Xenon version of Unreal Engine 3.0 games: 1/2 texture res

god i'm laughing out loud in my office, i'm gonna get sacked...

 

I found this on teamxbox forum,i dont know if it's true or an apriljoke:

"Our sources say that Microsoft is listening, and that it has already upped the memory capacity in the Xbox 360 to 512MB in response to developer concerns about it's performance" - GameInformer April issue

If it's true,did we see 512MB XDR ram in the PS3? I know XDR ram
is expensive,i wanna see Sonys strategy after the XBOX2(360) launch with
512MB ram.

 

3Dc isn't gonna be the saviour of a console with only 256MB. Think about the Xbox's 64MB and the next gen having 4x, and you might think that with 3Dc, the "effective" memory is a lot higher. But most Xbox games didn't have normal maps, so there'd be nothing for 3Dc to compress. Instead of saving memory through a new type of compression, we're taking up more memory by storing something that just wasn't used before. If the Xenon can render an exact Ninja Gaiden with only the addition of normal mapping, the game that fit in 64MB on the Xbox will now take up more than that on the Xenon, even with 3Dc. Games like CoRiddick, Halo 2, and Doom 3 would have that larger "effective" memory pool to work with on a next gen console, but where normal mapped games were the minority in this generation, they will be the norm in the next.

Comparing to the PC is a little different, because many of the bigger titles are using normal mapping, and some without compression. AFAIK, no games (other than the 1.3 patched Far Cry) currently use 3Dc. Doom 3 might fit on the Xenon in High Quality, and actually look better than the PC version, because 3Dc is designed to produce less artifacting than S3TC/DXTn.

 

Xbox 360 Sees Dramatic RAM Increase?

http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/gossip/xbox-2/xbox-360-sees-dramatic-ram-increase-038638.php

 

Well iron tiger when you see the xenons ram amount you might be surprised , i think it may end up having the most ram in a console most likely because it will hae the cheapest ram

 

dramatic?

Is a bump up to 512Mb considered dramatic?

 

why not ? its a doubling of the ram amount . If they clocked the xenon cpu at 6.8 ghz instead of 3.4 would you not consider that a dramatic increase in speed and performance ?

 

You don't consider doubling RAM dramatic? And especially for a console shipping THIS year?

Tommy McClain

 

PSP jumped from 8 Mb to 32, so anything less than 4x is far from dramatic

 

didn't it also get slower ram in that jump ?

 

I hope this news is true, 512MB would be nice. If MS can put more ram on Xenon than what PS3 will have, it would be nice way to counter the edge Cell has on Xenon cpu. Also maybe this helps Sony to also increase ram.

 

Heheh..
I was just wondering what "dramatic" meant. I mean, I think 512Mb is great, but maybe others don´t consider it like a "dramatic increase"..

 

Is the XDR "concentrated" to the whole system(PS3) or just the cell interface from patents?
Otherwise i could think 256XDR for cell and 128-256 GDDR3 for NV gpu.

 

For costreasons then if nobody get that.

 

btw the reason why i think the xenon will have the most ram is simple

even if its gdr 700 which is fast today by sept most cards like the r520 and the next nvidia card will be using that ram thus causing it to be made in higher quanitys and the price to go down .


By its second year on the market the ram will be moved into mainstream cards and will thus be even cheaper to get .

Meanwhile the ps3 will have xdr ram and it will be expensive and it will so far only be used in the ps3 . While gdr ram has been made for over a year now and yields are high and the designs have been tweaked the xdr has not , then factor in the volume sales and while the ps3 will sell in high numbers i doubt it will sell higher than the xenon + pc sector

 

There´s one factor here beside timeframe and avalability as i see it.
And it´s how cheap can Sony get XDR? I think there´s more qualified people than me here too answer that but as i remember Toschiba/Sony will make them THERSELVES in their own fab´s so besides the fraction of licensing cost from Rambus this can be a ACE in their hands.

 

Not only are you laughing out loud in your office - you are typing it in and telling us that you are laughing out loud in your office.



On the topic at hand.. by 2006 you can expect most PC's to have 1024 megabytes of system memory and the top end cards to have 512 megabytes of video RAM. That kind of RAM is not possible for a console to be released in 2005/06 so what the Epic guys said was a bit of a no-brainer.

 

No scans of magazines please . They need to feed thier children too you know

 

Actually, even with those that DO have normal maps tend (as often as possible) to use indexed color... that's *almost* 4:1, well, it's 4:1 plus 768 extra bytes. However, the main weakness of indexed textures is that they're slower. If you're heavy on shaders, texture reads on an indexed texture takes an extra cycle. Moreover, on HDTV and especially progressive scan modes, it's not going to work as well because the artifacting is more visible (not hidden by the low res or the interlacing) -- all the more reason that all 3 next-gen consoles probably won't even support 8-bit color at all.

The only reason we tend to use 8-bit indexed color on normal maps vs. DXT is because DXT is just too destructive to quality and creates all nature of artifacting that shows up as bump-noise. At least indexed color may cause some softening of bumps, but it doesn't create details and blocking that shouldn't be there because the quantization takes place over the entire texture space. In short, numerical accuracy is not entirely lost.

In any case, from a bandwidth point of view, 3Dc won't really save much. We already use indexed and DXT textures wherever possible. Very few textures on Xbox go in as straight 32-bit uncompressed unless they're really small (e.g. icon-sized). And since the potential compression ratios haven't really changed, 16x texel resolution is still going to mean 16x memory usage.

 

Scans = bad.