Capcom: PS3 harddrive install worth it!

[Katilian]

MrMarc said:

Katilian said:

 

I don't see why games which 'require' HDD installation don't just do it dynamically. Basically, if the data isn't available on the HDD, copy it over in the background. You might need a small amount of the game copied over initially, but after that you'd be set. If it was smart, you could set it up to stream as far into the game as possible in the background until the entire data was copied, so it would be done within the first hour of the game.

 While that's certainly a good idea on paper I think in reality it would cripple the already minimal ammounts of RAM the consoles have to offer. 

 Maybe for a high-end PC game which would be run on something with... I don't know a minimum of 4GB's of RAM this may work? Other than that though it doesn't sound too feasible with this generation's hardware, on consoles at least.

It really depends on how you buffer from the drive. Theroetically, if memory was a premium, you could copy from the drive a single byte at a time, but this obviously wouldn't be the most efficent either. At a meg a second (only requiring one meg of memory to transfer) you could copy around 3.5gig in an hour. Remembering that this would need to be a background operation, you wouldn't want to be saturating the busses either, so assumably there would be a sweet spot as a compromise.

Not knowing the technical details of the PS3, I can't really comment on how feasible this actually is, but given that dynamic loading is doable on significantly less powerful systems, the idea of dynamic caching isn't far fetched.