Soundwave said:
What does it matter whether it was software side or dedicated hardware, it was even part of the official GameCube SDK (dev kits). |
It matters a huge fucking deal.
1) CPU cycles spent decoding video is cycles not spent decompressing textures.
2) CPU cycles spent decoding video are CPU cycles not running A.I. routines.
3) CPU cycles spent decoding video are CPU cycles not doing Physics.
4) CPU cycles spent decoding video are CPU cycles not doing post-processing on the CPU. I.E Morphological Anti-Aliasing, Bloom etc'.
5) CPU cycles spent decoding video are CPU cycles not doing shader compilation.
6) CPU cycles spent decoding video in software consumes more power than on a dedicated hardware block.
| Soundwave said: The point is it could be done, if Squaresoft wanted the game on the GameCube it would have been fairly easy to put it onto 2 discs. The biggest space hog on FFX was actually the voice acting (which was awful lol), they used up more space on that than even the video did. That could have also been easily compressed. |
The point is, it could be done on all the consoles, making it a redundant "advantage" for the Cube.
Arguably, the Original Xbox could do it better in software thanks to it's more flexible and extensive SIMD instructions anyway.
Lossless Audio has always been a space hog... Remember when the 8th gen consoles launched, Call of Duty had 30-40GB of it's install footprint as just lossless Audio?
Yeah. It's shit. But it's the world we live in.
...One could argue high quality Audio is less important these days as people have resorted to using TV's built in Audio or garbage Sound Bars... I haven't seen a 7.1 Audio system (Other than mine) in the wild in over a decade.
| Soundwave said: The games of that era were still low res 480i/p games, they didn't use up much data, FMV and uncompressed audio is what would eat up disc space but by 2001 there were tons of compression techniques available. My junk family laptop that had junk specs could run MPEG-4 video files in those days without much fuss. |
Size of data is all relative.
Consoles have stagnated for decades on drive capacities, which is why it stings more.
As for a "Junk Laptop". - Remember when Intel released the Intel Pentium MMX in `1997? They had this thing called "MMX"
MMX is a set of extensions which is used to accelerate things like Video decoding, hence why a "junk laptop" especially one with more advanced SIMD like SSE could do MPEG-4 without much drama.
Consoles however are fixed hardware devices, you can't just drop in a new CPU and get better performance.
So any CPU cycles you invest into things like video decoding... Means the CPU isn't allowed to spend cycles on something else.
| Soundwave said: XBox was horribly designed hardware from a cost POV that was bleeding huge amounts of cash that even Microsoft said "uh no, this has to stop". |
The consumers were the winners because of that.
That should be celebrated, not shunned.
The more hardware we get for our dollar, the better.
The fact you are celebrating getting less hardware for your dollar is just bloody bizarre.
Are you the kind of person who is happy paying more to put fuel in their vehicle? Paying more for their Mortgage? More for their Electricity? More for their Groceries? No?
Think about it.
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