Comments on: On PS3 and Blu-Ray

By: markdeloura

markdeloura — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 02:53:12 +0000

Thanks to all of you who posted such well thought out comments on this. I really enjoy reading what everyone thinks, whether I agree with it or not! The fact that you took the time to reply is something I really appreciate.
In my original post I skipped some areas deliberately because I thought they were minor points, while others you’ve brought up are strong points that perhaps I just didn’t get into. Having seen so many games in my 10 combined years at Nintendo and Sony, I still feel strongly that the BD is the right answer for the PS3 – from the perspective of storage. But there are a number of other angles on the decision, and that’s what makes it so controversial. I look forward to seeing the marketplace’s ultimate decision on this issue!
Thanks,
—Mark

By: HunterXI

HunterXI — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 02:41:40 +0000

True, in some aspects, but I think that your logic is a bit specious. The largest chunk of data in map files for most games are textures and sound clips (and cinematics, when present). Geometry tends to make up a small portion of map data. I recall once, back when I modded Halo, extracting the geometry from a multiplayer map. Halo's multiplayer maps are all around 80MB (when decompressed). When I extracted the geometry, it was about 8MB in size – 1/10 of the map data. Furthermore, with things like Procedural Generation, that could be reduced significantly. Now take Oblivion. Most Oblivion profiles probably have somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 trees, and yet Oblivion has not a single tree model. Not one. That's Speed Tree at work. Less than a Megabyte of code is responsible for what would otherwise be hundreds or thousands of Megabytes of model data. Oblivion doesn't use Procedural Generation for anything else, but it can easily be extended to graphics, as seen in the work of .theprodukkt. Their tech demoes, which are all 64KB, claim to exhibit "30,000x Compression" (comparing the initial data passed through their engine to the final file). Or what about kkrieger, the fully-fledged 96KB FPS? And audio/video? When it comes to audio, we're already fine. First generation Xbox games predominantly used Xbox PCM Audio, a take on Wav Audio with PCM compression. Wav Audio generates audio files that can be as much as 30x larger than mp3-esque counterpart files. So, shortly thereafter, people began using the OGG/Vorbis format (an OSS alternative to mp3). Problem solved — you could now fit 8000+ hours of high-quality audio on a DVD-9. Video? Same story. Older formats like Bink Video provided cinematics whose filesizes compare to similar-length High Definition videos on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Compression does marvels, and will continue to do so. Never will I forget the first time I saw a 10+ GB file GZipped thrice into a 20KB file. You could argue that without compression, we'd need BR/HD-DVD-length discs for current-generation games. When it comes to games, BR/HD-DVD simply aren't needed. However, there is no doubting that a BD-movie player is a fun bonus. That said, however, I don't feel like it's nice to force people into buying it. The whole argument that the PS3 is cheap because it's a game console in addition to a cheap Blu-Ray player is (forgive me) bullshit. Statistics have shown that, among Xbox 360 owners, for example, only a small portion of its owners actually have an HDTY (about 10-15%), and therefore, any real use for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. The PS3 caters to the same audience as the Xbox 360, so we can assume that, for the time being, those statistics will remain similar. That would mean that Sony is forcing the large majority of its customers to buy something they have no use for. Well, that's my take on how Ozymandias could argue that a Blu-Ray drive is not exactly the right move for gamers on PS3.

By: aiken

aiken — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 00:28:58 +0000

Definitely an interesting article, and the logic behind it makes a lot of sense — at least as an explanation of Sony’s rationale.
However, I take issue with both of the main points: that we should expect this generation’s game size to increase sevenfold because the previous generation’s did, and that there’s a linear relationship between the number of vertexes, amount of video, etc, and game size.
The first point clearly can’t be a rule because, if it were true, in just seven more generations of consoles, games would be 4 million petabytes. I’m pretty sure that information theory and physics can show that that’s not physically possible (there can’t be more bits in the game than there are electrons in the machine, I’d speculate). So somewhere, that relationship isn’t going to hold.
On a more practical note, there’s are fallacies in the second assumption (that more vertexes and video mean more storage space). The easiest one is the improving art of compression, as Trimbo notes.
However, my guess is that procedural content generation is the key to MS’s decision not to include a HD optical media in the 360. If cut scenes can be procedurally genreated, how much storage does that save? And how about vertexes, textures, etc — people are working hard on procedural approaches to all of those.
It may very well be that xbox 360 games get smaller as time goes on, not bigger. Or, at least, that the portion of the DVD needed for static content shrinks.
-b

By: Trimbo

Trimbo — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 18:41:57 +0000

Default video format has moved from 480i, or roughly 640×480 at 30 frames per second (9.2 million pixels per second), to 720p. 720p is 1280×720 at 60 frames per second (55.3 million pixels per second). That’s about a 6x size increase. 6 x 2GB would again push us over the DVD-9 size.
In the pre-rendered world, I think most 720p video sources are actually going to be at 24fps or 30fps. At least if Blu-Ray is going to be anything like DVD, where the player itself does the 3:2 pulldown on 24-fps signals when viewing on a 60i display. I think the only material that’s actually filmed at 60fps non-interlaced is IMAX/Showscan/etc..
For pre-rendered game cinematics, I would probably not render at 60fps. It wouldn’t be worth the added rendering time and disk (HDD)/disc (DVD/BDD) space. I’d render at 30fps, or, even better, 24fps for more of a film look and to save 20% on rendering time over 30fps.
Given those stats, I’d guess the amount of pixels being pushed for pre-rendered cinematics is more like 2.5x. Of course, advances in compression technology hopefully will help in this department. Aren’t the DeCSS crowd able to recompress DVD-quality video onto a single CD-R by using some of these spiffy MPEG-4 codecs that are out there?

By: hasanahmad

hasanahmad — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 11:12:00 +0000

It is interesting to see your thinking concerning blu-ray being more beneficial to gameplay. It should be noted that in terms of load times, even though the reading times of the Xbox 360 fluctuates depending on the data, it is overall in a consistent state.
In a Blu-ray disc, the game will either have no advantage other than more content, and more content means higher development costs. A general 360 and PS3 game on a dvd sized disc which is considered to be a blockbuster would cost anywhere between 15 million to 30 million to develop and that comes from the cost of content, man hours and other assetts in the game itself. If you look at it in a 3rd persons perspective the dvd is a more viable option as it is cheaper, number 1, and secondly it can transfer compressed textures to be decompressed after transfer whereas if you use the Blu-ray disc and say we dont even need to compress data there is so much space, the transfer will be a pain the ass. Overall its faster to transfer a compressed data to be decompressed by the system compared to tranferring a semi compressed or uncompressed data to be used by the system. Its simple. DVD and Blu-ray both optical media are the bottle neck. where in the System we have a tranfer bandwidth going over 10 Gb/s, in DVDs and Blu-ray, that is not even 10 Mb/s in most cases.
Another thing is that if you are into the Square Enix thinking of more CG than gameplay then sure, Bluray is the way to go but if you are are looking at an industry which is struggling to bring down development costs and resulting in making cutscenes not made of CG but off ingame assets to reduce costs, DVD is a viable alternative to Bluray in terms of games. Blu-ray may be great for Movies and Video content like CG but in the videogaming industry, CG is being frowned upon more and more especially after the Sony debacle of showing CG at E3 2005 and then getting thier ass handed to them at E3 2006 for not matching that CG content. Sure it looks pretty, but Splinter Cell was prettier than Halo, but Halo sold more because of how it played and not because whats in it. In the end Bluray does not one up DVD and DVD does not on up Bluray in terms of gameplay.