What is stopping Next-Gen developers from using High-Res textures?

[ShootMyMonkey]

You sure about that? I seem to recall them explicity noting this is something their CPU would be good at and furthermore has been tweaked to be able to do. I don't know much about them but perhaps the dx instructions in the CPU's ISA may shed some light on this as well.

They were probably referring to at least doing procedural geometry work on the CPU, as you can't exactly do that on the GPU anyway. Procedural textures on the CPU are fine when it's a one time thing, but I can't imagine that it would buy you anything in savings over already cached textures that were loaded off the disc. I seriously doubt that anyone would advocate per-frame synthesized textures on the CPU. I have little doubt that the ballyhoo they made over procedural synthesis was solely marketing the purported power of the console. "See what a trillion floating point operations per second can do!"

Parallax mapping can be added just like with usual bump mapping. Height maps for parallax mapping are usually smooth, so they can be easily combined with low-frequency bump maps.

Except for the fact that you can put bumpmaps on just about anything, whereas you can't do that with parallax maps. Anything that has local discontinuities in its basis space isn't a valid pick for parallax mapping.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I have little doubt that the ballyhoo they made over procedural synthesis was solely marketing the purported power of the console. "See what a trillion floating point operations per second can do!"

I take procedural synthesis to mean more in geometry and levels, like randomised trees and scenery rather than a few standard tree models repeated. That's readily attainable.

 

[!eVo!-X Ant UK]

I take procedural synthesis to mean more in geometry and levels, like randomised trees and scenery rather than a few standard tree models repeated. That's readily attainable.

Yes, more tree's ECT...ECT.. is what PS2 used it for

 

[MistaPi]

Does Oblivion stream textures and other data, is it even possible without a hard drive?

Edit: And why isn't streaming being used more for a seamless exprerience without thouse anyoing load screens?

 

[Jesus2006]

Does Oblivion stream textures and other data, is it even possible without a hard drive?

I'm not sure, since it loads "areas" when you move, so i guess i not. On the other hand, playing without a harddrive is possible (though with very long loading times).

 

[Fox5]

UT2004

Doom 3 has a few 2kx2k and 1kx1k normal maps for the larger enemies.

Yeah, when I saw those Kameo shots I thought "huh, looks like a wall I once stared at in UT2k."

Actually, it's interesting to note that Halo PC takes well more than double the amount of RAM when running.

Yeah, that game was suprisingly ram hungry, but I believe it cached the next level to memory if possible to eliminate load times.

I'll get with that, but then if a console and a PC had the SAME amount of RAM the console would put out better results.

And the PC would do more. Like taxes, not everything that uses more PC hardware is necessarily bloat.

 

[ERP]

Edit: And why isn't streaming being used more for a seamless exprerience without thouse anyoing load screens?

Cause it's actually hard to do right, and hard to test.

Although I expect it's something we'll see more of on 360/PS3 just because of the relatively poor performance of the optical drives relative to main memory sizes.

 

[Siraris]

This is my first post, as I usually just lurk here, but I thought I'd join the fray.

I think that next-gen textures are looking good so far, but the environment textures are killing me. I'm so tired of seeing stretched out textures, and I was hoping that "Megatexture" would start being applied to games.

I'm not in the industry myself, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of the stuff we've seen so far is just the tip of the iceburg. Most of the PS3 games still have months in development, and I'm just referring to launch titles.

I look at These shots from Heavy Rain, and I start to drool. Look at the soft lighting, the detailed textures, the sub-surface scattering done on the leads face, and I think that it's still in early development.

One question I have about the RAM issue in consoles, is, isn't BUS speed just as important as how much RAM you have? If the PS3 has a HDD to cache data, as well as being able to stream textures off the disc, won't having a blazing BUS speed make up for the lesser amount of RAM?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think that next-gen textures are looking good so far, but the environment textures are killing me. I'm so tired of seeing stretched out textures, and I was hoping that "Megatexture" would start being applied to games.

I agree with that. Grounds have been really weak so far on the whole. I think every FPS thus shown has a bland, non-AF-filtered grounds. GOW has had the best detail in that regard so far, with lots of rubble in there too. Megatextures aren't likely to feature unless you have to install to HDD, as the streaming requirements are probably too much to add on top of the rest of your streaming data.