360 Discs Large Enough For Content?

heartless_ wrote to mention a GamesFirst article exploring whether or not Xbox 360 Discs are large enough for their expected content. From the article: "The first Prince of Persia occupied 2.44 gigs, the second 2.88, an increase of only 18%. Knights of the Old Republic went from 3.65 gigs in the first installment to 3.99 gigs in the second, a 9% increase. The Splinter Cell series went from 3.71 gigs in the first to 3.05 gigs in Pandora's Tomorrow, a reduction of 18% (though it should be noted that Chaos Theory, after switching development houses, ballooned into one of the largest games on the Xbox at 5.62 gigabytes). So the assumption that games, by their nature, grow in size as they evolve is not absolutely true. They do become more complex, but not necessarily at the expense of filesize."

Comments

HD

[dq5 studios]

But how many of those sequals had to include the now mandatory hi-res textures for HD resolutions?

it's all about HD

[AkaXakA]

Seeing as how Next-Gen is supposedly going to bring us HD, they key thing to remember is that the textures have to scale up too. Those bigger textures are going to take up quite a lot more space, so using current game sizes with current texture sizes to figure out if next-gen games will require more than the XBox discs can manage, isn't very useful.

Comparing them to install base sizes of new PC games (think HDR Half-Life 2) is a lot more useful.

Re:it's all about HD

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Those bigger textures are going to take up quite a lot more space, so using current game sizes with current texture sizes to figure out if next-gen games will require more than the XBox discs can manage, isn't very useful."

Faster CPU == more compression on the textures. Quadrupling the res on the textures doesn't necessarily mean quadrupling the size requirments. Imagine using a 640 by 480 Gif image for the old console, then using a 1280 by 960 JPEG image on the next console. In one case I tried here, the .GIF was 155K and the JPG awas 197K. 4 times as many pixels, but it was only 30% or so bigger in terms of file size. This is more or less what happens when new consoles come along. More CPU == better compression etc.

I am having a hard time believing the idea that the media is going to make all that much difference between the PS3 and the 360. Both systems only have 512 meg of RAM to fill.