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The Witness using 5GB RAM so far

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2+2=5

The Amiga Brotherhood
If the game does not require more than available resources and runs well i don't see the problem.
 

Septimius

Junior Member
Sure, we can optimize the game by making the textures lower res, and otherwise doing things that made Mass Effect look superior on Xbox than on PC.

Wait.
 
How the hell does THAT game use 5GB?

It's a persistent world in which the puzzles all tie in to an overlying theme. That theme, of course, is something we haven't seen yet.

The game could be 25GB and still be a truly unique experience, as far as I'm concerned.

This is a game coming from the man who made Braid.

We're in for a treat.
 

nasos_333

Member
It's a persistent world in which the puzzles all tie in to an overlying theme. That theme, of course, is something we haven't seen yet.

The game could be 25GB and still be a truly unique experience, as far as I'm concerned.

This is a game coming from the man who made Braid.

We're in for a treat.

I dont think anyone suggested the game wont be special because it takes up a lot of ram

The argument was that taking 5GB ram for those graphics seems like a joke and he should never have mentioned it

I think he is coming from a 2D game and the 3D is a whole new world he is exploring, he will learn eventually :)
 

Vinci

Danish
Yet it is silly to load 5GB on your ram, when you could easilly load a lot less

If he hadn't mentioned it, no one would have known and no one would have cared. Which, I should think, is an underlying component of his point: If the end-user is not impacted by how he chooses to do things, and how he chooses to do things makes his life easier and job less time-consuming and expensive, why should he not choose to do things that way? Because it's unseemly to a bunch of programming folks who, again, wouldn't have known what the game was doing had he not mentioned it?
 

Robot Pants

Member
It's a persistent world in which the puzzles all tie in to an overlying theme. That theme, of course, is something we haven't seen yet.

The game could be 25GB and still be a truly unique experience, as far as I'm concerned.

This is a game coming from the man who made Braid.

We're in for a treat.

I'm definitely excited and have been for a while, but from what we've seen I'm pretty shocked. You might be right, just haven't seen the whole picture yet.
 

fanboi

Banned
I don't reallt see why some of you saying "lazy" etc.

If a developer can focus on game content, balancing and all other things that makes the game great without suffering from lack of optimization (since I Think you are mixing these up since they are saying they don't need to optimize as much as Before since you can deliver a great experience without putting motnhs of man hours into optimization) that is great.
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
I have no idea to be honest. But i reckon its not something he would be happy about.
And i have no idea what the limitation of apps are on ios.
But i dont think apple would allow a 5gb + game on store.

Well, I mean, obviously he'd have to compress a lot of stuff. iOS devices are fast catching up but they're not there yet.
 

nasos_333

Member
If he hadn't mentioned it, no one would have known and no one would have cared. Which, I should think, is an underlying component of his point: If the end-user is not impacted by how he chooses to do things, and how he chooses to do things makes his life easier and job less time-consuming and expensive, why should he not choose to do things that way? Because it's unseemly to a bunch of programming folks who, again, wouldn't have known what the game was doing had he not mentioned it?

I get his point of course, but his comments seem very funny considering how the game looks, that is all
 

Eltros

Banned
This and all the recent comments he really hates Microsoft. We are going to get one of those scenes like when Code Pink starts shouting at a political event but it will be J. Blow at the Microsoft event. There really has to be more then he just does not like the console at this point.
 

Keikaku

Member
Right now I'm planning a game for the iPad/PC. Most of my work is designing the game, but a good portion of it right now is how I can load the game into the iPad's 512mb of memory. I have to figure out how to load the game while the player scrolls across a map, how to load and unload assets in the background, and potentially limit the amount of images the player can see at any given time.

If it was just PC, I wouldn't really need to plan this at all. I could go straight into game making and not have to worry about memory juggling because most computers have 1GB to spare for games.

If tomorrow you told me I could design a game for 8GB of memory, I would be able to throw out at least a month's work of planning and testing for memory crashes, loading/unloading assets, and so on. It would be absolutely awesome.

Anyone screaming "bah lazy devs not optimizing their code" just don't get it.
I can fit eight people into a Mini Cooper if I absolutely had to, stacking and squeezing them on the floors and seats, but if they could ride in a passenger van instead, why the hell would I still try to get them to fit in a Mini Cooper sized amount of space inside the van? I could just pile them in, drive my van, and be so much more comfortable.
Thanks for typing what I wanted to say. I always wonder if people what people who "armchair dev" think when they make stupid arguments. Arrrgh.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
v1oz said:
He's basically using all the RAM just because it's there. Which is the lazy route, you just end up with inefficient code that's a memory hog. There will always be better coders out there who can make sure every single meg counts, resulting in technically superior games with less resource utilisation and better performance.

That's why I've always preferred coders with a hacker demo scene background. Old school guys like the people from Factor 5 who really pushed hardware to do things you never thought it was capable of. They'd do amazing things with just 2MB of RAM on the Amiga - 5GB would just lend them near infinite creative possibilities.

Scene coding has never been about reducing size of running code, the emphasis has always been on working within set parameters for executable size. Which is to say that in order to hit a competition limit, say a 64k intro, or a 100k game, everything is created algorithmically in a precalculation pass on running rather than being simply stored within the executable file.

Added to this, in many instances optimization of performance is achieved by precalulating as many operations as possible so as to provide the cheapest possible code-path at runtime.

A classic old-school example of this is rather than using sine and cosine functions (slow computationally but almost "free" memory-wise) large static tables of pre-baked sin and cos values are algorithmically created in memory during the precalc phases, and are simply used to look-up the results when the effect routine employs them. This offers maximum performance speed at the cost of a hefty memory overhead.
 
No sense in not using the resources you've got at your disposal. If the performance doesn't suffer, I don't think we have too much to complain about.

I just hope that we're not heading to too bloated download-sizes, since the current PSN speeds I get most of the time would make this... less than ideal. Of course it is possible that the PS4 will come with an infrastructure upgrade, which renders this moot.
 

Vinci

Danish
@fanboi

I'm was just thinking of the potential if a developer did both. A well optimised game is going to allow for more possibilities.

This is true, though I would hope developers would aim for the stars and then optimize their way into making what they wanted possible... and not make something, optimize it well, determine that they have plenty left to use, and then start tossing shit in just to do so.
 
Well, I mean, obviously he'd have to compress a lot of stuff. iOS devices are fast catching up but they're not there yet.

I could see blow cut textures size in quarter res of ps3 that should decrease memory and space used for textures with times 16. Ios devices are still like 1/3 of current gen on paper specs if im not mistaken the A6x chip has a 80Gflops gpu.

That is why im interpreting this tweet as a way to stab at the xbone and a bit childish to be honest. He could have just said "We use all the available memory we can get on the devices The witness is releasing on". Sounds more professional and less childish. Because its not a random number you pull from your ass 5gb when you have 7gb to your disposal. Unless he is porting to Xbone or Sony also has bloated 3Gb OS.

/conspiracy. Inbe4 microsoft shill.
 

nasos_333

Member
No sense in not using the resources you've got at your disposal. If the performance doesn't suffer, I don't think we have too much to complain about.

I just hope that we're not heading to too bloated download-sizes, since the current PSN speeds I get most of the time would make this... less than ideal. Of course it is possible that the PS4 will come with an infrastructure upgrade, which renders this moot.

He can do as he pleases, as long as he does not try to suggest that no next gen game can possibly run in 8GB ram which somehow is so "low"

He speciaifically says that his indie game takes 5GB, which implies a bigger game would never run in this order of magnitude ram

Which is a laughable statement of course

The fact that he cant optimize his game does not mean next gen is already doomed for using "only" 8GB of fast unified DD5 ram (PS4)
 
My thoughts as an old assembler coder dude: He is absolutely right.

If using lots of RAM that's not needed somewhere else speeds up your development process and gets you a better performance, it's the right way to go.
 
Yet it is silly to load 5GB on your ram, when you could easilly load a lot less

It's the other way around. In the case of The witness, shrinking the memory use is a solution to a problem that does not exist on PS4 hardware.

It is silly to put effort into loading less than 5GB when you could easily load a lot more. The shrinking itself would be 'unoptimised' part of the proces because you're putting effort into something that has no benefit at all.

It's like trying to compress a game from 500MB to 300MB when you're going to ship it on a 650MB CDROM anyway.
If your 500MB game is as efficient as your 300MB game, shrinking is not 'optimalisation', just a waste of time.
 

Hypron

Member
He can do as he pleases, as long as he does not try to suggest that no next gen game can possibly run in 8GB ram which somehow is so "low"

He speciaifically says that his indie game takes 5GB, which implies a bigger game would never run in this order of magnitude ram

Which is a laughable statement of course

The fact that he cant optimize his game does not mean next gen is already doomed for using "only" 8GB of fast unified DD5 ram (PS4)

He didn't say that. He just said that 8GB wasn't that much.
 
The amount of stupid posts in this thread make my head hurt. You don't even need to be an expert in programming or computers to see how ridiculously inane these arguments are.

If I have a 5GB ram pool to use, and I use slower but memory saving techniques so I only use 1GB of that pool, then THAT is "unoptimized".
 

Acheteedo

Member
Why are people complaining? So what if it uses 5GB? If the resources are there, why the hell not? Don't forget it's open world, so why not load it all in if you have the option?
 

Tomat

Wanna hear a good joke? Waste your time helping me! LOL!
Makes me upset, as it means PC ports will probably be bare-bones and very poorly optimized.

I'm a little confused here. Would being "very poorly optimized" actually be a problem for the PC if this is all a RAM issue? If the 5GBs of RAM is there and there's a GPU/CPU on par or better than what the XB1 has, would it run alright?

Genuine question. I don't know shit about memory management/porting/software development in general.
 

adixon

Member
If he hadn't mentioned it, no one would have known and no one would have cared. Which, I should think, is an underlying component of his point: If the end-user is not impacted by how he chooses to do things, and how he chooses to do things makes his life easier and job less time-consuming and expensive, why should he not choose to do things that way? Because it's unseemly to a bunch of programming folks who, again, wouldn't have known what the game was doing had he not mentioned it?

It's not even unseemly to programmers, believe me, with the possible exception of a few head cases who care more about addressing a technical challenge which doesn't exist than making a game (something which is not unheard of in game development). People who think they can evaluate this game's tech without understanding how it is put together, without even having played it, and think they can draw some kind of meaningful comparison to Crysis 3, are armchair analysts who probably don't even care if everything they're saying is wrong -- they just, like so many of us, enjoy wasting time on forums. The funny thing about Gaf though is that there are decent number of people here who make games, know what they're talking about, and have already pointed out the absurdity of these comments.
 
Well, I mean, obviously he'd have to compress a lot of stuff. iOS devices are fast catching up but they're not there yet.
I truly doubt they'll ever catch up. If an iPad was to have as much power as a dedicated gaming device, the battery life would be terrbile. Just look at modern handhelds.
 

hodgy100

Member
then number of people that don't understand why he's using so much memory is disappointing. if he makes his game use as little ram as possible, the rest of the ram just sit's there unused. its a waste of time to sit there optimising your game engine, adding in streaming tech when you just don't need to, adding these things in when he still has 2gb of ram still available is nothing but a waste of time and money!
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
Is the 3GB OS for xbox one confirmed ?

I wonder how they would ever manage to take up 3GB with a console OS

Wasn't the general idea that it doesn't actually use 3GB all the time, but it needs guaranteed space to run apps to stop them from taking resources from games, so they partitioned off a lot to begin with?
 
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