling cost...it seems the easiest thing to sacrifice. Will we ever get a console that's unbalanced by too much RAM...I doubt it!

I voted for "faster optical drive" in the absence of HD-DVD or BLU-RAY...I think M$ are making a mistake by not waiting for this, especially if Sony goes with Blu-Ray...If M$ is aiming for mass market in the next 3-4 years, it would be at a serious disadvantage if a comparably priced PS3 alongside it has Blu-Ray IMHO. A replay of the DC-PS2 scenario...although M$ has a larger cash reserve for marketing purposes than sega did.

 

[Farid]

If it was possible to fit Metroid Prime on a 1.4GB GOD, you must be a damn sucky developer if you can't fit a next-gen game on a 9GB DVD... :?

There's such a thing called "compression"...

You're right, but compression is not always a good thing, if you compress too much, your loading times can skyrocket easily.
I forget the english word, about how you pack yours datas for the best loads time.
Anyway, especially on consoles some datas have to be duplicated to help reduce seek times. If you're "limited" by the media, you have two choices, less datas (with smart art, that's almost invisible), or you decide to invite your players to embark the good ol' never ending loadings train...

Smart fast loadings are a real challenge, when you look at games, for example, from Traveller tales (Crash bandicoot this gen, Haven, Finding Nemo) theirs games have horrendously long loadings... And the games are nothing specials compared to R&Cs and Jaks, you can see that some developers still considering load time like "nothing really important".

Anyway i'm digressing, since 9Go (octets Guden ) will be more than enough for a next gen game (And more of all if thosse specs for Xenon are real).

 

[Megadrive1988]

in my opinion the PlayStation1 / PSone should have had 4 MB main memory, 3 MB VRAM and 1 MB for audio. rounding out a nice 8 MB total.

the Nintendo 64 should've had 8-10 MB memory if we have to keep the memory UMA.

the Playstation2 should've had 128 MB main system memory, 8 MB eDRAM and 32 MB of off-chip video memory, and 8 MB for audio.

Xbox should've had 128 MB main memory plus at least 64 MB for NV2A

 

[PC-Engine]

Compression increases your effective data transfer speed. If your hardware can decompress on-th-fly without a performance hit, why not compress everything that can be compressed? If you have say 10MB/s data transfer speed, if you compress you can effective double that or more.

 

[archie4oz]

in my opinion the PlayStation1 / PSone should have had 4 MB main memory, 3 MB VRAM and 1 MB for audio. rounding out a nice 8 MB total.

the Nintendo 64 should've had 8-10 MB memory if we have to keep the memory UMA.

the Playstation2 should've had 128 MB main system memory, 8 MB eDRAM and 32 MB of off-chip video memory, and 8 MB for audio.

Xbox should've had 128 MB main memory plus at least 64 MB for NV2A

Yeah 20:20 hindsight is always nice, especially when you don't have to make the monetary decisions with engineering... BTW, it was a good thing you didn't make any decision on the PSOne since there was a rather nasty memory production hiccup during it's early production that caused a shortage... Your specifications would've cost Sony quite a fortune...


And why is there no option for *more* CPU? Aside from clock, and a lot of AltiVec registers (probably includes renames as the PowerPC ISA can't count more than 32 architectural registers) and the SMT support the CPU leaves some doubt...