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Blue-ray 'Not a Burden' For Sony
Via Opposable Thumbs, an article at GamePro in which Phil Harrison clarifies that Blue-ray on the PS3 is a 'game design' decision. From the article: "Once we had that storage capacity on Blu-ray Disc, adding the movie playback functionality was extremely cost-effective, [the cost] is actually non-existent. So games like Resistance which, as a launch title, is up to 20-something gigabytes already. And that's day one -- think about four years, six years from now. We'll be pushing the 50 gigabyte limit with dual-layer Blu-ray very quickly. So we absolutely need it as game designers, and in that regard, the consumer is getting the movie functionality effectively for free." I probably would have had a follow-up question there, but that's where the interview ends. So what do you think? Which came first for Sony: Blue-ray as new movie media, or Blu-ray as answer to design challenges?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure San Andreas was dual layer already, and that's for the PS2 with smaller and simpler textures. So, I can see how they would need 15+ gigs at a minimum for a good sequel on the PS3.
Are you saying that game developers who are currently filling up DVDs for PS2 and XBox games should suddenly have compression algorithms that are 6.75 times more efficient?
First off, the number of PS2 and XBox games that filled up a dual layered DVD could be counted on one hand.
Secondly, the only system that supported compressed textures in hardware was the Gamecube, the XBox and PS2 both had to uncompress their textures prior to rendering a polygon with that texture on it; with how much of a performance drain it was, the vast majority of PS2 games didn't bother compressing/uncompressing the textures and they were stored uncompressed. The compression algorithm that was used on the Gamecube supported 9 to 1 compression and more modern compression algorithms can get to 15 to 1 before they become too lossy. So yes they PS3 developers could use an algorithm that was 6.5 times as efficient as the algorithm they used on the PS2.
Running at 1080p widescreen instead of 480p standard means that there's 6.75 times more data (1920x1080 vs 640x480).
Only if all your "data" is full screen video.
Most of the time, just like with PC games, all the higher resolution will mean in practice is that you see the same image but with higher resolution. Obviously there will be more data due to the higher capacity of the machine, more vertex data and more detailed texture data, but not 6.75 times as much because you don't need to fill the entire screen with a single texture.
The enemies of Democracy are
now that 360's are going to get HD players there will be two options for distribution. The HD player only plays HD-DVD movies. As it is essentially an HD-DVD drive connected via USB2 to the 360, MS wouldn't be able to (realistically) enforce their DRM and copy-protection in the games. Games still will come only on DVD and play through the normal slot.
But I'd rather have the CPU dedicated to rendering more complex environments than decompressing textures
Well, when I was talking about texture decompression I was specifically refering to the GPU; the Gamecube's GPU handled real-time hardware texture decompression (S3TC) (from Nintendo.com). The result of this was that textures were compressed on disc and in memory, reducing the memory imprint of the game and reducing loading times. On a side note, I think anyone who has an iterest in GPUs should really look at the Flipper (Gamecube's GPU); it had it's framebuffer embedded on the GPU, a 1 MB texture cache (which was pretty large with the texture compression), and a fixted functionality pipeline that had most of the advanced techniques of the generion (like bump-mapping) built into it.
I just checked my PS2 copy of the game. It's 4.2GB (technically 4,499,169,280 bytes). 2.8GB of this is the audio. The Xbox and PC versions should actually be smaller due to the fact that they use compressed audio files instead of streaming XA.
I remember having a discussion many years ago about this and how it would be technically possible to have the (~3GB PS2) GTA3 on the Gamecube despite the 1.5GB discs by just compressing the audio. Low and behold the Xbox and PC versions come out under a gig.
Hell, World of Warcraft is less than 6 gigs... small enough to easily fit on one dual layer DVD. If you have more content than can fit on a single DVD (DL) than use the hard drive and use multiple discs...
So will someone at Sony please tell me why BluRay is a necessity for this generation.