BioShock PS3 dev: 'Blu-ray hasn't made much difference'

[sieanr]

Kyros said:

Texture detail has nothing to do with size of bluray. Video RAM can hold 256 megs of texture detail on a ps3 and about the same on the 360. Unless you want much more frequent load time on the ps3...

Because of that God invented texture streaming. Games like Devil May Cry that have hard load times at some points have become very rare. A game like GTA4 where you can drive everywhere in the world without load times has to read textures to the VRAM all the time. The VRAM is more like a Cache in a system like this that contains everything you see but as little unused textures as possible.

Or in other words there are two things restricting texture details:

1) The bandwidth from disc to VRAM. This has been until now the dominant factor, but apparently developers like for example ID software can now use more textures than fit on a DVD.
2) The amount of texture space on disc. This has not been that important until now, but if developers overcome the first problem this will change. And apparently they come to this point.

Fucking bullshit

The bandwidth from disc to VRAM hasn't been an issue since the Dreamcast. All the consoles after that were designed to stream textures.

RAM is a bigger limit on texture detail than those things you mention. This is because a texture has to be in the RAM for it to be rendered. So you can stream all you want but the resolution of the textures you see in a scene is still constrained by how large the ram is.

Texture fillrate is the other big limit. The higher resolution the texture is the more power is required to map that texture to a polygon. Once again you can stream until the cows come home, but it doesn't matter when the GPU isn't powerful enough to actually draw those textures quickly.