Support NeoGAF

[BeOnEdge]

so what are all the tech freaks talking about saying halo did alot with the hard drive?

 

[Pimpbaa]

so what are all the tech freaks talking about saying halo did alot with the hard drive?

All it's probably doing is streaming off the harddrive, nothing so special about that. I doubt it's even doing that cause there seem to be loading zones in the game (brief pauses). Harddrive just helps lessen those pauses.

 

[Nerevar]

All it's probably doing is streaming off the harddrive, nothing so special about that. I doubt it's even doing that cause there seem to be loading zones in the game (brief pauses). Harddrive just helps lessen those pauses.

Big loading screen at the beginning of a level = whole level is loaded to HDD in swap-space (so very slowly)

min-loading sections during level = that part of the level is loaded into main memory from the HDD (so it's much quicker)

 

[Pimpbaa]

Big loading screen at the beginning of a level = whole level is loaded to HDD in swap-space (so very slowly)

Yeah, I forgot about the longass beginning of the level load times. Rallisport 1 and 2 are the same way.

 

[Lazy8s]

Streaming can be done without a HDD, but the potential would be far more limited. The optical drive would then get tied up with that burden and therefore wouldn't be as available to potentially benefit other applications.

There's compromise that has to be made in a game's design for it to offer continual streaming, but Halo Xbox showed that a seamless-enough experience can be provided without making those compromises just from putting the HDD to the task. Also, being able to jump right back into the middle of the last cached level, even after having turned the console off (as Halo allows), is very nice.

Besides, the real benefit of HDDs is their massive read/write storage for the possibilities already mentioned: the caching and tracking of minute state changes for complex worlds like in Morrowind, super memory card capabilities, custom soundtracks, etc.

 

[DopeyFish]

The Xenon console is designed around a larger world view of storage than Xbox was. Games will have access to a variety of storage devices, including connected devices (memory units, USB storage) and remote devices (networked PCs, Xbox Live™). At the time of this writing, the decision to include a built-in hard disk in every Xenon console has not been made. If a hard disk is not included in every console, it will certainly be available as an integrated add-on component

The above states that one will be available no matter what.

As for *most* of the faster load times, I don't believe the hard drive had anything to do with it, really. I felt that though the hard drive being used for a scratch-pad was a good idea in theory never was really executed well in practise.

 

[GigaDrive]

I just noticed that Xenon / Xbox 2 edram (embedded memory on the GPU) bandwidth is 32 GigaBytes / sec but it is equivalent to an outstanding 256 GigaBytes / sec.

quoting myself from Beyond3D

oh my, I didn't notice this until 5 min ago. the Xenon EDRAM bandwidth is

for an EDRAM write bandwidth of 32 GB/sec

32 GB/sec aye? that seems kinda low. does it not? the PS2's eDRAM bandwidth is, as we all know, 48 GB/sec.

32 GB/sec EDRAM bandwidth is also lower than the also unconfirmed report (the old one) of 51.2 GB/sec for system memory.

PS3's EDRAM bandwidth on the GPU is likely to be in the 100s of GB/sec

so once again, this leads me to believe the Xenon block diagram and this new document outlining Xenon in detail, is either fake, or very old.


edit: however it looks like I missed something else too

Each of these pixels can be expanded through multisampling to
4 samples, for up to 32 multisampled pixel samples per clock cycle.
With alpha blending, z-test, and z-write enabled, this is equivalent
to having 256 GB/sec of effective bandwidth! The important thing is
that frame buffer bandwidth will never slow down the Xenon GPU.

equivalent to 256 GB/sec of effective bandwidth.

neato! for techheads obviously

 

[DopeyFish]

oh so you are megadrive1988

creepy.

 

[MightyHedgehog]

Given how insanely expensive and advanced the new consoles will be, I'm still shocked by how relatively inexpensive new consoles are going to be. I mean, yeah, everyone's going to be putting up very big up-front losses initially...but man, are these razors nice! I just pray that the average price of a blade doesn't go up to $60 US.

It's more than likely that the new consoles will debut at $299. I mean, being too much lower than the competition doesn't really mean much...see GC and DC for example. If anything, the perceived value of the cheaper console might well hurt it. More RAM is probably the only thing this proposed setup needs....well, and it'd be nice to have a built-in HDD again...or perhaps, a bundled mini-HDD-like device that rest outside of the unit to enable a much smaller footprint.

 

[DopeyFish]

it's because the gpu can send the e-dram 8 pixels per clock instead of 1:1 making the bandwidth technically 8x the original bandwidth 8x32 GB/s = 256 GB/s