Darren New escreveu:
> On 3/31/2011 10:15, Warp wrote:
>>    Looking at the hardware specifications of both consoles, they seem 
>> pretty
> 
> I just noticed that things on the PS3 seem less ...  shiney. :-) Like, 
> there's much more detail in batman's cape on the xbox than the ps3, from 
> what I can notice without having them physically side-by-side.  Maybe 
> the dev tools for that sort of thing are easier on the xbox, so more 
> work goes into making it prettier.  Or it might just be my imagination. :-)
> 
>>    There are many Xbox 360 games that have huge sceneries, such as the
>> Assassin's Creed series, Red Dead Redemption, Oblivion, etc.
> 
> Yeah, that's the kind of thing I was thinking about. I've only 
> personally seen it in Uncharted and inFamous, which are PS3-specific.

whatever the differences, they are pretty much negligible.  The bluray 
would not allow for more anything than would be able to fit in the 
memory at any one time.  Both consoles support huge open-worlds and the 
360 GPU may have an edge on graphics (or artists just the bump up 
spec/normal maps for the Microsoft console on multiplatform games).  The 
bluray player just seems to allow for far more cinematics, scripted 
events, history and voice acting, as seen in Uncharted, God of War 3 etc.

The recently released Crysis 2 is a huge open-world and has been awarded 
king of graphics on consoles so far, with 360 with a slight edge at 
this, that in the mouths of fanboys assume gigantic proportions.

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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nemesis <nam### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> The 
> bluray player just seems to allow for far more cinematics, scripted 
> events, history and voice acting, as seen in Uncharted, God of War 3 etc.

  Nothing forces a game to be released on 1 DVD. Lost Odyssey comes in
4 DVDs, Blue Dragon, Star Ocean: The Last Hope and Final Fantasy XIII
com in 3 DVDs each, and Mass Effect 2 comes in 2 DVDs.

  Of course a Blu-Ray can hold the same amount of data as about 6 DVDs,
so it's easier to put put even more stuff in one.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 3/31/2011 12:41, nemesis wrote:
> whatever the differences, they are pretty much negligible.

Oh, agreed in all ways. It's not like we're comparing the Wii or something.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Oh, agreed in all ways. It's not like we're comparing the Wii or something.

  It's curious that technically the Wii is like 10 years old, yet if you
look at the sales, it surpasses the Xbox 360 and the PS3 combined. By a
large margin.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>    The major problem is not the speed, but the amount, as I mentioned.
> The architecture would be fine, the problem is that the amount of RAM
> is puny compared to modern game requirements. If the Xbox360 had, for
> example, 2GB of RAM (or more), then it would really be a killer gaming
> platform.

Don't forget games for the PC that quote 1GB or 2GB RAM requirements 
need to accomodate the Windows OS and all other running services and 
apps as well as the game itself.  I would be quite surprised if any game 
for Windows actually used 1 or 2GB of RAM just for itself - apart from 
caching files from disc on the way to the GPU, what else would a game 
need that much CPU RAM for?

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> I just noticed that things on the PS3 seem less ... shiney. :-) Like,
> there's much more detail in batman's cape on the xbox than the ps3, from
> what I can notice without having them physically side-by-side. Maybe the
> dev tools for that sort of thing are easier on the xbox, so more work
> goes into making it prettier. Or it might just be my imagination. :-)

I haven't played on the xbox360 very often (I don't own one) but my 
impression is games on the PS3 use motion-blur and depth-of-field 
approximation effects more.  Maybe the devs are just trying to find ways 
to use up the spare CPU cores, but often it makes the game look quite 
bad in still shots, when you can see that they are just faking the effects.

Mind you, apart from the shadows (why use low resolution shadow map 
textures in such a polished game??), Gran Turismo 5 is beautiful.

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On 01/04/2011 08:49 AM, scott wrote:

> Don't forget games for the PC that quote 1GB or 2GB RAM requirements
> need to accomodate the Windows OS and all other running services and
> apps as well as the game itself. I would be quite surprised if any game
> for Windows actually used 1 or 2GB of RAM just for itself - apart from
> caching files from disc on the way to the GPU, what else would a game
> need that much CPU RAM for?

While I would imagine that most of that is texture data, and possibly 
models, a chunk of it is probably sound data too. Depending on the game, 
it might also need to store non-trivial amounts of gameplay data.

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> While I would imagine that most of that is texture data, and possibly
> models,

I imagine a good written game-engine (like a good written OS) will use 
up whatever unused resources it has available to the benefit of the user 
- in this case filling up the CPU RAM with a cache of GPU data that 
might be needed soon.  But it's not a minimum requirement for such RAM 
to be available, it's just loaded directly from disc a few frames 
earlier (big CPU<>GPU transfers are spread out over many frames anyway) 
if the files aren't in the cache.

> a chunk of it is probably sound data too.

Didn't think of that, I guess uncompressed CD-quality sound takes up 10 
MB or so per minute, maybe this is used a lot by PC games, IDK.  At 
least when using XNA with the xbox, the sounds/music are stored in some 
compressed format, it wouldn't surprise me if they are decompressed 
on-the-fly to avoid using up too much RAM.

> Depending on the game,
> it might also need to store non-trivial amounts of gameplay data.

Yeh, this is the main point I was wondering about, apart from graphics, 
what sort of data might a game need to store that runs in to several 
hundred MBs?  I couldn't think of anything straight away.

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>> a chunk of it is probably sound data too.
>
> Didn't think of that, I guess uncompressed CD-quality sound takes up 10
> MB or so per minute, maybe this is used a lot by PC games, IDK. At least
> when using XNA with the xbox, the sounds/music are stored in some
> compressed format, it wouldn't surprise me if they are decompressed
> on-the-fly to avoid using up too much RAM.

Yeah, MP3 or similar seems to be the norm here. (And these days, 
decoding MP3 takes so little CPU power...)

>> Depending on the game,
>> it might also need to store non-trivial amounts of gameplay data.
>
> Yeh, this is the main point I was wondering about, apart from graphics,
> what sort of data might a game need to store that runs in to several
> hundred MBs? I couldn't think of anything straight away.

I know when I looked at the HalfLife 2 engine, you needed to build 
navigation maps to allow the NPC AI to navigate around the map. That's 
not model data as such (it never goes near the GPU), but it's data that 
you do need to run the game. On the other hand, for a typical HL2:DM or 
CS:S map, it's only a dozen MB or so...

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scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> I haven't played on the xbox360 very often (I don't own one) but my 
> impression is games on the PS3 use motion-blur and depth-of-field 
> approximation effects more.  Maybe the devs are just trying to find ways 
> to use up the spare CPU cores

  Those effects are not dependent on the CPU.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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