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

[sieanr]

Kyros said:

I do understand the concept of streaming. PS3's bluray doesn't have nearly fast enough streaming speeds to show texture detail significantly higher than 360 games.

Simply not true. ID software stated that they have to use less detailed textures in the 360 version because they couldn't fit them on the disc. The moment ONE developer is able to do that its only a matter of time until ALL developers can do it. Time changes things.

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.

Yes if you had such a small amount of VRAM that would be an issue. But you have 256MB VRAM and if you could perfectly load every texture in exact the resolution you need (textures in multiple resolutions FTW) then you only need 1920*1080*3 ~6mb of texture information. Or in other words you can fit 40times the textures in your VRAM compared to the resolution of your image.
Now you need that because you simply are not able to perfectly stream textures so you need to have textures that are behind you, some that are in higher detail than is necessary for an object of a given distance etc. pp. But for a good developer the VRAM is big enough and not the limiting factor.

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.

You do not know much about 3D graphics do you? The resolution of the texture has not much to do with the texture fillrate. A texturing unit will simply compute the correct texel position for a given screen pixel and doesn't care at all if the texture has a 256, 512 or 1024 resolution. It will take the texel at position [0.2, 0.3] of the texture at the correct mip-level and some surrounding pixels to prevent aliasing. Try http://nehe.gamedev.net/ if you want to know more about 3D programming

 

You really have no idea what you're talking about. 

For starters "1920x1080x3 ~6mb" is probably the most telling. I assume that you thought you can take the resolution times the number of colors used in a pixel and get a rough estimate of its size (after all nothing runs in 27bits). Modern day GPUs use 32bits for its image, which means you should have multiplied it by 4, giving a correct size of roughly 8mb. Then you have to factor in even more space for holding other frames and other shit like vertex data... fuck it, I don't feel like wasting my time by explaining this.

256mb of RAM is a significant limit on texture detail. TEXTURE fillrate limits the resolution of textures used in-game. Its why COD4 sacrificed detailed textures for 60fps. You also have to take into account texture bandwidth, rendering passes and that other fun stuff.

Oh, and you do realize that 360 games have been streaming textures since the consoles launch.