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[Vinci]

But wouldn't the most optimised game use all of the RAM? If it's not using it all... then there is still untapped performance?

Depends on your needs. Going out of your way to use as much as possible or as little as possible seems silly either way. Use what you need to deliver the experience you want to, within the confines of what you can technically perform and afford to do.

That's my guess, anyway; I'm speaking from an outsider perspective, but rationally that makes the most sense.

 

[Jac_Solar]

True, but a poorly optimised game (irrelevant of the hardware) would make for a worse experience. They need to find a balance.

He's used 5gb of the 8gb available ram. He's loading everything into 1 chunk, or something along those lines, which means that you only need to load the entire world once, and it should be fluid. No texture pop in, no loading after the initial load, etc. It shouldn't be a worse experience at all.

If he started "optimizing", it's more likely that it'd make for a worse experience, as he'd need to separate the chunks and condense everything.

Framerates tend to struggle when there's a lot happening on screen at once, obviously. What we might consider "poor optimization", or low framerates for no apparent reason, is almost always due to the game trying to load stuff that's out of your field of view, or if the game fails to unload stuff that you have loaded -- but these things are related to several things; rendering solutions, GPU, CPU power, etc. It's not really related to what he was talking about, since he was simply talking about how he was using the ram.

I think that's how it works, anyways.

 

[ari]

Well, he's right about DDR3 being dirt cheap, but they had to save money somewhere to allow for the Kinect to be bundled with every console.

I'm sure that was the reason.

 

[GreggTheGrimReaper]

Do the fish move out of the way?

Imagine this combined with realtime weapon change!

 

[Randdalf]

But wouldn't the most optimised game use all of the RAM? If it's not using it all... then there is still untapped performance?

Well, first of all, if the game itself was only 5GB in size (including dynamic memory usage) then there would be no reason to used any more RAM because you can just upload the whole game into main memory to avoid having to load from disc constantly (i.e. minimal load times if any).

RAM != performance, a badly written program will still run just as badly on a machine with 1GB of RAM as it would on a machine with 32GB of RAM. You can certainly create algorithms that are more optimal with some pre-processing step, but in general more RAM just means you can avoid loading stuff from the hard drive. Assuming the size of games doesn't increase eight-fold, then this means there will be less loading times, no need for streaming from disc, no need to decompress data after it has finished loading (Naughty Dog's engine does this iirc). It reduces the complexity of the game engine.

 

[hesido]

Imaginary Blow Quote: "Oh, ok, I'll just start optimizing so that the game runs on 1GB of ram, I'll devote an entire month doing it, and another month fixing bugs. Oh, btw, you'll get less puzzles but hey, I need to prove I can do this to some GAF users."

Imaginary GAF User Quote after he gets it to work at 1GB: "1GB? Uncharted 3 looks better than this and it works on 512MB *split* ram on older hardware with less gigaflops. I'm very tech-savy and I know about split Ram's and stuff."

 

[Can Crusher]

This game barely looks any better than Wind Waker HD. He should probably keep his mouth shut.

 

[Vinci]

This game barely looks any better than Wind Waker HD. He should probably keep his mouth shut.

Considering Wind Waker looks better to me than the vast multitude of games released these days, that's a helluva compliment. Its art style, to this day, is stunning.

 

[Windom Earle]

The first few pages are straight up gamefaqs fanboy material.

The game is optimized to make good use of one of the PS4's main strengths, not the other way round.

 

[Can Crusher]

Considering Wind Waker looks better to me than the vast multitude of games released these days, that's a helluva compliment. Its art style, to this day, is stunning.

Obviously I'm not talking about the art. Or I would be talking about Bioshock Infinite.

 

[kick51]

The first few pages are straight up gamefaqs fanboy material.

The game is optimized to make good use of one of the PS4's main strengths, not the other way round.

*checks first few pages*

ugh

 

[Vinci]

Obviously I'm not talking about the art. Or I would be talking about Bioshock Infinite.

I realize that, just responding to what I thought was an odd comment. If the game is achieving something that few other games have in the last ten years, i.e. approaching the level of Wind Waker's art style, then I would really like the person responsible to make as many waves as possible. Also, I'm not 100% certain that achieving that sort of art style is necessarily easier to do technically.

 

[PolarGamer]

Obviously I'm not talking about the art. Or I would be talking about Bioshock Infinite.

This is awesome. What if we are talking about music?

 

[Alcoholikaust]

Sounds unoptimized

basically...what modern PC games use 5 gigs of ram...not without crazy super samlpling or 4k right?

 

[XenodudeX]

This game barely looks any better than Wind Waker HD. He should probably keep his mouth shut.

How do you know what WW HD looks like? Have you seen gameplay footage?

 

[KidBeta]

This game barely looks any better than Wind Waker HD. He should probably keep his mouth shut.

He is in a much better position to talk about it then 99% of the people on this forum, yet it doesn't stop them talking either.

 

[Paracelsus]

He is in a much better position to talk about it then 99% of the people on this forum, yet it doesn't stop them talking either.

Most PC games (poor optimization) don't take more than 2-3 gb overall at 1080p. If he's shooting for 5 I hope for him it means 1440p native and textures worth of real life.

 

[Dragon]

Obviously I'm not talking about the art. Or I would be talking about Bioshock Infinite.

I'm not sure you know what you're talking about at all really.

 

[chris0701]

Blow need to shut his mouth and put more time to develop his game.

 

[Prophet Steve]

This game barely looks any better than Wind Waker HD. He should probably keep his mouth shut.

That is a very, very crappy comparison. You should probably keep your mouth shut.

Different art style, one game being by a big company, RAM having little to do with the art in the first place and different reasons.

 

[Dragon]

Blow need to shut his mouth and put more time to develop his game.

This assumes that having a conversation on twitter prevents him from doing so. Seems to be quite a misconception.

 

[TheD]

Blow need to shut his mouth and put more time to develop his game.

SMH
You need to stop attacking devs because they talked about console RAM on twitter!

 

[Tom Brohanks]

Why is it unoptimized? If you have the memory, you should use it. He can have tons of stuff loaded/cached in memory without the need to manage it extensively. If he can essentially fit the entire game in memory, then that's a huge plus.

My thoughts exactly. My biggest gripe with Gran Turismo 5 is how long it takes to do anything because the game is always loading stuff in to memory from either the game disc or the local HD that only stores a small amount of data(5GB?) on it for the game.

This new next gen is going to be great for both console and PC gamers because the developers aren't restricted to such anemic constraints. However, I do believe developers are still going to figure out how to squeeze as much work as they can out of these systems like what has happened as every console system has aged.

 

[KidBeta]

Most PC games (poor optimization) don't take more than 2-3 gb overall at 1080p. If he's shooting for 5 I hope for him it means 1440p native and textures worth of real life.

Those 4GB video cards are sure strange then.

So is the 6GB titan.

Useless according to you.

 

[Kai Dracon]

This assumes that having a conversation on twitter prevents him from doing so. Seems to be quite a misconception.

Maybe some people think a person making a few tweets or producing a 30 minute development video every few months = someone sitting on the net all day to bullshit about games and getting no work done.

 

[tkscz]

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow

Sad when a developer thinks that in store RAM is the exact same price as embedded RAM bought in bulk.

 

[JaseC]

Sad when a developer thinks that in store RAM is the exact same price as embedded RAM bought in bulk.

But he says much the opposite.

Edit: I can't tell if by "embedded RAM" you're referring to the DDR3 or ESRAM. In any case, as Theonik says, the comment is in regard to the former.

 

[kick51]

Blow need to shut his mouth and put more time to develop his game.

No time for tweets, keeping making my game motherfucker

smh

this thread is fucking awful.

 

[Theonik]

Sad when a developer thinks that in store RAM is the exact same price as embedded RAM bought in bulk.

He said it's cheaper. And that's true for the RAM itself.
Edit: He was talking about the main memory of the system.

 

[KidBeta]

Sad when a developer thinks that in store RAM is the exact same price as embedded RAM bought in bulk.

dat 32MB embedded ram in bulk.

 

[TheD]

Sad when a developer thinks that in store RAM is the exact same price as embedded RAM bought in bulk.

Bulk would be cheaper unless you are comparing to DIMMs being sold at a loss!

 

[PolarGamer]

Blow need to shut his mouth and put more time to develop his game.

Wow. Anger. This thread is really depressing. Gonna quit it.

 

[Can Crusher]

That is a very, very crappy comparison. You should probably keep your mouth shut.

Different art style, one game being by a big company, RAM having little to do with the art in the first place and different reasons.

What are you even talking about man?

It's like reading comprehension is in the toiled these days. I was clearly talking about graphic fidelity in a cell shaded game.

What the hell does that have to do with them being different art styles and big/small companies?!

Wind Waker is a 10 year old game or something. Think about that.

 

[famousmortimer]

I'm not sure that people understand what the word unoptimized means. I also don't think that some of you are grasping that 'optimizing' to make more room in the memory for other things means cutting corners and making sacrifices to get it to run.

Using ram that is available to you and still having some left is in no way, shape, or form, unoptimized. Ever. Ever ever.

 

[Can Crusher]

I'm not sure that people understand what the word unoptimized means. I also don't think that some of you are grasping that 'optimizing' to make more room in the memory for other things means cutting corners and making sacrifices to get it to run.

Using ram that is available to you and still having some left is in no way, shape, or form, unoptimized. Ever. Ever ever.

It's just a way to say "Well this game doesn't look good enough to me in comparison to other games, and those use less ram".

 

[M°°nblade]

It's just a way to say "Well this game doesn't look good enough to me in comparison to other games, and those use less ram".

It's not about how good a game looks using a certain amount of RAM.

It's about how easy it is to develop a game using a certain amount of RAM.

 

[KidBeta]

It's just a way to say "Well this game doesn't look good enough to me in comparison to other games, and those use less ram".

Dat subjective opinion. Seriously the comparisons are retarded.

 

[bomblord]

I'm also calling unoptimized code. Unless he's trying for 2k textures the issue I'm having is that most of them seem to be flat colors which can be much more easily done by just assigning a color to the geometry instead of a needlessly huge texture.
Also optimized code is always the way to go it can cause issues and slowdowns for the garbage collection if there's 2-3gb of useless data to cleanup at a time.

The only way it's not unoptimized is if he's loading the entire game into memory at once, which is fine but I wish he would have said that instead of implying it's the textures taking up that much space.

 

[Erasus]

Blow need to shut his mouth and put more time to develop his game.

I now understand why developers hate GAF

smh, he can tweet what he wants.

 

[Nozem]

So The Witness is 5GB so far, but it will be bigger than the available 7GB.

 

[Durante]

This is what I was always talking about regarding development costs: having a more powerful platform can actually make development cheaper, at least for everyone not building "AAAA" games. This is a very good thing. Optimization is not a goal in and of itself -- it's a means to an end, and the less you need to do of it to achieve that end the better.

 

[Can Crusher]

It's not about how good a game looks using a certain amount of RAM.

It's about how easy it is to develop a game using a certain amount of RAM.

Are you kidding me? Really? The reason why we needed more RAM was so devs could make the same looking games than before, but have an easier time?

I don't even know what's happening anymore. Sure more ram enables that, but that's not why these machines will have more ram.

Dat subjective opinion. Seriously the comparisons are retarded.

Every opinion is subjective.

 

[LosDaddie]

Blow is going in hard for Sony, damn.

Yeah, that's all I got from his tweets, too.

 

[Xyber]

Wow, so much hate in this thread.

RAM is meant to be used. If he can load most of his game on to the RAM and thereby reduce the loading time (or even remove them for the most part) then why is it a bad thing?

It's the same shit on PC, people are complaining when a browser uses 500MB of RAM when they sit on 6GB that is completely unused. Why have all that RAM if you are not going to utilize it?

It's not lazy from his part. Why waste time on a streaming solution if he just don't need it?

 

[TheD]

I'm also calling unoptimized code. Unless he's trying for 2k textures most of them seem to be flat colors which can be done just by assigning a color to it instead of using a massive texture.

Also optimized code is always the way to go it can cause issues and slowdowns for the garbage collection if there's 2-3gb of useless data to cleanup at a time.

The only way it's not unoptimized is if he's loading the entire game into memory at once, which is fine but I wish he would have said that instead of implying it's the textures taking up that much space.

It is clearly not just flat colours!

Saying that he should for NO REASON cut down on textures and replace them with fucking flood filled polygons is not logical.

 

[Kai Dracon]

It seems the specter of "graphical realism equals technical sophistication" rears its head once again. And this assumption is underlying the conversation for a lot of people.

 

[Draft]

Well I hope he can tighten up the graphics on level 3 because this looks like a good iPad experience.

 

[sweetvar26]

Very interesting topic and thread.

 

[Ty4on]

If DDR3 is so inexpensive like he says, it kinda makes me wonder how Nintendo couldn't put a measly 4GB of RAM in the Wii U.

Sorry for the late reply to something everyone has given their two cents, but DDR3 isn't that cheap.

Computer sales are going down and as a result more and more RAM producers focus on RAM for mobile devices. The result isn't just that prices have stopped going down, they're actually going up.

 

[maabus1999]

So The Witness is 5GB so far, but it will be bigger than the available 7GB.

Either there isn't 7 GB or I'm completely perplexed by his RAM usage...especially if he is going to then "optimize" it for an ipad...

From his latest comment it seems he is not loading the game into a RAMdrive like environment.

I just don't know what he's doing with all these assets then? Better hope he doesn't have a memory leak either.