Xbox 2 specs

[Guest Two Heavens]

People on Internet find simple solution to everything shocker!

[JPickford (retired mod)]

I couldn't see why it would be hard. It would be done all the time if the consoles had massive amounts of RAM.

The thing is, HD space is always cheaper and more plentiful than RAM. So there is always the option to do more using the HD. So whatever you can keep track of in RAM, you can keep track of a lot more by using the HD.

My PC has 256meg of RAM and it uses the HD for virtual memory. If I upgrade to 1GIG will XP turn off the virtual memory?

[PaB]

Surely a built-in flash card with, say, 256 MB capacity would be fine for save games and some downloadable content? And with 256-512 MB of RAM, you could do some of the (non-existant) caching with that?

It would - Right up until it fails, and rather than lose your traditional 8MB worth of saves - you lose 512MB worth plus downloads. Flash is volatile, it is not intended for long term data storage.

[PaB]

My PC has 256meg of RAM and it uses the HD for virtual memory. If I upgrade to 1GIG will XP turn off the virtual memory?

No - But you will have a noticable speed increase as virtually nothing will be cached to Virtual Memory

[Sng]

Is virtual memory on a PC a lot slower than standard DDR RAM?

[RJames]

HD's can do a fairly good impression of slow RAM. This *can* be extremely useful in games but it's not something that developers have really explored much. Even on PC's which always have a HD.

Surely this is inherent in all PC games/apps and otherwise, since the OS itself uses the HD as virtual memory? I'd assumed the Xbox OS used the HD as a cache in a similar way as well?

That's why if you have two harddisks and play games from one, but use the other for the windows swapfile (and ensure it's on a different IDE channel), you can get a significant performance boost...

-J

[RJames]

Is virtual memory on a PC a lot slower than standard DDR RAM?

Yes, by a number of orders of magnitude.

One has moving parts, the other does not... and that's just for starters.

-J

[JPickford (retired mod)]

Surely this is inherent in all PC games/apps and otherwise, since the OS itself uses the HD as virtual memory? I'd assumed the Xbox OS used the HD as a cache in a similar way as well?

That's why if you have two harddisks and play games from one, but use the other for the windows swapfile (and ensure it's on a different IDE channel), you can get a significant performance boost...

-J

Yes. PC games often use virtual memory (or rather they allocate memory without regard to the amount of physical RAM in the machine). This is why PC games have sloppy framerates and mysterious pauses all the time.

[Pob]

The game enhancement being discussed is using the HD to keep track of many, many objects beyond the capacity of RAM alone. In this context a HD is a vast chunk of slow (pretend) RAM. In theory you could make game where you could put a bullethole in every inch of every surface with textures being constantly streamed on and off the HD. RAM would be better but RAM is smaller and more expensive than HD.

This is what I'm talking about.

To be honest, the main thing I'm concerned about is GTA5.

what I really, really want to see in a GTA game is a persistent world, where each little person has his own life, and he goes about it no matter what the player is doing.

I want to be able to decimate the population, so that replacement city-dwellers have to be shipped in by plane.

I want to be able to create a huge pile-up, then go off on a mission, and drive drive past the same spot again 10 minutes later and see the tail-end of the clean-up operation.

I want to be able to spot some guy who car-jacked me an hour earlier driving around in my stolen wheels, so I can exact my revenge.

Is that too much to ask??

[Sng]

Sounds like GTA: The MMORPG, to me!

[PaB]

Is virtual memory on a PC a lot slower than standard DDR RAM?

Massivley...

In an average computer, it takes the CPU approximately 100ns (nanoseconds) to access RAM compared to 6,000,000ns to access the hard drive. To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to what's normally a 3 1/2 minute task taking 4 1/2 months to complete.

[Sng]

Crikey! So would turning down virtual memory force it to use my RAM? Or would stuff choke on the little virtual memory I leave it.

I got 1gb you see so surely it can all just use that?

[RJames]

Yes. PC games often use virtual memory (or rather they allocate memory without regard to the amount of physical RAM in the machine). This is why PC games have sloppy framerates and mysterious pauses all the time.

It cannot be denied!

[ChrisN]

I want to be able to spot some guy who car-jacked me an hour earlier driving around in my stolen wheels, so I can exact my revenge.

All you need to record there though is the entity that stole your car (sprite, colours, no more), and then randomly put him into the game world whereever you happen to be 10 minutes down the line. That sort of thing doesn't require a big persistant world.

[mr.miffed]

A reset button would be nice.

[RJames]

Crikey! So would turning down virtual memory force it to use my RAM? Or would stuff choke on the little virtual memory I leave it.

I got 1gb you see so surely it can all just use that?

No you need both. It'll always utilise your RAM first. Virtual Memory is just for overflow 'pages'.

You should have about 1.5-3x your RAM allocated in Virtual Memory. And fixing the swapfile size is the best way to do things. Since you have 1gig RAM, I'd say that a 1.5gig swapfile would be more than sufficient.

If you have two drives then you should force the swapfile onto the drive which doesn't contain windows/apps/games and put that drive on a different IDE controller to your 'main' drive. This can NOTICEABLY improve your PC's performance. If you use Photoshop and have your scratch file on a 3rd HD/controller things get even better (in PS).

But this is info for a different thread

[PaB]

No you need both. It'll always utilise your RAM first. Virtual Memory is just for overflow 'pages'.

You should have about 1.5-3x your RAM allocated in Virtual Memory. And fixing the swapfile size is the best way to do things. Since you have 1gig RAM, I'd say that a 1.5gig swapfile would be more than sufficient.

Wise words mate.

Fixing your VM at roughly 2X you RAM is the way to go.

[Sng]

Cheers! Will do.

I reformatted late last night so my PC's running swimmingly.

[Pob]

All you need to record there though is the entity that stole your car (sprite, colours, no more), and then randomly put him into the game world whereever you happen to be 10 minutes down the line. That sort of thing doesn't require a big persistant world.

Not if the little tyke is programmed to take the spoils back to his hovel and stash the vehicle in his garage.

Then, if somehow I knew in advance where he lived, I could wait in his garage ready to club him about the head, and reclaim my car

[Pob]

Yes. PC games often use virtual memory (or rather they allocate memory without regard to the amount of physical RAM in the machine). This is why PC games have sloppy framerates and mysterious pauses all the time.

So, basically, is a hard drive the only way to save large amounts of information memory for significant periods of time?

Or could console manufacturers come up with another way of allowing games to 'remember' what a player did to the surrounding environment three weeks ago (or whatever)?

[JPickford (retired mod)]

Not if the little tyke is programmed to take the spoils back to his hovel and stash the vehicle in his garage.

Then, if somehow I knew in advance where he lived, I could wait in his garage ready to club him about the head, and reclaim my car

I agree. That's much more in the spirit of GTA than randomly placing an angry near you on the map.

The beauty of a big, detailed world is that the player can figure out their own ways of doing things.

[Kobayashii]

WTF is this? does that mean we'll all be buying new 'Blu-Ray' players and scrapping our dvd collections soon then?

Surely they'd play on blu ray players, just like CD's play on DVD players.

[Pob]

HD's can do a fairly good impression of slow RAM. This *can* be extremely useful in games but it's not something that developers have really explored much. Even on PC's which always have a HD.

So are Bungie geniuses for this fantastic use of the Xbox hard drive in Halo, while other, lesser developers are lagging behind still trying to figure out how to keep a dead body on screen for more than 10 seconds without the whole game grinding to a halt?

There is certainly no noticable performance drop when you reach the end of a level in Halo, a trail of dead bodies and discarded weapons left in your wake.

[Sng]

I think it's more to do with other developers not really seeing the benefit waying up higher than the effort?

[RJames]

I think it's more to do with other developers not really seeing the benefit waying up higher than the effort?

Also, most of them are doing cross-platform development, so don't bother implementing HD requiring features, since they can't be done on the other two consoles...

[Sprite Machine]

Also, most of them are doing cross-platform development, so don't bother implementing HD requiring features, since they can't be done on the other two consoles...

So do you think that, if, in the future, all consoles have hard-drives as standard (or something similar), we'd start to see more and more innovative ways of it being used? I'd like to think so. Perhaps MS have set the trend, so to speak.

[PaulM]

I think we're much more likely to see a multi-core PowerPC in the Xbox 2 than 4 separate processors - whether it's two dual core CPUS or one 4 core CPU. The upcoming Power5, which the xbox2 chip is rumoured to be based off (or the PPC 980 derivative), can have up to 8 cores per CPU so fitting 4 on wouldn't be too much of a problem. The advantage of this is that you cut down on latencies in interchip communications and hopefully it'll be a bit cheaper to manufacture.

[Sng]

Well don't forget they've been available on PCs since 402BC and developers have hardly done much innovation there in terms of HDD use.

[kamrantaz]

So are Bungie geniuses for this fantastic use of the Xbox hard drive in Halo, while other, lesser developers are lagging behind still trying to figure out how to keep a dead body on screen for more than 10 seconds without the whole game grinding to a halt?

There is certainly no noticable performance drop when you reach the end of a level in Halo, a trail of dead bodies and discarded weapons left in your wake.

maybe you didnt notice the shit frame rate that halo supports?

[Sng]

Oh and Bungie are also lazy bastards Halo 2 would be out by now if they didn't go into work and play Eyetoy all day.