Ail said:
Mifely said:
Just_Ben said:
Mifely said:
Do all Wii owners imagine that they purchased a console that will, someday, be able to play all the HD console games, merely with a minor loss in texture quality? Textures take a fair chunk of memory, yes, but... its hardly the sole contributor to the memory footprint of an application like GTA4 or AC. Lemme throw up a sample memory budget for a run-of-the-mill HD game:
* 30-60 MB -- OS (I think the Wii has a much smaller OS)
* 4 MB -- screen buffers (easy to shrink if you lose HD)
* 60 MB -- code and global data (next to impossible to shrink without changing the game)
* 30 MB -- game objects (next to impossible to shrink -- see above)
* 20 MB -- animations (easy to shrink... but with substantial quality loss)
* 60 MB -- physics/collision data (pretty hard to shrink without serious level changes, which means you're re-doing all the content)
* 120 MB -- textures (easy to shrink, acceptable quality loss, IMO)
* 60 MB -- visual geometry (kinda hard to shrink, but somewhat doable, depending on artist skills and tools... and time)
* 20 MB -- sound (easy to shrink if you lower quality and compress like crazy... maybe)
* 20 MB -- AI navigational data (pretty dang hard to shrink without really messing up the AI and re-doing the content)
* ~60 MB -- misc crap I forgot (most stuff is usually much harder to shrink than textures)
Now fit that on the 64+27MB of the Wii, after accounting for, I would hope, 8MB or less for the Wii's OS. You come out with a completely different game, that is also lame compared to its HD counterpart(s).
And yes, HD cross-platform games ALWAYS use ALL the memory available. I don't think I've ever heard of a HD game that didn't have to squeeze into its platform(s) memory budget at some point in its development cycle. This has been true for... eons. Consoles never have as much memory as the developers want.
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I am no game developer, but at least a developer, and this numbers look awfull wrong to me. 60 MB code, compiled, in the ram? Only 120 MB for the textures? Thats not much. Sorry but I think all things you mentioned are way to high and the textures are way to low.
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Textures, sound, and animation (a lot of the things that can be made lower-quality easily) are usually compressed as well. 120MB of textures is a lot more texture data than 30M 32-bit RGBA values, in other words. My numbers are pretty close -- The textures might take up some additional memory (like part of the 60 extra megs I mentioned), but not as much as you might think.
I should add that, if the texture/animation/sound data is compressed, it requires some CPU horsepower to decompress and utilize each frame... another gotcha for the Wii, relative to the PS3/360 -- in order to process the data fast enough the Wii not only needs the data to be smaller, but in some cases might require less efficient compression than the more powerful consoles.
The Wii will always have great exclusives. It will never share games experiences with the other consoles, but that doesn't mean it won't have great games -- obviously it does. Downporting to it is kinda pointless, in that its so difficult, that developers are always better off making a game focused solely on the Wii's strengths, instead of trying to shove a game that uses the "big" consoles' strengths onto the Wii.
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Your general numbers are right but a few things are off.
Remember the PS3 only has 256 Mb + 256Mb for graphics ( most of it is going to be texture)
20 M for the sound, I would be hardly surprised if sound took more than a couple Mb honestly, it's uncompressed on the fly and played like that, there's no sound buffering per say in memory, nothing significant at least.
60Mb Physics/Collision data is mighty high too. The way it's handled is the game has the Visualization tree in memory and it's used for Physics/Collision too.
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Of course. These numbers will vary *vastly* from title to title... my point was more to illustrate that memory isn't just "textures" or things that are easily reduced in quality to make the game fit. A game which is "room based" will have a load less collision geometry loaded at once than a game with outdoor environments, for example.
Lets revise my texture number and say it includes the extra 60MB I had for "misc" data, and another 10MB (so 190MB total), just to fill the 250-ish M of VRAM along with the geometry. The basic issue hasn't really changed, in spite of that revision.
Unlike textures, sound, and animations, the other stuff can't just be compressed away (usually), and even using compression taxes the CPUs/GPUs on the higher end machines... the Wii would have to overcome that hurdle as well as quality reduction, just as a start.
