Red Faction Maxes out Xbox 360 - Volition turn to Xbox 720

[shams]

S.T.A.G.E. said:

shams said:

megaman2 said:

Gameplayer: So you’re saying that RFG is pushing the hardware as far as it can go? Squeezing every drop of juice out of the Xbox 360?

Rick White: Yeah, we’ve got it to the point where we can’t even put an extra vehicle into a world, because it’ll blow the memory. Every little change we make we have to be hyper-critical about it because it could just bring the whole system down. We evaluate every little change in the game, and then we run our tools on it to make sure it isn’t going to break the game and then we move forward, so it really is about pushing the engine as far as we can, and pushing the hardware as far as we can, and then looking at what is the next set of hardware that’s going to come out. Where can we take it then? You know we’re already thinking about if we had XYZ X number of years from now, what would we do with our engine?

That sounds a little wanky to me, to be honest. Saying that they used 100% of the 512MB of RAM that the 360 has available is just excessive - they should cut back on some of their textures, and add extra content to the game if its important.

Unless they have balanced their textures/RAM usage to 50:50, its going to make a PS3 port much, much harder as well - as the memory is more segmented.

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They should be using more compression (i.e. for game/mesh/sound data) if they have RAM issues - I just don't believe that everything is compressed and perfectly optimised (for RAM use) - and they have used the entire 512MB.

Or setup a local RAM texture cache, and stream textures into the cache as needed. That could save them 100MB...

If they used the entire 512 MB of RAM wouldn't that mean the PS3 version will turn out graphically superior since the 360 shares the 512 MB of RAM between the GPU and the CPU? If the game was done evenly it would've turned out the same, but the PS3 can compress files better right?

The PS3 has the same amount of RAM as the 360 (apart from 'system' use, where the 360 reserves 32MB and the PS3 potentially a lot more on both VRAM & system RAM). The difference is that the PS3 'forces' developers to use half for VRAM, and half for system RAM - potentially in exchange for better performance.

So, if Red Faction has roughly split half RAM into meshes/textures & half into game data/application use - it should be "pretty much" fine on the PS3.

But if it needs say 400MB for textures/meshes (i.e. meshes generated on the fly), then its going to suffer on the PS3. Might need a system that caches meshes in system RAM, and streams them into a smaller VRAM block as they are needed.

There are always solutions - its just about performance, development time/difficulty & optimisation.

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These days, compression is relatively CPU low - depending on the algo's used. GPUs may support compressed vertex lists, compressed (lossy) textures and more.

 

From a development POV, one of their issues with the PS3 may be the "uncertainty" about available RAM. On the 360 you know MS never use more than 32MB - on the PS3 Sony gives a more vague limit (not sure about the numbers). You might not be able to guarantee more than 400MB of RAM available (for example) and just use the rest as a cache when its there.