Random Gaming Thoughts

[marurun]

That's not something that's ever really gone away, or likely to. Most of it is just relative. The more data that has to get pulled into memory, the faster the storage needs to be. Even with strategies to minimize or mask loading, plenty of HDD based games have long loading screens at times. SSDs have improved on that significantly now, but they're still ultimately pulling data into RAM.

Obviously though, it'll vary. Even the PS1 had the occasional title that fit entirely in RAM (Ridge Racer, offhand), and if all developers were trying to make were SNES games with Redbook audio, load times would rarely have been a thing.

With the advent of hard drives, though, companies started developing strategies to selectively steam data. Yes, RAM is still a bottleneck, but good design can mask many loading breaks in ways you really can’t with optical media. Even ROM games sometimes had to pause to load, especially LoROM games for the SNES.

[isiolia]

With the advent of hard drives, though, companies started developing strategies to selectively steam data. Yes, RAM is still a bottleneck, but good design can mask many loading breaks in ways you really can’t with optical media. Even ROM games sometimes had to pause to load, especially LoROM games for the SNES.

They started to do those sorts of things before HDDs were standard. Popo mentioned Metroid Prime, but another example I can think of is King's Field IV - if you don't warp around, it never needs to stop and load. Many, if not most 360 games were designed to work primarily from the DVD, given that not all models had internal storage. In turn, having them stream data from the disc as you played wasn't uncommon. It's something Digital Foundry mentioned frequently when comparing (eventual) DVD vs HDD install performance. There are the initial load times to compare, but there's also a lot of data being loaded as you play that was designed around the data rate available from disc. Which, at that point, was still kinda-sorta reasonable relative to the data being moved.

While there are certainly benefits to seek times/etc too, the major shift over to complete installs to HDD being standard was more because consoles started tossing gigabytes of data around, and load times would be measured in minutes rather than seconds if pulling that from discs. Seems like the SSD speeds for the Series X and PS5 will enable some new tactics though.

[RCBH928]

@isiollia

Are you saying the whole Rdige Racer can fit in 2MB RAM or every level can fit in that size?

@MrPopo
"it all depends on whether or not the game correctly guessed you were going to go through that door and has sufficient time to load the next room" I like tricks like these that overcome the limits and become invisible to the user.

[RCBH928]

One thing I find confusing is smartphone games. As fast and as big SSDs are and RAM is, they still take time to load at least to launch. I am thinking they must be downloading stuff from the internet each time.

[marurun]

With the advent of hard drives, though, companies started developing strategies to selectively steam data. Yes, RAM is still a bottleneck, but good design can mask many loading breaks in ways you really can’t with optical media. Even ROM games sometimes had to pause to load, especially LoROM games for the SNES.

They started to do those sorts of things before HDDs were standard. Popo mentioned Metroid Prime, but another example I can think of is King's Field IV - if you don't warp around, it never needs to stop and load. Many, if not most 360 games were designed to work primarily from the DVD, given that not all models had internal storage. In turn, having them stream data from the disc as you played wasn't uncommon.

Yes, I'm overgeneralizing a bit, but speaking broadly, streaming game data from HDD or cartridge storage is much more reliable in terms of speed and availability, and those techniques are generally less common for optical storage mediums.

[MrPopo]

To put into perspective the differences in data speeds, with modern hardware:

RAM: 25 GB/s
SSD: 3-6 GB/s
BD: 72 MB/s

There's a general trend in computer architecture that faster means a higher price per byte stored. So an SSD is faster than a BD, but the cost to create a BD on a per-byte basis is much lower than an SSD. Similarly, RAM is faster than SSD, but the price per byte is much higher. And this extends beyond RAM into things on the CPU (registers and various levels of caches); things on the CPU die are even faster than RAM (with registers being a single clock cycle to access) but the cost per byte is huge compared to RAM. So when designing a computer tradeoffs are made, and then when writing software you make tradeoffs again. Things you're going to access frequently you want to have in faster storage, while things that are accessed infrequently can be in slow storage.

[isiolia]

@isiollia

Are you saying the whole Rdige Racer can fit in 2MB RAM or every level can fit in that size?

The original launch-window game (which is, admittedly, pretty limited in scope) loads entirely into RAM. The only thing the disc is used for is the music, and you can actually swap the game disc out for an audio CD of your choice to have it play that instead (I want to say the long box instructions even mentioned that, but I no longer have it to check).

One thing I find confusing is smartphone games. As fast and as big SSDs are and RAM is, they still take time to load at least to launch. I am thinking they must be downloading stuff from the internet each time.

In some cases they might be synching data, especially if you have a profile saved to the cloud or something. Apps in general can take a second, and most don't need to reserve as much RAM/etc as a game might. Things that are more instant are likely kept on standby in the background, like they are on a desktop OS.

[MrPopo]

One frequent reason for loading "slowness" in modern titles is compression/decompression. If your graphical data is compressed then you need to decompress it and load the parts you want into your working memory, and that takes time.

[marurun]

Even ancient games often used some forms of compression. The most common compression in 8-bit and 16-bit titles was of text, sometimes creating issues for hobbyist translators, but compressing graphical assets wasn't unheard of. A few SNES titles even used extra chips for data compression.

[Forlorn Drifter]

Nintendo is finally having a Direct tomorrow, and it’s 50 minutes. Assuming it isn’t all Smash Bros stuff, that should be interesting.

I do have to say I’m slightly frustrated by companies saying they want to re-real ease old games and then never doing it. Just get it done people.