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Enchant Arm Update(HDD caching,DVD9 limitations,Beta vs Alpha kits)

bycha said:
I guess retarded guys on fucking crack from Tecmo just love to whine, because they been whining about how hard it is to squeeze DOA4 into DVD9 so loud that even I heard em...

Yeah, and the complaint (which was a joke BTW) was about squeezing in uncompressed HD video FMVs into the disc! Like I said, it's all about FMVs. Itagaki will just end up putting in compressed WMV9 FMVs in the game.

2hr 720P WMV9 only takes up 2~3GBs. And I can't even imagine 2hrs worth of FMVs in a fighting game.....

I mean COMON guys. GT4 is using DVD9. X360 is at the VERY LEAST 20 times more powerful graphically than ps2. Ring any bells?

I guess it's option B you're choosing? :P

Is the Tekken 5 DVD for PS2 (let's say conservatively 10,000,000 PPS) 50x as big as as Tekken 3 CD for PSOne (about 200,000 PPS)? :lol

Myst IV (PC, 2004), by the way, utilizes 2хDVD9.

(But I guess for people without perfomance PC at home this one is hard to understand.)

Myst 4: Revelations

PC System Requirements

Supported OS: Windows® 98SE/2000/Me/XP (only)
Processor: 700 MHz Pentium® III or AMD Athlon™ or better (Pentium IV recommended)
RAM: 128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended) (256 MB required for XP)
Video Card: 32 MB DirectX® 9-compliant video card (64 MB recommended) (see supported list*)
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0-compliant sound card
DirectX: DirectX 9.0 (included on DVD)
DVD: 4x DVD or faster
Hard Drive Space: 3 GB free
Display: 800x600 display


HOLY SHIT! You're right! It's a monster game requiring a monster rig! :lol
 
Shogmaster said:
Yeah, and the complaint (which was a joke BTW) was about squeezing in uncompressed HD video FMVs into the disc! Like I said, it's all about FMVs. Itagaki will just end up putting in compressed WMV9 FMVs in the game.

2hr 720P WMV9 only takes up 2~3GBs. And I can't even imagine 2hrs worth of FMVs in a fighting game.....

Nice joke! Moaning about close partner weaknesses. MS liked that for sure.
Oh, you guessed! Li-mi-ta-ti-ons. That's what on the table for X360-playaz.

Is the Tekken 5 DVD for PS2 (let's say conservatively 10,000,000 PPS) 50x as big as as Tekken 3 CD for PSOne (about 200,000 PPS)? :lol

Like I said, people simply, very-very simply do not understand past, current and future state of graphical and audio technologies.
 
bycha said:
Nice joke! Moaning about close partner weaknesses. MS liked that for sure.
Oh, you guessed! Li-mi-ta-ti-ons. That's what on the table for X360-playaz.

Either you are mildly retarded, or you are like twelve.... You better be twelve, because we already have filled our quota for mildly retarded.

Like I said, people simply, very-very simply do not understand past, current and future state of graphical and audio technologies.

Why don't you dazzle us mr. tech-wiz. You're off to such a great start! :lol
 
Shogmaster said:
Is the Tekken 5 DVD for PS2 (let's say conservatively 10,000,000 PPS) 50x as big as as Tekken 3 CD for PSOne (about 200,000 PPS)? :lol

For most games it's probably going to be enough. But for a game of gt4'ish proportions you're gonna have to go multi-disc. NO WAY in hell you're gonna be able to compress an 80K+poly High-rez-texture model into the same space occupied by a 4k very-low-res-texture model, and gt4 filled a dlDVD with such, IIRC. Similar or even bigger(do to easier LOD) scaling-up of assets going to go into the rest(environments, etc.).
 
teh_pwn said:
And what about high definition audio, and high definition video, and all the information needed for more geometry, AI, speech, etc. Just compress it all?

Sure you could do that, but that's a major inconvenience for the developers and it'll handicap the games.

I'm betting major games designed ground up for PS3 will look ugly on X360 because they'll take advantage of the space. Even if they spend the resources to compress all the stuff, it can't look as good as the near lossless data that would be on the PS3 game.

Decompressing massive amounts of data on the fly also consumes much processing power. That's where PS3 has the edge on Xbox360. So if the game is designed ground up for PS3 and takes advantage of all that space and processing power, you're going to have to take an even greater hit on media quality.

Just compare Gamecube games to PS2/Xbox games with lots of media. Ugly.

most PC games these days still come on CDs. It's not going to be a problem unless you want to throw in lots of HD movies (which are HUGE). I'm glad that developers are going to have a tougher time fitting in lots of CG movies in games - they need to go away. In-engine cut scenes are the wave of the future.
 
Nerevar said:
most PC games these days still come on CDs. It's not going to be a problem unless you want to throw in lots of HD movies (which are HUGE). I'm glad that developers are going to have a tougher time fitting in lots of CG movies in games - they need to go away. In-engine cut scenes are the wave of the future.

IAWTP
 
Divus Masterei said:
For most games it's probably going to be enough. But for a game of gt4'ish proportions you're gonna have to go multi-disc. NO WAY in hell you're gonna be able to compress an 80K+poly High-rez-texture model into the same space occupied by a 4k very-low-res-texture model, and gt4 filled a dlDVD with such, IIRC. Similar or even bigger(do to easier LOD) scaling-up of assets going to go into the rest(environments, etc.).

80K+ polys per car, high res texture racing game on a huge backdrop? Sounds alot like PGR3 (which seems to fit fine on a single DVD for Bizarre). ;)
 
Divus Masterei said:
For most games it's probably going to be enough. But for a game of gt4'ish proportions you're gonna have to go multi-disc. NO WAY in hell you're gonna be able to compress an 80K+poly High-rez-texture model into the same space occupied by a 4k very-low-res-texture model, and gt4 filled a dlDVD with such, IIRC. Similar or even bigger(do to easier LOD) scaling-up of assets going to go into the rest(environments, etc.).
...

Vark said:
Models and Textures on the 360 won't be a problem (especially if things move to the more procedural side of things).

Texture data compresses very well, as does model data.
 
Shogmaster said:
80K+ polys per car, high res texture racing game on a huge backdrop? Sounds alot like PGR3 (which seems to fit fine on a single DVD for Bizarre). ;)

Is pgr3 estimated to have 100s upon 100s of cars and dozens upon dozens of diverse locations?

What I'm worried is that there may come a time when say, pgr4 they may've to limit the number of cities, or drop a few of the pgr3 cities in order to bring new ones, limit the total number of cars, or risk making it dl'able content, or going multi-dvd.

HL2 which I've heard is a game on the shortside(mgs3-re'ish length in the 10-15hr range), and with not too great model variety, and which seems to use mostly realtime gphx for the story sequences occupies more than 4GB on my Hdd.

HL2 is slightly below the low-gphx-end of what I'd expect for a top-tier next-gen title. For being a title below-par in gphx detail, game length and model variety, if I've heard correctly, it's not too comforting to hear it takes a pretty big chunk of what we've available. (IIRC, about a whole gig in the dl-dvds is locked away for security reasons in xbx and could be so in x360 too.)

ed
 
Nerevar said:
most PC games these days still come on CDs. It's not going to be a problem unless you want to throw in lots of HD movies (which are HUGE). I'm glad that developers are going to have a tougher time fitting in lots of CG movies in games - they need to go away. In-engine cut scenes are the wave of the future.

UT2004 was like 5 fucking CDs. Installation took like, 5 minutes longer.
 
Divus Masterei said:
HL2 is slightly below the low-gphx-end of what I'd expect for a top-tier next-gen title.

Nah, raise the bar

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You can't compare directly of course and X360 will not have RSX (even at 430Mhz), but consoles -- specialized hardware.
Raise the bar.

And about length and scope of games -- I agree.
 
Divus Masterei said:
Is pgr3 estimated to have 100s upon 100s of cars and dozens upon dozens of diverse locations?

Are you saying that Polyphony is going to put 100s of cars per race @ 80,000+ polys per car?!? That by itself is a 480million PPS @ 60fps without any background (not to mention PS3 only has 512MB of RAM, just like X360). Really, before any lack of room on the media hijinks, we should be worried that there is lack of room on the RAM! :lol

Or are you worried that there isn't enough space on the disc to store data for 100s of cars and locations at higher polygon count and textures? Didn't someone just explain to you that geometry and texture data compresses really well? And if some X360 dev decides that 6/7GB just isn't enough, those guys do have the option of taking some of that room on the standard HDD. They can have the data from a second DVD installed on the HDD.

What I'm worried is that there may come a time when say, pgr4 they may've to limit the number of cities, or drop a few of the pgr3 cities in order to bring new ones, limit the total number of cars, or risk making it dl'able content, or going multi-dvd.

Which even if happens, isn't gonna be a big deal since X360 comes with a HD.
 
Shogmaster said:
Or are you worried that there isn't enough space on the disc to store data for 100s of cars and locations at higher polygon count and textures? Didn't someone just explain to you that geometry and texture data compresses really well? And if some X360 dev decides that 6/7GB just isn't enough, those guys do have the option of taking some of that room on the standard HDD. They can have the data from a second DVD installed on the HDD.

If PGR3 uses compression and takes most of the available 7.4GB(assuming that's right.), then a game using 4-5x the content, will occupy 4-5x the size. True this'd only be a problem for probably a single racing game, a GT4'ish game which is likely to be extremely rare(Is there even any such racing game besides gt4 this gen?).
 
Is pgr3 estimated to have 100s upon 100s of cars and dozens upon dozens of diverse locations?

Do you really thinks that GT5 will have hundreads of 80K+poly car? Can you imagine the time it would take to create these models? ;)
 
sangreal said:
Never been a problem on PC.
Very different situation...

PC games are just thrown on a disc in a very compressed fashion. The only think taken into consideration when burning a PC game is how can they fit the most data on that disc. Reason being, the game will never be played from that disc and there is no reason to optimize the format of the data on that disc. When you install the game, it will be copied to your HDD.

A console game will read data from the disc, and if that data is not probably organized, it can have quite an impact on your load times. Console games often end up with more data overall (including duplicates and uncompressed data) in order to improve efficiency. Why do you think so many consoles take up so much more space than PC games...even when the PC games often sport much higher resolution textures and such?

Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance is a massive game and goes well over 7gb, I believe. However, the textures are quite low resolution and there aren't nearly as many of them as a normal PC game. Imagine a game designed in the same fashion, but with high-resolution assets. You'd still have all of the audio and game data to deal with (though that too would likely increase in size), but now you'd have to deal with MUCH higher resolution textures.

Of course, they could allow them to compress data a bit more...but they still need to worry about data seeking optimization and, even when compressed, large texture sets can eat up a lot of space (especially now that we are worrying about so many texture layers).

Do you really thinks that GT5 will have hundreads of 80K+poly car? Can you imagine the time it would take to create these models? ;)
Chances are, it will have hundreds of cars...

I'm sure more detail will actually become a benefit for them. They were already shooting for extreme accuracy, but had to worry about polygon budgets much more. Now there are fewer limits and they will still be working towards the same goal. I don't think it will take significantly more effort...
 
Doesn't a game like San Andreas already use a good chunk of a dvd disc? (If not most of one) Do you honestly think in 5 years games won't take much more space? San Andreas textures were ass, and if everything is heavily compressed streaming will be very difficult, won't it? I don't think the dvd gives next gen games enough space, but I don't see it being a HUGE problem. Just an annoyance, an excuse to get a PS3 game over an Xbox 360 game.
 
dark10x said:
Very different situation...

Exactly, some people are just incapable of thinking when it comes to this topic, for example, trying to compare the size of a PC Game's data footprint present on a CD|DVD to a Console game's. A prime example:

Nerevar said:
most PC games these days still come on CDs.

You don't compare a PC game's shipping size to a console game's size requirements, you compare it's HDD footprint. A PC Game is run off the HDD where the complete data set, N, is present in uncompressed form, a Console game must run this same set, N, off the optical drive and needs that same footprint AND space for redundency, N + R, present on the disc.

Contemporary games like UT2004 (N = 4.5GB) or FEAR (N = 4GB) already are getting quite large and this is for a game being run off the HDD in a PC so is only the N term from above, the PC format that has no concept of redundancy and R can be quite large in proportion AFAIK. It's not looking that great for DVD...
 
Vince said:
A PC Game is run off the HDD where the complete data set, N, is present in uncompressed form, a Console game must run this same set, N, off the optical drive and needs that same footprint AND space for redundency, N + R, present on the disc..

But isn't the data on the disc for the console game going to be compressed? Why compare it to a PC game on HDD in uncompressed form?
 
Redbeard said:
But isn't the data on the disc for the console game going to be compressed? Why compare it to a PC game on HDD in uncompressed form?
No, it's not going to be...at least not in the same fashion.

This should already be obvious with current generation consoles, where the typical game size is much greater than your average PC game.
 
jet1911 said:
Do you really thinks that GT5 will have hundreads of 80K+poly car? Can you imagine the time it would take to create these models? ;)

NO, gt5 will most probably have about 150ish cars, and about a dozen tracks. But gt6 having to only tweak their engine, and being able to recycle most of gt5's content with a few tweaks is another matter entirely
 
Redbeard said:
But isn't the data on the disc for the console game going to be compressed?

The short answer is no. "Compression" is a term that's somewhat ambiguous as it's applicable to a wide range of techniques that conserve data storage requirements. For example, Texture Mapping is a form of "compression" as it holds data in a set that's far smaller than reproduction using just geometry -- but you won't hear many people saying that streaming textures off a CD is "compression." Especially compared to the bulk compression that happens on PC games and is uncompressed and stored in a volume several times it's size on the HDD of a PC.
 
Vince said:
The short answer is no. "Compression" is a term that's somewhat ambiguous as it's applicable to a wide range of techniques that conserve data storage requirements. For example, Texture Mapping is a form of "compression" as it holds data in a set that's far smaller than reproduction using just geometry -- but you won't hear many people saying that streaming textures off a CD is "compression." Especially compared to the bulk compression that happens on PC games and is uncompressed and stored in a volume several times it's size on the HDD of a PC.

So what does Vark mean when he says...

Vark said:
Texture data compresses very well, as does model data.
 
Vince said:
Contemporary games like UT2004 (N = 4.5GB) or FEAR (N = 4GB) already are getting quite large and this is for a game being run off the HDD in a PC so is only the N term from above, the PC format that has no concept of redundancy and R can be quite large in proportion AFAIK. It's not looking that great for DVD...

And probably these are shortish(haven't played UT2k4 or FEAR) fps with few areas/models recycled frequently(e.g. vast mostly empty lands or vege-recycling areas or your tried and true corridors/tunnels), and little use of fmvs or voiceovers(judging from what I've heard of other recent pc fps...).
 
Redbeard said:
So what does Vark mean when he says...

He's trying to argue that forms of compression are going to allow X360 to trade off computation for storage and that it will allow a NG game to fit on a DVD. It's a somewhat easy argument to make as it seems logical, but in reality it's not going to happen. For example, texture compression (eg. S3TC or 3Dc|DXT1) is already used in PC games as it's support is ubiquitious on 3D ASICs. Geometry compression is not as cut-and-dry, but in any case the PlayStation3 is much more receptive as a platform to things like Subdivisions surfaces.

In any case, the fact thats that data on a console is run off the Optical Drive in an analogous way as to the HDD in a PC, it needs to be uncompressed (unlike what is done on a PC game) and accessible readily and quickly.
 
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