| setsunatenshi said: This is kind of a no shit sherlock... yes, in theory you can build a machine without RAM, it just won't be a gaming machine. [Yes, it could be a RAM less console.] So why exactly bring it up when we are discussing something as specific as a console? It would be too long of a post to go through every minutia, so let's just get the short version... Your example of the media being loaded off the cd is pretty much invalid as every modern console will install the game into the drive for quick access to the game assets. That goes exactly into my previous point of having a faster hard drive having a benefit on LOADING TIMES. That is it and that is all. [That's exactly what I'm trying to say. Having faster reading times from the media means that I could let some things to be loaded on demand instead of loading it five minutes before using it. In another words, the way I use the RAM available is in some way affected by the speed of the media. That's our point here, you said RAM has nothing to do with the media but it has.] If any game developer is reading this, please feel free to correct me in case I'm saying something wrong, but the RAM needs to hold the most immediate resources for what current level of the game is being played are. If the game needs to go back to the storage (hard drive, sd card, bluray, etc) to pick up new resources the game either will stop to load those same resources into the RAM or just simply glitch out. [I have a bachelor degree on Computer Science, a master degree on Computer Networks; I'm a software developer on my work and an indie game developer as a hobby but I think that you still won't believe me but... you're wrong. The game goes to the BD or HDD to read assets all the time - specially on big games. It's called asynchronous (concurrently) loading: the loading is happening while you're already playing the game and usually keeps that way until you turn it off. The RAM can't store all the game data. Think of Witcher 3 or Skyrim world: when you goes near a building it is loaded into the RAM but it's discarded when you're far from it (specially on older consoles). Another example of it are the pop-ins (but not all of them).] There is simply no way in hell you can give the tasks of the RAM to the storage media unless you ran out of RAM. The developer would simply program the game around the RAM limitation and make sure they will only load exactly as many resources as they are absolutely needed in order for the game to play. This can simply mean lower resolution textures, fewer objects, etc. [I'm not saying that Switch can use the cartridge as a RAM. I'm saying that the developer could benefit from having a faster media while using the RAM available. In that way, having a faster media could mean different usage of RAM even on the same game in different consoles.] So please let's stop with theoretical scenarios and just look at things realistically. And that means, no, having a faster ssd/sd card, will not compensate for some lack of RAM while running a modern game. [I'm using practical scenarios. I can understand what you are trying to say. I'm not saying that the cartridges on Switch will compensate it not having 8Gb of RAM. What I'm saying is that a game can use the read speed of a faster media in his favour and get better usages of the RAM space that doesn't need to be used as cache anymore.] |
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