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Squilliam on 29 April 2009
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WereKitten said:
Squilliam said:

Except the industry if given enough performance from the console itself will continue the trend of moving away from expensive CGI onto pre-rendered or in game cutscenes. The rest -> Textures, models, etc would likely still be random access in the same way it is now.

Yes the assets are getting bigger and compression isn't getting better. If they could compress efficiently now they wouldn't complain about the DVD-9 disc size. However the actual models and terrain themselves can get a nice dose of tessellation, the first gen technology of this will be implemented with direct3d 11, by the time 2011 rolls around we'll have 2nd or 3rd generation tessellation hardware which should simplify the rendering of polygons and the models used to create the game.

I don't see how using 10-20GB flash drives would be any hassle in a couple of years. It will be more expensive than optical drives, but consider the savings of not having to use a mechanical hdd or optical drive and slashing the ram requirements down. Its a saving which could net more than $100 and $5 per game at the start of the generation is a pretty good tradeoff with that level of savings.

 

We're reasoning about 5 years in the future, right?

- CGI are not going away in 5 years. Next gen consoles won't be powerful enough, as they will probably comparable to PCs of 1-2 years before the launch date. As for the CGI price: moving in-engine the rendering won't make much for the biggest cost, that is the setup of models and scenes and animations. It's not the rendering farm that is expensive, it's the artists designing the stuff. Same man-hours spent setting in-engine scenes instead that in Maya means comparable cost.

- Tessellation basically saves on geometry, and that saves you precious GPU memory. But space on the storage media is hardly taken up by detailed models data. I deem that marginal. On the other hand procedurally generated content will be more and more important for sure for things like terrains in open world games.

- Higher def textures wil simpy require more space. They do on today's PC games.

Completely removing the optical drive doesn't make sense: in 2011-2013 both MS and Sony will still want their console to be a media hub. This media hub must be able to play CDs, DVDs and most probably BluRay movies.

What makes more sense? Using the BluRay disc format for games too and including 200-500GB of solid state storage in the console, or limiting games to half the size of MGS4 or FFXIII on each $5 stick?

 

If CGI cost just as much as in engine video rendering then it would be more popular, no? It would be an obvious choice, and yet even PS3 exclusive games like MGS4 for example tend to eschew CGI for in engine rendering or pre-recorded rendering from inside the game engine. Even though theres more space available, still the trend remains and it goes against CGI so the only plausible explanation is that it costs more and the price/benifit isn't there unlike the previous generation.

I do grant that textures do take up a lot/most of the space. There isn't an easy way around this unfortunately. However I don't see them exploding to over 20GBs by the next generation alone, thats a lot of unique content to create. Procedural generation is constantly catching up, and perhaps it may alleviate this issue.

As for optical formats, both Microsoft and Nintendo don't seem at all interested in physical media anymore. Furthermore I doubt that many consoles are actually used to play music or movies, people tend to prefer actual dedicated players for these functions and theres always the shift to and focus on digital formats streamed over the internet such as Netflix. Microsoft hasn't put much thought into DVD playback if the quality is any indication.

Lastly, as for space on solid state flash medium 4GB will cost $8 retail, 16GB will cost $30 retail. The actual flash and manufacturing costs are likely half the Newegg prices given there are several layers of margin and shipping between the consumer and producers. Therefore its possible to conclude that the cards cost roughly $1 per GB of data. Given the fact that flash producers like Samsung are currently transitioning to a new process node and another one will be transitioned about the time the next generation consoles are released one could conclude that one could get a 16GB card for roughly $4 manufactured assuming transistor counts double twice. 32GB for twice the cost would be more than enough for almost all ambitious games released towards the start of the generation.

Given the fact that these cards can be made to be only usable on the one console im certain that publishers would be willing to wear some of the additional costs involved in using flash as it would eliminate the used market for games.

 



Tease.