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Re: New 360 Pic
I'll bet those were real time. If you've seen the tech demos, or even run 3dmark for nVidia and ATI's current cards, it's not a far leap considering that the PS3 and 360 are using GPUs another step over what we have now. But you need to realize that the demos run in a best-case scenario. Very little, if any interaction is involved, so nothing is being processed except visual data.
Streaming data from the DVD drive in the PS2 has become common since there is no other way to deal with the miniscule memory on the PS2. You get weird solutions like texturing half an image in one frame, then the other half in the next frame so you can have better quality textures without running out of memory. Or you can go the grand theft auto route and just use crappy textures everywhere.
Still it's not an elegant solution because the DVD drive can only stream so fast. Hard drive would be much faster, lots of ram, better still (everything the PS2 doesn't have). Games like GT4 have the PS2 on its knees, but it looks great--amazing for the PS2. It's nice to know that at the very end of the PS2's lifecycle, someone finally solved most of the hardware's quirks. I very much hope that this won't be the case for the PS3 and 360, but that new cpu's similarly outlandish design gives me doubts, which is pretty much what I was arguing the whole time. But this time the video cards (not that the PS2 really had a separate GPU) are very different--not console hardware in the least, coming from a very standardized background that's easier to deal with.
Ironic that the original PSX was catapulted to success because it gave developers what they wanted--an easy to program for piece of hardware. That it had a CD drive standard was another big key. It was really as no-nonsense as you could get. Xbox took a similar path, just get all the basics, and do them well. Obviously something like this won't do in today's competition of sony, MS and nintendo, but pushing too far forward into arrogant and usual tech isn't the answer, at least to me.
I'll bet those were real time. If you've seen the tech demos, or even run 3dmark for nVidia and ATI's current cards, it's not a far leap considering that the PS3 and 360 are using GPUs another step over what we have now. But you need to realize that the demos run in a best-case scenario. Very little, if any interaction is involved, so nothing is being processed except visual data.
Streaming data from the DVD drive in the PS2 has become common since there is no other way to deal with the miniscule memory on the PS2. You get weird solutions like texturing half an image in one frame, then the other half in the next frame so you can have better quality textures without running out of memory. Or you can go the grand theft auto route and just use crappy textures everywhere.
Still it's not an elegant solution because the DVD drive can only stream so fast. Hard drive would be much faster, lots of ram, better still (everything the PS2 doesn't have). Games like GT4 have the PS2 on its knees, but it looks great--amazing for the PS2. It's nice to know that at the very end of the PS2's lifecycle, someone finally solved most of the hardware's quirks. I very much hope that this won't be the case for the PS3 and 360, but that new cpu's similarly outlandish design gives me doubts, which is pretty much what I was arguing the whole time. But this time the video cards (not that the PS2 really had a separate GPU) are very different--not console hardware in the least, coming from a very standardized background that's easier to deal with.
Ironic that the original PSX was catapulted to success because it gave developers what they wanted--an easy to program for piece of hardware. That it had a CD drive standard was another big key. It was really as no-nonsense as you could get. Xbox took a similar path, just get all the basics, and do them well. Obviously something like this won't do in today's competition of sony, MS and nintendo, but pushing too far forward into arrogant and usual tech isn't the answer, at least to me.
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