Sony goes batshit insane

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-06-11 05:53pm

Agreed with HyperionX.

Both the circumstantial evidence he points out, and the supposed 'leaks' have been predicting that the hard drive wouldn't be included (even before it was announced that it was detachable).

Silver Paladin · Post by **Silver Paladin** » 2005-06-13 09:57pm

At least Revolution has a HD!...kinda...well...not really...

So I suppose all 3 consoles are tied in that regard.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2005-06-13 10:03pm

Silver Paladin wrote:At least Revolution has a HD!...kinda...well...not really...

So I suppose all 3 consoles are tied in that regard.

The thing is, it's pretty strange that Sony is hyping up their system as being more than just a gaming rig if you have to buy separate equipment to use its non-gaming features. Granted, it may still have functionality without its hard drive, but it's frankly pretty hard to envision a way in which they would get the thing to do everything short of changing the oil in my car if it doesn't have a hard drive.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-06-13 10:53pm

It will be very suprising if the Xbox360 ships without a harddrive in the default configuration. It makes utterly no sense given the level of Live multiplayer service integration(which requires a mass storage for DLable content which will be avaliable to everyone who connects their Xbox360 to Live Silver[aka Live Lite] ), nor would it make any sense for the backwards compadibility which needs mass storage to store the profiles for it.

And when it does, I'm going to remember to post about how wrong you were Praxis.

HyperionX · Post by **HyperionX** » 2005-06-13 11:07pm

ggs wrote:It will be very suprising if the Xbox360 ships without a harddrive in the default configuration. It makes utterly no sense given the level of Live multiplayer service integration(which requires a mass storage for DLable content which will be avaliable to everyone who connects their Xbox360 to Live Silver[aka Live Lite] ), nor would it make any sense for the backwards compadibility which needs mass storage to store the profiles for it.

All things related to Xbox live could potentially be stored online. As for backwards compatibility, BC is so limited already I wouldn't be surprised if they left it out of the basic system.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-06-13 11:31pm

HyperionX wrote:All things related to Xbox live could potentially be stored online.

Downloadable content needs to be put somewere, moron.

Any fucktard who suggests a patch should be downloaded everytime you power off & power on your xbox360 needs their fucking head checked.

HyperionX · Post by **HyperionX** » 2005-06-14 12:23am

ggs wrote:
HyperionX wrote:All things related to Xbox live could potentially be stored online.

Downloadable content needs to be put somewere, moron.

Any fucktard who suggests a patch should be downloaded everytime you power off & power on your xbox360 needs their fucking head checked.

And? Why not? Everything is going through Xbox Live anyways. In fact who ever said anything needs to be patched? Let bugs stay in forever like they used to.

Even if you had to DL the stuff you can always be forced to buy the HDD beforehand.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-06-14 12:45am

Christ. ggs has a damn good point. Even an absurdly small (say, 5-10Gb) drive would be enough, but zero non-volatile storage is just retarded.

However, does anyone know how people used the Xbox one? I mean, I assume it cached to the HDD, but was there every gigabytes of downloadable content? What I heard was 'downloadable content' was actually a 5k file that unlocked shit that was already in the game. The music ripping was so insanely slow I'm not surprised noone did it. So maybe everyone decided that it wasn't worth the $50 to include one standard?

... Not that I'm sure how they're going to handle performance with just RAM. But if it's true that the only console with a drive has a 512meg FLASH CARD, then it's gone a bit wrong.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2005-06-14 02:00am

All of you calm down. This thread is productive, since important and interesting things are being discussed, and it's going to stay that way or be locked.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2005-06-14 02:03am

Stark wrote:... Not that I'm sure how they're going to handle performance with just RAM. But if it's true that the only console with a drive has a 512meg FLASH CARD, then it's gone a bit wrong.

What's particularly surprising is that the Revolution is the system that seems to have the least need for a HD, and it has the best one (if it can be called that). All of them are supposed to have additional drives that you can purchase, but it's very strange especially given the fact that Sony and Microsoft insist that their consoles should be used for more than gaming.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-06-14 04:35am

I'm interested if the different purchase versions I've heard about are used to access different markets (assuming for the moment games don't need drives). Sole gamers buy the cheapest one, media people get the one with the included drive, etc. It's odd noone noticed that extra hardware that isn't standard never, ever takes off.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-06-14 05:22am

Stark wrote:Christ. ggs has a damn good point. Even an absurdly small (say, 5-10Gb) drive would be enough, but zero non-volatile storage is just retarded.

Ironically, it would cost more to get a harddrive of that size than say a 20gb one

However, does anyone know how people used the Xbox one? I mean, I assume it cached to the HDD, but was there every gigabytes of downloadable content? What I heard was 'downloadable content' was actually a 5k file that unlocked shit that was already in the game. The music ripping was so insanely slow I'm not surprised noone did it. So maybe everyone decided that it wasn't worth the $50 to include one standard?

The Xbox uses it's biult in harddrive as a large scratch buffer. It caches the last 3 games to disk and then does extra caching per game.

Since the DVD is fucking slow (1x or 2x DVD read!), dumping the stuff to disk greatly enhances preformance. For example from a cold start, launching Halo 1 or 2 can take upto a minute depending on the level. Hot start with a lot of stuff cached can be done in under 10 seconds.

Also Halo 2 has had a map pack released via live as well as patches too.

Apparently, user soundtracks also help greatly for the playablity of racing games.

This is one serious problem the PS3 has; slow ass disk reads. No harddrive/scratch disk space makes for long load times.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-06-14 08:52am

Yeah, like how 40Gbs cost AU$60 and 80Gbs cost AU$80. Thats progress!

Do you have any information about how a HDD-less Xbox2 will handle loadtimes? It seems madness to take a step back from the Xbox in this regard.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-06-14 09:44am

Stark wrote:Yeah, like how 40Gbs cost AU$60 and 80Gbs cost AU$80. Thats progress!

Retail it is more like AU$80 for a 40gb harddisk and ~$90 for a 80gb harddisk. Cheaper when you buy in bulk of course.

Do you have any information about how a HDD-less Xbox2 will handle loadtimes? It seems madness to take a step back from the Xbox in this regard.

A DVD is very slow compared to a disk. While the 512mb of ram will help, that is just pushing stuff which should be on secondary storage (aka a harddisk) into primary storage.

For example on the Xbox the DVD drive was limited to ~ 1.3mb/s, and the harddisks were limited by the 33mb/s by the IDE cable (the controller is a modifier ATA100 IDE controller).

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-06-14 04:26pm

Please make sure I'm doing the math right, but...
I remember seeing the speed for the PS3's blu-ray drive, and ran the math and according to that, it would take ~12 seconds to load 512 MB of data.

Does that mean that the PS3 can load any game in under 12 seconds?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-06-14 06:41pm

Well, it means all the software has to be written around zero paging, which puts in in 1977. It means you could fill the memory is 12s, but it's more complicated than that and the running processes will dent that more or less. You can't just stream raw data into memory and expect it to do anything.

However, a more important point is that 512 is laughably small. I'm a struggling student, I've got 2Gb. Sure, the 512 is super fast, but thats IT. That's ALL. It really does boggle the mind that they'd release a system with such power but a lack of storage. Clearly, its all part of a Dalek plan to destroy society.

Does the 512 include video memory? I'm not familiar with the actual architectures of these consoles.

@ggs - wholesale is my friend. Well, my friends wholesale is, or something.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-06-14 07:52pm

Praxis wrote:Please make sure I'm doing the math right, but...
I remember seeing the speed for the PS3's blu-ray drive, and ran the math and according to that, it would take ~12 seconds to load 512 MB of data.

Does that mean that the PS3 can load any game in under 12 seconds?

linky

So 2x blu-ray has a transfer rate of about 9 MB/s (see the blu-ray faq, if you work the math you can see that their claim of 36.5 Mbps is in fact megabits). Based on a quick google, 12x DVD-ROM has a transfer rate of about 16 MB/s. Hard drives hit 50+ MB/s in actual use, not theoretical numbers. So I don't think blu-ray is winning any competitions here.

At 9MB/s, it will take ~56 seconds to fill the memory from stuff on Blueray. It will be shorted because it cant actually load 512mb of stuff into memory, ala need room for actual game state.

And the Xbox360 is going to have a 12x DVD drive(~16MB/s).

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-06-14 07:55pm

Stark wrote:Does the 512 include video memory? I'm not familiar with the actual architectures of these consoles.

Yup. And in the PS3's case 1/2 of that is actually exclusively the graphics card. The CPU cant address it IIRC.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-06-14 08:51pm

That's weird, I'm going to have to look for the numbers I saw for the PS3.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-06-14 09:22pm

Do they think they can get away with 256 system RAM on the PS3? Is PC architecture really that ineffiecent?

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-06-14 09:22pm

Praxis wrote:That's weird, I'm going to have to look for the numbers I saw for the PS3.

The real cute bit about Blu-ray is support for Microsoft's VC-1 video codec is a mandatory part of the Blu-ray spec (for video encoding)

linky

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-06-14 09:25pm

Stark wrote:Do they think they can get away with 256 system RAM on the PS3? Is PC architecture really that ineffiecent?

It has 256mb of video ram, and the GPU can address all 512mb too.

And yes, the PC architecture can be damn ineffiecent. However, it also does a fuckload more at any given time.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-06-14 09:34pm

Well, my fileserver hardly uses any resources at all just ticking over, routing, sharing and hosting. Move the mouse, though, and the PII/400 is on it's knees.

I've read a fair bit on how wide the bandwidth is inside these consoles, between the RAM/CPUs/GPUs. Have console engineers decided high-bandwidth is more important (or can replace) bulk storage? My gaming systems will use any arbitrary amount of memory I care to throw at it (even UT2k4 sprawls out to fill 4Gb), so is this poorly done or do these consoles avoid it another way?

HyperionX · Post by **HyperionX** » 2005-06-15 01:02am

ggs wrote:
Stark wrote:Does the 512 include video memory? I'm not familiar with the actual architectures of these consoles.
Yup. And in the PS3's case 1/2 of that is actually exclusively the graphics card. The CPU cant address it IIRC.

Says who? I believe Ken Kutaragi or some other Sony official is on record claiming otherwise.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-06-15 08:57am

HyperionX wrote:
ggs wrote:
Stark wrote:Does the 512 include video memory? I'm not familiar with the actual architectures of these consoles.
Yup. And in the PS3's case 1/2 of that is actually exclusively the graphics card. The CPU cant address it IIRC.
Says who? I believe Ken Kutaragi or some other Sony official is on record claiming otherwise.

Could you post a link to that? While I havent been able to find any quotes to backup my claim I wouldnt mind being proved wrong.

I also found this gem while searching for details on the PS3 memory architecture, about the Xbox260's harddrive:

linky #1
linky #2

LD25 Series - for gaming systems, home entertainment devices and small-footprint PCs

Seagate's new LD25 Series is the first consumer electronics hard drive in a compact, 2.5-inch form factor - an entirely new concept for inside-the-box CE storage that enables smaller, simpler, cooler-running and more cost-effective game consoles, home entertainment devices and small footprint media PCs. Seagate's industry leading DynaPlay technology optimizes the drive for media streaming, power consumption and content security.

LD25 Series makes it possible for game consoles like the Xbox 360 to expand their capabilities far beyond traditional gaming - to enable them to expand and keep new soundtracks for games, to rip and store entire libraries of music and video, and to play back multimedia centralizing other entertainment functions with the gaming function.

With the increasing popularity of PC systems based on clever design and Mini-ITX mainboards, small footprint PCs and PC media centers are becoming a very visible - or perhaps a less visible - part of the home entertainment and information network. The LD25 Series' unique combination of small size and media-focused design will further promote and enable these new, creative designs. Based on Seagate's industry-leading technology platforms, the LD25 Series offers 20GB, 30GB and 40GB capacities and both PATA and SATA interfaces, is designed specifically for use in installed home entertainment applications, and features Seagate's patented SoftSonic fluid dynamic bearing motors for super-quiet operation and high reliability. LD25 Series is shipping now to the Microsoft Xbox 360 and to other consumer electronics customers and manufacturers of small-footprint PCs.

"The hard drive extends the gaming experience on Xbox 360," said Todd Holmdahl, corporate vice president, Xbox hardware. "From downloading trailers, new game levels, maps, weapons, vehicles, and more to supporting custom playlists in every game and storing video messages from friends, Seagate's LD25 Series 2.5-inch hard drive brings gaming and digital media together for the ultimate entertainment experience."

(bolding mind).
I think we can finally nail down that the Xbox360 is going to have a harddrive in it