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prlatino86 on 18 August 2007
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sharky said:

Anyways if you actually know anything about game programming you know lack of HDD is not a problem..otherwise PS2 is the most gimped, crappy system of all time. And Gamecube is the second least powerful, most gimped. Right?

Of course it's all Sony fanboys who hate the Core (because they know it will be used to destroy Sony) so you'll never get them to admit PS2 sucks because it lack a HDD LOL.

5400RPM is barely at all faster than a 12X DVD drive..but I know you guys will just completely ignore that fact and most of you probably cant even begin to comprehend it. Technically illiterate doesn't begin to describe the technology level of most of you..

But just ask yourself why Madden is 60 FPS on 360 and 30 on PS3 with HDD...or why most PS3 multi-platform games have longer load times with the HDD than 360 without HDD...

The article is actually fairly interesting..for one it notes ms DOES allow MMO's to require the HDD (I think it's very reasonable in that case).

 >>"We can't guess how much space you're going to need for your updates, and, if anything's going to keep you from expanding indefinitely, it won't be us, as much as market forces," said Ian Lewis, software design engineer at Microsoft. "Feel free to require 30GB for your game; that's just going to make your potential audience a lot smaller.">>

 That is also interesting..MS is not telling designers to do anything.

 

 


Actually, not having a harddrive can be an issue, it can limit options in programming.  It allows programmers to have extremely heavy compression of textures and other information, then when the game is put into the system, it can uncompress the info onto the harddrive.  This was beneficial in the sense that it helps reduce load times, and allows for increase texture sizes and better graphics quality.  This benefit was used on the Xbox, which was what allowed the regular xbox to have some games around the end of its life was some pretty intense graphics.  perfect examples were Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Conkers: Live and Reloaded.  Anyone who ever owned those games on Xbox would notice the first time they put in the Disc, it wouldnt let them skip through the opening intro cutscene immediately, because it was uncompressing info onto the HDD.  then, every time ur played the game, the info would already be on there, until you played a different game and then replaced the disc again, you would have to repeat the process.  This is one part of the reason why Chaos Theory looked so much better on xbox then ps2. (P.S. this was done mainly due to the limit in size of the DVD.  High compression allowed for more info. 

Also, the HDD is still faster then the DVD drive.  Even at 5400 RPMs.  Plus, here you can have almost a dual effect, feeding the RAM with info from both DVD and HDD simultaneously. 

Yeah, so this is the reason microsoft has been talking lately also about allowing games that come with a label HDD REQUIRED, so developers can use that option, same way they did with games.  (EDIT: before some smartass says it, besides games that are MMOs)