Battlefield 3 - Page 85

Thanks for he cut and past! The hi res photo wont show for some reason. I cannot wait!

I don't see where it says it's SD (meaning running at a lower resolution). That absolutely would not make sense (not to mention be against MS rules). He's just throwing the terms SD and HD around a little too casually.

The only difference is going to be the texture resolution. He's a little disingenuous when he acts like no one else is doing texture streaming (everyone does nowadays). But this allows them to double their storage space, and guarantee they're streaming off a faster HDD. It's a clever way of skirting around a few issues - space, speed and disc swaps. It's screws only the minority who dont have HDDs. I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes the norm going forward.

Agreed. He was trying to use it as an allegory, but it was the wrong allegory to choose (as some people will obviously misunderstand it as literal).

He should have called the streaming textures something like, say, an "afterburner". (Tho, now that I think about it, that still might be too "technical" of an allegory. If people don't know what an afterburner does, that won't mean much...)

If you aren't streaming, aren't the textures running at a lower resolution, ie the terms standard definition and high defintion aren't all that inaccurate?

Textures are always streaming. Even with lower res textures Im sure theyre still bottlenecked by the available Vram. It's just a question of how high a resolution texture they have at hand to stream in.

Standard def and high def have very specific meanings. Texture resolution has zero to do with it. You'll still probably see some benefit from the high res textures even if you're running at SD resolution. it's just muddying the water to use those terms.

The thing is that they're trying to make it sound like they're doing something special that no one else has. That BF3 is going to have the best textures EVARR because they're including a special disc. The reality is that there is no way they could squeeze the game onto a single DVD. Their choice was either to cut maps out, reuse textures more often, force disc swaps depending on the map or mode, or do what they're doing and leave people without a HDD with an inferior version.

They made the right choice IMO, but that's cause I have a HDD. Make no mistake, the disc only version is going to have some really blurry textures up close. I'm 99% certain the beta was using the high res textures.

If you don't have a HDD, you'll almost certainly be able to use a $10 8GB USB stick for this purpose as well.

I have a 20g HDD that's pretty full. Can anyone recommend a good OTC USB stick? Or does it even matter?

The patriot xporters are pretty good. Especially the rage XT ones (what I use to install games on).

It probably won't matter all that much. You might see a little more texture pop-in with a slower stick.

Also, GameStop is running a sale on used 360 HDDs.

20Gb - 9.99
60gb - 19.99
120gb - 24.99

You're not going to want to play this game without the texture pack. If you don't have a HDD now is the time.

Would we get better performance from using a USB drive vs a hard drive?

I thought you couldn't install games to a USB stick, that they were strictly for game saves or DLC. If you've actually done it before then obviously I'm wrong, but can you confirm that?

Edit: A little Googling says that you can install to a stick, but not to a mechanical USB drive. That must be where I was getting my wires crossed.

I do it all the time. Slightly faster than a HDD in most cases - thats why I do it.

I've got two of the fastest 16GB sticks I could find dedicated to the purpose.

Yep, I edited above. Probably right before you posted.

Yes, you can. (this article is from last spring so the performance data is probably outdated, however it does show that you can install games to a flash drive)

http://www.examiner.com/video-game-n...sb-flash-drive

For the texture dump, I seriously doubt it. For speeding up game loading time, almost certainly. (but only by a second or two)

Given the choice, install the game to USB and the texture disc to the HDD.

You can install games to anything over USB - even HDDs or SSDs in an enclosure. You're limited to a 16GB partition per device, and you're bottlenecked by the USB bus - so forget about any fantasies of super fast loads on an SSD.

"The thing with the 360 is that you need to be able to give consumers a game where you don't have to install it on a hard drive, because there are 360s without a hard drive. So we need to give you the option of installing it, rather than just demanding it. You could call it a 'standard-def' version for the 360 if you don't have a hard-drive."

I agree. SD isn't the proper term to use.

Any guestimate on the size of the texture disc file?

Any more than 7.5GB wouldn't fit on a disc. I saw the PC version is 10GB - so assuming they fill the first disc up to max, all they need is another 2.5GB.

It's probably not that clean a cut, so 3-4GB.

Perfect. Thanks.

Hold on are you saying that a SATA HD will be slower than a USB 2.0 flash drive?

It's been tested and confirmed (check eurogamer). The nonexistent seek time of a good flash drive usually overcomes any speed advantage the HDD might have in sequential reads or bus bandwidth.

It's too bad we can't tap straight into the SATA bus - Id strap an SSD on in a heartbeat it you could.

If you say so, but honestly doesn't make any logical sense so not going to waste my time...

It makes perfect sense if you have more than a surface understanding of it.

If you don't believe me, believe the people who do this stuff for a living.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xb...factor-article

Even by your own admission, they are doing something else no one else has.... they are not making the other choices (sacrifices) you mention, which others games must be doing.

Though I suppose I understand your sentiment, it still seems as if they are using a "new" way to give us more. The theory itself, texture streaming, is not new, but they seem to be setting a new standard for the method -- how is done -- to maximize the quality and variety of available textures on fixed hardware.

Other games like rage just went with forcing a disc swap. Its not a technological advance, it's just a ballsy move to make to compromise the graphics for people without a HDD. There's plenty of good reasons not to do this.

But I'm in favor of it - one of the biggest mistakes MS made was not to include a stock HDD. If this works out and doesn't turn out to be a debacle for EA, expect a lot of games to start doing this.

Does it have anything to do with the speed of the DVD drive not being able to stream the textures they want fast enough?

Not really. The main problem is storage space on disc. A faster drive is always better to completely prevent pop in, but every other game manages it off a dvd just fine.

Campaign or going straight to the MP? Once you do the MP, you always never go back to campaign.

MP.

I will campaign the day my interwebs goes out.

If the MP servers arent up this weekend, then campaign.