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So far we have the WiiU Deluxe selling at a loss at $350, when the Xbox One has a 500gb drive, 8gb of ram, and a kinect. The PS4 is supposedly going to be equally beefy. Are they really going to be able to keep both of those under $400?
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May 22, 2013 04:43
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edit: ^^^ If i had to guess I'd say $500-600Zomodok posted:Do you not understand the shortcuts and limitations in other systems that were put in place for the 512 limit and how 5 for the XBone and 7 for the PS4 is an insanely good thing in terms of look and complex systems right. Pretty sure I understand them quite well actually. Did you know that a Windows 7 PC running full bore max settings on Crysis (released 2007) barely uses 1gb of memory? And that it looks stunningly better than any game we've seen in the last decade from consoles (hell even on low it looks better). 1gb is a lot of memory dedicated to games, 5-7 is also a lot, objectively quite a lot more than even 1gb. However the amount of useable memory in development has diminishing returns as far as effective increases in quality are concerned. You'll see a much bigger leap in fidelity between 0.5-3gb than you will between 3-7. treeboy fucked around with this message at 05:06 on May 22, 2013 |
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May 22, 2013 05:03
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treeboy posted:Pretty sure I understand them quite well actually. Did you know that a Windows 7 PC running full bore max settings on Crysis (released 2007) barely uses 1gb of memory? And that it looks stunningly better than any game we've seen in the last decade from consoles (hell even on low it looks better). Did you know that games use ram for more than graphics? Things like AI, physics and storing worldstates to reduce draw-in? Things that have been horrifically neglected due to the overall lack of memory on current systems.
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May 22, 2013 05:12
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RAM is also essential for keeping OS functions readily accessible while ingame. The ingame XMB in the PS3 almost didn't happen because of the RAM constraints, and its utility was still held back significantly.
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May 22, 2013 05:16
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Paper Jam Dipper posted:To be constructive, what do people think Nintendo should have done with this new console? I mean, aside from the obvious posters who just wish Nintendo would release games on their Playstation or X Box. I'm not sure why they didn't build it with the same or similar specs to the XBone and PS4. Someone please enlighten me because a Nintendo console that gets all the next generation games and and the next generation nintendo games and has a gimmick (touchscreen) seems like it'd be a loving slam dunk.
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May 22, 2013 05:22
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edit^^^ supposedly the handheld alone is ~$150 USD. If they'd gone toe to toe in the stats department as well it'd be a $550+ console but they still want to appeal to a wider audience by making it more affordable (my guess)OLIVIAS WILDE RIDER posted:Did you know that games use ram for more than graphics? Things like AI, physics and storing worldstates to reduce draw-in? Things that have been horrifically neglected due to the overall lack of memory on current systems. I'm well aware of data/art bloat, i deal with it daily. You're also completely missing my point that contemporary PC games which don't have any of the restrictive memory requirements of current gen consoles still don't use 5-7 gigs of system memory. Fallom posted:RAM is also essential for keeping OS functions readily accessible while ingame. The ingame XMB in the PS3 almost didn't happen because of the RAM constraints, and its utility was still held back significantly. That's why we see the console manufacturers reserving blocks of memory for OS functions, apparently (based on what I've read here and elsewhere) 1gb, 3gb, and 1gb for the WiiU/XBone/PS4 respectively.
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May 22, 2013 05:22
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abigserve posted:I'm not sure why they didn't build it with the same or similar specs to the XBone and PS4. Someone please enlighten me because a Nintendo console that gets all the next generation games and and the next generation nintendo games and has a gimmick (touchscreen) seems like it'd be a loving slam dunk. Nintendo is a video game company. Sony and Microsoft are electronic giants. As such they have more flexibility with what they can do, their manufacturing capabilities, the costs they can eat, the infrastructure they have in place, and so-on. Beyond that they also bet on the tablet which adds a lot to the price. That isn't to say Nintendo can't do better than they are, but Sony and Microsoft have a lot of synergy and existing assets they can leverage in a lot of ways. Things like the Blu-Ray Drive in the PS3 exist as much because Sony is trying to push a new technology as anything else. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 05:28 on May 22, 2013 |
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May 22, 2013 05:24
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treeboy posted:I'm well aware of data/art bloat, i deal with it daily. You're also completely missing my point that contemporary PC games which don't have any of the restrictive memory requirements of current gen consoles still don't use 5-7 gigs of system memory. You know why that is, right? You're not actually that stupid, are you? It couldn't be that most games are made for hamstrung consoles and therefore HAVE to be limited down to that amount, or are built assuming they might put it on the consoles so cut back on those thing "just in case", rather than the devs "not being able to find a way to use it".
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May 22, 2013 05:25
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OLIVIAS WILDE RIDER posted:You know what that is, right? You're not actually that stupid. What about PC only developers?
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May 22, 2013 05:26
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abigserve posted:I'm not sure why they didn't build it with the same or similar specs to the XBone and PS4. Is this a real question? Money. One might argue that the investment would be worth it, but ever since their experience with the Gamecube Nintendo has been extremely disinclined to participate in an expensive processing power arms race.
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May 22, 2013 05:26
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Black Baby Goku posted:What about PC only developers? You mean like the scenario that I already posted? Which PC only devs are these by the way? Valve's got Portal/TF2 etc on the consoles, Blizzard is currently porting Diablo III to the PS3/4
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May 22, 2013 05:27
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OLIVIAS WILDE RIDER posted:You know why that is, right? You're not actually that stupid, are you? World of Warcraft, arguably one of the more system intensive games in recent history in terms of data usage/communication, and sheer volume of loaded entities/textures/effects/animation, under heavy load uses about 2gb of system memory. Normal load for Diablo 3 is in the 800k-1.2gb range. I stand by my statement. I'm sure that in the coming years the extra memory will come in handy for doing some spectacular things, however currently there's no reason to poopoo 1gb as a paltry amount when its double what we've been used to developing with for the last 8 years, and simply figuring out how to fill 4-6 extra gigs of available RAM is the challenge now. edit: this also goes back to my original post - it doesn't matter how big your memory pool is anyway if your CPU/GPU can't handle the amount of throughput you're demanding. Since we have no practical information regarding the abilities of the PS4 or XBone these concerns are still an unknown. I'm not anticipating lovely processors but Cell didn't end up being the messiah everyone claimed it to be back in 2006 either. treeboy fucked around with this message at 05:37 on May 22, 2013 |
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May 22, 2013 05:33
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treeboy posted:World of Warcraft, arguably one of the more system intensive games in recent history in terms of data usage/communication, and sheer volume of loaded entities/textures/effects/animation, under heavy load uses about 2gb of system memory. You're also failing to remember that all these systems barring the WiiU are full HD systems running CPU and GPU memory in a single chunk. Throwing the HD texture packs into Skyrim or Sleeping Dogs will give you 1-1.5gb of GPU ram usage along side 1-2gb of system memory use. There's 3.5GB of the Xbone's 5GB locked down already for a current gen game.
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May 22, 2013 05:38
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Also you want your game to run on as many systems as possible, not just beasts with plenty of RAM.
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May 22, 2013 05:43
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treeboy posted:I stand by my statement. I'm sure that in the coming years the extra memory will come in handy for doing some spectacular things, however currently there's no reason to poopoo 1gb as a paltry amount when its double what we've been used to developing with for the last 8 years, and simply figuring out how to fill 4-6 extra gigs of available RAM is the challenge now. Modern OSes have background file caching which means that your extra memory is being used whether the game allocated it or not. The_Franz fucked around with this message at 05:47 on May 22, 2013 |
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May 22, 2013 05:43
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treeboy posted:simply figuring out how to fill 4-6 extra gigs of available RAM is the challenge now. John Carmack posted:There's still a lot more we can use. We'll suck up any resources that are given to us. If people come out and say, OK, now you've got four gigs of RAM and all this, we'll happily use it. It'll make our lives better. The games will get better. The graphics will get better. Things will improve in a lot of ways.
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May 22, 2013 05:58
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That's what he's saying, though? His point is that at this current time, console devs aren't going to use much more than a gig or two of RAM other than if they're feeling particularly lazy about optimization. Obviously that'll change in a few years, but the point is that there's a lot that can be done with 1 GB at least for now.
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May 22, 2013 06:00
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Basic texture quality has always been held back by memory constraints. It's not hard to use the memory if it's there, and not limited by I/O too much.
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May 22, 2013 06:02
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You mean that I get to work with proper memory allocation and don't have to use the shortcuts and maybe focus on more complex systems like path finding, artificial intelligence, and the other hundreds of different things that could be expanded on Why would I want that~~
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May 22, 2013 06:08
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Zomodok posted:You mean that I get to work with proper memory allocation and don't have to use the shortcuts and maybe focus on more complex systems like path finding, artificial intelligence, and the other hundreds of different things that could be expanded on Did you hear the new Call of Duty has a Dog in it?
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May 22, 2013 06:11
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^: I would know  Saying "this amount is still workable" is not the same thing as saying "anything more than this amount is worthless". I'm really not sure why the latter is what impression you're getting. miscellaneous14 fucked around with this message at 06:13 on May 22, 2013 |
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May 22, 2013 06:11
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miscellaneous14 posted:That's what he's saying, though? His point is that at this current time, console devs aren't going to use much more than a gig or two of RAM other than if they're feeling particularly lazy about optimization. Obviously that'll change in a few years, but the point is that there's a lot that can be done with 1 GB at least for now. My point is that finding uses for more memory isn't a years-long challenge. Games like Rage already suffer from fidelity issues due to memory limits.
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May 22, 2013 06:12
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:Also you want your game to run on as many systems as possible, not just beasts with plenty of RAM. Does that even matter in this case? WiiU has virtually no hope of getting ports of PS4/XBO games, so why would devs limit themselves to 1GB of RAM?
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May 22, 2013 06:13
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Toady posted:My point is that finding uses for more memory isn't a years-long challenge. Games like Rage already suffer from fidelity issues due to memory limits. Rage almost seemed like a backward step, though, because in order to accommodate the high detail of the megatextures they had to do away with dynamic lighting altogether. This strikes me as a general issue with AAA gaming and the move to HD- just doing all the work of using all those pixels takes up a lot of resources, both the system's and the publisher's, leaving less room to really go wild with new gameplay development.
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May 22, 2013 06:17
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TaurusOxford posted:Does that even matter in this case? WiiU has virtually no hope of getting ports of PS4/XBO games, so why would devs limit themselves to 1GB of RAM? There isn't much argument about that unless those other consoles manage to sell even worse than the Wii U somehow. This console will live and die (probably more the latter than the former) by its' exclusives.
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May 22, 2013 06:18
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TaurusOxford posted:Does that even matter in this case? WiiU has virtually no hope of getting ports of PS4/XBO games, so why would devs limit themselves to 1GB of RAM?
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May 22, 2013 06:36
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miscellaneous14 posted:This console will live and die (probably more the latter than the former) by its' exclusives. So, it's pretty much the Gamecube. It even has the much more successful GBA to make up for it, in the 3DS. Which is a factor that Sega didn't have with the Dreamcast. They didn't have anything else going on. It's almost as if they put all their eggs in one basket.
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May 22, 2013 06:39
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I think there's a difference there in that Sega didn't have any more eggs.
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May 22, 2013 06:43
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Uh you guys realize that processes on 32 bit Windows can only use 2GB of RAM right? And since hitting the limit causes a hard crash, it's best to target slightly less than 2GB? (32 bit processes on a 64 bit system or with the /PAE flag on boot can use 3Gb but it isn't something you should depend on) Meanwhile, take a look at Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ 32 bit users are still ~30% of the market. And another ~30% has less than 4Gb of RAM. There's a lot of valid reasons for PC devs to shy away from really crazy RAM requirements. I don't think I can name any games off hand that require 64 bit even. El_Matarife fucked around with this message at 06:50 on May 22, 2013 |
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May 22, 2013 06:48
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El_Matarife posted:Uh you guys realize that processes on 32 bit Windows can only use 2GB of RAM right? And since hitting the limit causes a hard crash, it's best to target slightly less than 2GB? (32 bit processes on a 64 bit system or with the /PAE flag on boot can use 3Gb but it isn't something you should depend on) The difference is you can have more ram and you can release things like optional free HD texture packs for your games for those people. Like Skyrim and Sleeping Dogs did.
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May 22, 2013 06:50
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Yeah, but my point is that basically "PC game devs haven't used 5-7GB of RAM due to intrinsic limits, but if they were available they'd use them". Don't expect next gen games to be easily chopped down by 75% to fit on the WiiU. I promise that within 2 years, most PC games will be asking for 8Gb+ RAM and 4GB+ video cards will be common even in the $200 mainstream price point.
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May 22, 2013 07:10
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Maxwell Lord posted:Rage almost seemed like a backward step, though, because in order to accommodate the high detail of the megatextures they had to do away with dynamic lighting altogether. This strikes me as a general issue with AAA gaming and the move to HD- just doing all the work of using all those pixels takes up a lot of resources, both the system's and the publisher's, leaving less room to really go wild with new gameplay development. Rage's problems don't stem from the 'challenges of AAA gaming development.' Outside of animation for the enemies charging at you to get killed, there is nothing that Rage does on any platform its appeared on that could be considered "high detail" compared to other games that basically revolve around being graphically intensive. Megatextures as a concept sounds really awesome, and I'm sure Rage would look great if the game actually made solid use of resources available on a proper gaming PC. For megatextures to really achieve their full potential, you need a lot of...memory. There's a reason why games like Crysis 3 look and run CONSIDERABLY WORSE on consoles compared to even a modest gaming PC at comparable settings: a lack of processing power and memory. This is a game that was targeted to run on 512 and 256 megs of video ram respectively. There's only so much you can do with that, so its not a surprise that they had to make sacrifices to get poo poo to work on console. The PC platform was not a priority for Rage, and despite its very competent shooting mechanics, it's pretty obvious that next to nothing was done to really take advantage of what a gaming PC potentially has to offer. Carmack even explained himself with some very hard facts that some PC gamers can't seem to reconcile with their personal reality bubble: consoles are where a massive chunk of the market goes to play videogames. It makes sense that game design is focused around trying to get poo poo to work on closed, static platforms built around hardware that is over half a decade out of date, that's where the money is! The real reason most games these days don't take into account available memory over maybe a gig or two is because the currently available consoles don't have it. It's a lot easier to scale your stuff down to what a console can handle if you're only worried about 2 or 4 gigs of video memory as opposed to 8 or 12. With the PS4 and the Xbone pushing more memory, we might see this change should either of those systems actually catch on.
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May 22, 2013 11:58
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Ok technical question, sorry to keep this going but I'm curious now. How does VRAM usage factor into total memory usage on PCs? Does everything that is currently loaded into VRAM always have to be mirrored on system RAM, minus whatever framebuffering it's doing? Or can it be it's own separate entity independent of system ram, ie. 2g system RAM usage + 1g VRAM usage?
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May 22, 2013 18:58
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Midee posted:Ok technical question, sorry to keep this going but I'm curious now. How does VRAM usage factor into total memory usage on PCs? Does everything that is currently loaded into VRAM always have to be mirrored on system RAM, minus whatever framebuffering it's doing? Or can it be it's own separate entity independent of system ram, ie. 2g system RAM usage + 1g VRAM usage? It can be seperate, but still counts towards the total RAM the system can manage.
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May 22, 2013 19:21
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Depends on the version of DirectX being used in Windows, etc. Generally speaking though, that 2Gb per process limit includes the VRAM being used. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#how_graphics_cards_and_other_devices_affect_memory_limits I was actually wrong about the limit, on a 64 bit it supports 4Gb per process with the PAE / IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE set on compile: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#memory_limits I can't find ANY PC games that require 64 bit after a cursory search, but there's a few stories claiming the next DICE Frostbite engine Battlefield game will be 64 bit only. I know quite a few games have 64 bit binaries but there doesn't seem to be an easy list anywhere. El_Matarife fucked around with this message at 20:04 on May 22, 2013 |
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May 22, 2013 19:58
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El_Matarife posted:Depends on the version of DirectX being used in Windows, etc. Generally speaking though, that 2Gb per process limit includes the VRAM being used. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#how_graphics_cards_and_other_devices_affect_memory_limits Even if they have 64-bit binaries (or they eventually require games to be 64-bit), it doesn't matter if the developer puts no effort into actually using the resources that become available. Again, Rage is an excellent example of where many developers have their priorities these days. That's kinda why I hope the new consoles end up proving the value of that level of hardware, it might also provide a similar boost to PC gaming in general.
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May 22, 2013 20:31
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I considered a Wii U today, actually - thought about getting one. New Mario Bros U looks fun, NintendoLand seems like it could be neat, the New Luigi U DLC seems fun, and there's a handful of other games I might be interested in. The upcoming first party games seems like I would enjoy them too (big Mario Kart fan, huge Smash Bros fan, and I like some of the newer Zeldas, specifically Wind Waker). Got to the store and saw the price tag and couldn't pull the trigger. Could not justify $300 for no game, and didn't even consider the "Deluxe". I feel like, for something like the Wii U, the highest I will go is $250, and that would need to include a game of some kind. Which, coincidentally enough, is right around the price range people on craigslist are selling their "very lightly used" Wii Us for, they seem to be ~$225 - $250 and that usually includes whatever games they bought. I just don't trust Craigslist. Sorry for the slight necromancy.
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Jun 3, 2013 01:02
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As someone who owns a Wii U, I'd say the biggest problem is the games. I don't actually have any Wii U games for my Wii U. I've just been playing regular Wii games since I never owned a Wii. Since I know I'll be getting Bayonetta 2, the monolith game, and maybe Pikmin or Zelda, for me it will be worth it. If I had already owned a Wii, I literally wouldn't be able to play more games by buying a Wii U.
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Jun 3, 2013 14:58
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At this point I think there easily are about three or four really good games worth owning no matter what your tastes are. And you should note many of the launch ports are price reduced on the eShop right now.
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Jun 3, 2013 15:10
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So far (in addition to wii games I still haven't got around to like Mario Galaxy and Skyward Sword) I have New Super mario Bros U, Sonic racing, ZombiU, Nintendoland, Monster hunter and Lego city undercover. Also buy Sonic racing. It should be fairly cheap and it's a really good racing/ kart game.
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Jun 3, 2013 15:53
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