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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His spec is right. Obviously things like the budgets for sound or AI vary from game to game... but, it's pretty close. On the X360 you have 512mb of unified memory but right off, the X360 OS eats 32mb (this is why you can access the Live Blades during a game). Textures.. 120mb is about right. Let's say you have linear streaming levels, that gets further divided up into "rooms" or "sectors" where you only get 64mb of textures (which that can be eaten up by shared level texture data). It doesn't sound like a lot, it isn't, but it makes us Devs get a little more creative.
