Blu-rays in PS3 will cost Sony $100 per unit!

[Kuta]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25901

The above article explains how the Xbox 360 will have a massive economical advantage over the PS3. Sony are putting too much emphesis on ability and are not giving enough attention to comercial competition. The PS3 may have a lot of advantages over the Xbox 360 technicaly but are those advantages going to be utilised and will the extra cost make it worth while. It is worth noting that although the release of the PS3 is less than a year away I have not yet seen any blu-ray products on the store shelves yet. Looking at past situations like when DVDs were first introduced to the market it took a good 5 years until it got anywhere near a decent market penetration. Even if it takes only a couple years for blu-ray to pick up in popularity it will almost be time for the next generation of gaming machines!! So that leaves the game developers to utilise the new tech in the PS3 but perhaps someone could explain to me; exactly what would a game programmer do with a massive 50gb of storage on a single disc? With the current level of storage requirments for top of the range games, why couldn't you fit everything you need on a single 9G DVD even without compression?

I am sorry to say that the Xbox is making a lot more bussiness sense than the PS3 is and I would anticipate that Sony will end up loosing quite a lot of market share with the next gen of consoles. What are they thinking?

 

[Berty]

Im sure there will be a FF games that will eventually utilize that much space... unfortunatly

 

[lordofduct]

I am SO with Berty... I swear that franchise has to DIE! Oh and that Xenosaga crap will too probably...

Jesus those games put shaim to the RPG name

 

[schi0249]

The reason we haven't seen blu-ray products show up yet, is they aren't making the (final release) players yet. Blu-ray relys on the use of MPEG-4 chips; these aren't even available yet. Last I heard, these should start shipping late this year.

 

[Cloud121]

why couldn't you fit everything you need on a single 9G DVD even without compression?

I've been wondering that as well.

Eternal Darkness on GameCube. That game is 9 GB compressed down to a mere 1.5 GB to fit on that disc.

When I found that out shortly after buying it with my GameCube a couple years ago...

 

[ExCyber]

The article mentions no actual source on this, so I'm skeptical. Even if it does turn out to not be made up, I really doubt that the marginal cost of production is going to be $100; more likely engineering costs are being figured into that price. And even if that is the cost of production, it doesn't necessarily mean a higher retail price for PS3, since Sony might eat part of the cost for the sake of establishing a large installed base of Blu-Ray players.

Originally posted by Kuta+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Kuta)</div><div class='quotemain'>Even if it takes only a couple years for blu-ray to pick up in popularity it will almost be time for the next generation of gaming machines!![/b]

The traditional console lifecycle is 5-6 years, not 3-4 and many hang on for a while even after their "deaths" (NES, PSX, and Dreamcast are good examples), and this is obviously a move by Sony to massively accelerate Blu-Ray adoption. As much as I think UMD movies are silly, the market response (movies are selling almost as well as games despite their high cost and limitations, and Universal has announced support for the format) shows that Sony has the marketing and business expertise necessary to pull this sort of thing off.

Originally posted by Kuta@

With the current level of storage requirments for top of the range games, why couldn't you fit everything you need on a single 9G DVD even without compression?

I don't have firsthand knowledge of this, but I've heard that art assets (textures/models) tend to be massive in their native formats and have to be compressed/decimated/subsampled to actually fit on the disc in many cases, independent of the question of the video hardware actually being able to render them. Yes, you can do some neat stuff with procedural textures/models and the like, but that probably doesn't support the effort/reward ratio that industry players want. Then add in that Sony and Microsoft see HDTV as the Next Big Thing, and all of a sudden those textures and models will need to get a lot larger to remain cutting-edge. MS may be banking on getting rid of FMV in order to make room now that realtime scenes are looking almost as good as prerendered ones. Of course Sony is predisposed to use Blu-Ray since they want to get the standard established.

<!--QuoteBegin-schi0249

Blu-ray relys on the use of MPEG-3 chips; these aren't even available yet. Last I heard, these should start shipping late this year.[/quote]An MPEG-3 standard does not exist; work on it was abandoned in favor of enhancing MPEG-2. My understanding is that Blu-Ray is supposed to support MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264 aka MPEG-4 part 10), and VC1 (aka Windows Media Video 9). I think they're still waiting for the latter to be standardized, but that could theoretically come later in the form of a firmware upgrade on PS3, if not on players in general.

 

[Berty]

Originally posted by ExCyber+Thu, 2005-09-08 @ 12:48 AM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ExCyber @ Thu, 2005-09-08 @ 12:48 AM)</div><div class='quotemain'>The article mentions no actual source on this, so I'm skeptical. Even if it does turn out to not be made up, I really doubt that the marginal cost of production is going to be $100; more likely engineering costs are being figured into that price. And even if that is the cost of production, it doesn't necessarily mean a higher retail price for PS3, since Sony might eat part of the cost for the sake of establishing a large installed base of Blu-Ray players.

I don't have firsthand knowledge of this, but I've heard that art assets (textures/models) tend to be massive in their native formats and have to be compressed/decimated/subsampled to actually fit on the disc in many cases, independent of the question of the video hardware actually being able to render them. Yes, you can do some neat stuff with procedural textures/models and the like, but that probably doesn't support the effort/reward ratio that industry players want. Then add in that Sony and Microsoft see HDTV as the Next Big Thing, and all of a sudden those textures and models will need to get a lot larger to remain cutting-edge. MS may be banking on getting rid of FMV in order to make room now that realtime scenes are looking almost as good as prerendered ones. Of course Sony is predisposed to use Blu-Ray since they want to get the standard established.

<!--QuoteBegin-schi0249

Blu-ray relys on the use of MPEG-3 chips; these aren't even available yet. Last I heard, these should start shipping late this year.

An MPEG-3 standard does not exist; work on it was abandoned in favor of enhancing MPEG-2. My understanding is that Blu-Ray is supposed to support MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264 aka MPEG-4 part 10), and VC1 (aka Windows Media Video 9). I think they're still waiting for the latter to be standardized, but that could theoretically come later in the form of a firmware upgrade on PS3, if not on players in general.

[post=139347]Quoted post[/post]​

[/b][/quote]

I know when i have done art assets for mulitmedia/software they have all had to be downsampled/resized before they were put into the final project. Some stuff like background maps are pretty massive when they are still in the photo shop stage, but they always have to be brought down to size so they can be phsyically processed by the hardware.

How big are geometry files atm? around 300K for a 4K poly object? I can see games like Gran Turismo being able to utilize this sort of space simply due to the massive number of assets required, but unfortunatly i think that companies like Squenix will be creaming their pants as they go into FMV overload.

 

[schi0249]

Sorry, I meant MPEG-4, slight typo. My father-in-law is an engineer working on blu-ray media for a company. At this point, the media they are making is standard MPEG-2 only. To reach the 25 GB size, they are essentially fusing 2 standard dvds together. (My extremly untechnical understanding). Until the newest MPEG-4 is released, blu-ray will be severly limited. He recently got back from Japan where he is doing work for his employeer.

 

[M3d10n]

The next generation consoles are going to have 256 MBs of video RAM. The PS2 has 4 megs, but with proper DMA usage you can squeeze around 16 MBs worth of textures in a single frame. So, a PS3 game will be able to put around 12 times more texture data per frame than a PS2 game, already taking in acount the RAM used by the larger framebuffer and GPU-cached geometry.

So, texture data usage increases by 12x, while a DVD9 can offer roughly 1.8x more space than a normal DVD. Of course there'll be problems with games with massive amounts of art assets.

 

[CrazyGoon]

Originally posted by ExCyber@Thu, 2005-09-08 @ 12:48 AM

MS may be banking on getting rid of FMV in order to make room now that realtime scenes are looking almost as good as prerendered ones.

[post=139347]Quoted post[/post]​

Just to clarify, there isn't such a destinction between pre-rendered graphics (implemented through FMV) and real-time graphics. If the hardware was able to process the data quickly enough, real-time graphics can look as good as pre-rendered graphics. Although the hardware for the next-gen systems enable the animators to work without as many restrictions, this doesn't make FMV defunct (which is what you seem to be suggesting).

And besides, who's decision is it to get rid of FMV? Microsoft's? I think not! For a company that doesn't even develop games, their alledged "banking on getting rid of FMV" is pretty arrogant.

 

[ExCyber]

That part was just speculation, but it's hard to deny that compared to current practices, something is going to have to get heavily squeezed or cut to fit HD games on DVD. I don't see anything else that both takes up lots of disc space and is expendable...

 

[KuKzz]

I think not! For a company that doesn't even develop games, their alledged "banking on getting rid of FMV" is pretty arrogant.

Microsoft Games Studios don't make games ? That's news to me!

 

[VertigoXX]

To state the obvious but overlooked here... DVD burners are cheap and common. Dual-layer DVD burners are cheap and the media isn't that expensive. Blue-Ray burners are gonna be extremely expensive for a good long while, and the media will be so expensive that you might as well buy the original game. Adopting the new tech early in a console is a way to combat piracy.

Now, granted, if the game will fit on a DVD-5, I'm sure the mod-chip developers will find a way to make it read games off of them. But still, anything to slow the pirate scene down.

 

[CrazyGoon]

Originally posted by KuKzz+Tue, 2005-09-20 @ 03:35 PM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(KuKzz @ Tue, 2005-09-20 @ 03:35 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'>Microsoft Games Studios don't make games ? That's news to me!

[post=139780]Quoted post[/post]​

[/b]

As far as I know, Microsoft Games Studios is just a collection of bought out developers..

If you can find a game that was developed by Microsoft (other than Flight Simulator), then that's news to me!

<!--QuoteBegin-ExCyber@Tue, 2005-09-20 @ 10:01 AM

That part was just speculation, but it's hard to deny that compared to current practices, something is going to have to get heavily squeezed or cut to fit HD games on DVD. I don't see anything else that both takes up lots of disc space and is expendable...

[post=139780]Quoted post[/post]​

[/quote]

I get where you are coming from now. Make way for the heavy models/ textures. But the thing is, if FMV were to go, and on-the-fly rendered heavy models/ textures were to replace them, you may need more space to achieve the exact same scene.

 

[ExCyber]

Yes, just like a MOD may be bigger than an MP3...

 

[Mask of Destiny]

Originally posted by CrazyGoon@Wed, 2005-09-21 @ 11:24 AM

As far as I know, Microsoft Games Studios is just a collection of bought out developers..

Wasn't Midtown Madness developed before Microsoft started buying out game developers left and right? Not sure if there are any current titles though.

It's really not a matter of fitting HD content on these discs though. MPEG-4 part 10 should carry the day for cutscenes and current PC games are already designed to run at HD resolutions and most of those will fit on a DVD-9. The real problem is keeping the hardware fed with enough data to take full advantage of it since (at least on paper anyway) it should be powerful enough to display more realistic environments than current PC games are designed to produce.

I'm not entirely convinced DVD-9 on the XBox 360 is going to be a big problem. We'll have to wait and see I guess.

 

[CrazyGoon]

Originally posted by ExCyber+Wed, 2005-09-21 @ 11:40 AM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ExCyber @ Wed, 2005-09-21 @ 11:40 AM)</div><div class='quotemain'>Yes, just like a MOD may be bigger than an MP3...

[post=139809]Quoted post[/post]​

[/b]

I'm sorry, you lost me.

<!--QuoteBegin-Mask of Destiny@Wed, 2005-09-21 @ 06:36 PM

Wasn't Midtown Madness developed before Microsoft started buying out game developers left and right? Not sure if there are any current titles though.[/quote]

Angel Studios developed 1 & 2. Digital Illusions developed #3.

 

[Mask of Destiny]

A MOD files is sort of like a MIDI file with samples for the instruments used included. In that sense it's sort of like a realtime rendered cutscene. Most of the time a MOD file is smaller than the MP3 that represents it; however, if you go crazy with a lot of different large samples the reverse can be true.