Hard drive space comfort zone.

[Hobie-wan]

Granted 1200x1600 is an odd resolution.

Yeah, sorry I was distracted and flipped. I meant 1600x1200.

And yes, even at distance it makes a big difference as long as the textures are higher quality in the game, but especially when you're sitting 1 1/2 to 2 feet from the screen instead of 5-15 feet.

As an extreme example of texture quality, think of getting close to a wall in Doom vs Quake vs a modern game.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

The 360 has a dedicated chip for on-the-fly decompression. That's part of the reason, if not all of it. I think the Gamecube did too.

It helps explain the disparity in load times. Sometimes loading compressed data and then decoding it is faster than loading the uncompressed data.

[isiolia]

It's likely more a matter of only including the exact resources needed due to the fixed hardware platform.

Texture compression is used on PCs as well. There are various standards implemented for it in DirectX and OpenGL, and supported by major video cards. The S3TC the Gamecube used had already been part of the DirectX spec for years prior to the system launching.

Basically, it's something the GPU supports, not a dedicated chip, and PC hardware had it years before consoles.
As has been mentioned, most console games this gen have still been 720p or lower. By contrast, 1080p native or better is very common on the PC side, with games capable of rendering natively across multiple 1440p screens. Supporting that properly takes space - Skyrim's official HD texture pack was close to 5GB all by itself, for example, and that's not even getting into what some mods do.

What the 360 does have relative to the PS3 is more robust options for scaling video in hardware. (some details in this post).

[Valkyrie-Favor]

I've learned something new today - although, with those consoles, the entire game is compressed.

[isiolia]

Compressed or simply put into a container? The latter is common with PC games now too - plenty of Steam games use the GCF container for example. My Guild Wars 2 folder has a launcher/updater and an 18.7GB dat file as another.

[RCBH928]

@Fastbilly

My HDD does not seem to be that slow , but maybe that game is a heavy load. I wonder if it is worth while to install SSD on PS4 and Xbox1 .

[isiolia]

My HDD does not seem to be that slow , but maybe that game is a heavy load. I wonder if it is worth while to install SSD on PS4 and Xbox1 .

Games tend not to show as much of a benefit due to being able to pre-load data. Initial loading times get improved, and dynamic games that can't entirely predict what data they'll need (like MMOs) may see improvements. Once you're playing, if not all the needed data is loaded to RAM in the first place, the game will tend to load it in the background.

Can sort of see the benefits of that optimization with the tests from back when the 360's "install to HDD" option came out. For consoles especially, devs know what hardware they have to work with, and design for it.


SSDs provide a much more perceptible performance difference for general computing, or for things where there's no real limit to how good performance can be.
The thing that SSDs do phenomenally better than any other storage medium is access speed. Sure, they now have transfer speeds up there with good RAID arrays, sip power, are dead silent, all that... But, want to find a random file?

A good DVD-ROM can get down around a 100ms access time. The best HDDs will get under 10ms, perhaps around 7ms, though that's 10k RPM drives, and it'll more typically be in the teens.
A modern SSD is around .05-.2ms.

Your computer is jumping around looking/writing to little files a lot. Launch a program, and it's bouncing around, reading settings files, writing to system logs, grabbing library files, etc. And it's doing that not just for the few applications you see, but also for the tens of processes going on behind the scenes. Being 100x faster at that kind of stuff is the biggest contributor to the general snappiness that an SSD tends to provide...but it's also something that isn't usually relevant to gaming, outside of (say) an MMO needing to randomly grab textures to correspond to all the players who happen to be in town.

[Sasha_Blue]

I have 1TB in my PC and about 3 externals. Any music, documents, digital comics and videos I keep in my externals as well as DRM-free games. I actually start to worry when I hit the 400GB mark on my PC. I know I have plenty of other space but I still worry.

[RCBH928]

Thank you islolia , that cleared a lot.

Any one know if using thunderbolt/usb3 with an external drive will give same performance of an internal HDD? I heard external ones are always slower . I wonder if you can run like Battlefield off an external Hard Drive , or another OS.

[isiolia]

With external drives, it's basically a matter of interface. The drive in the enclosure is usually the same as what you'd install internally.

USB 2 (and definitely 1) are clear bottlenecks for most types of storage. The effective transfer speed for USB 2 is 35MB/sec.
By contrast, USB 3.0 can do around 400MB/sec in practice (rated at 5 Gbit/sec, but there's overhead).

Thunderbolt 1.0 is 10 Gbit/sec, 2.0 is 20 Gbit/sec, well above what USB 3.0 can do. Not sure what it does in practice.

For internal, basically, SATA 1, 2, and 3 are 150MB/sec, 300MB/sec, and 600MB/sec respectively.

Now, the vast majority of HDDs out there will never quite saturate SATA 1. They might get close, but most will top out in the 110-140MB/sec range. High end 10k RPM models might squeak over 200 MB/sec. Really, SSDs are the things that actually justify SATA 3 (or better) as some can peak over 500MB/sec.

In any case, no single HDD is going to come even close to saturating the bandwidth of USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt.

What I'd not be as sure about is delay in sending commands and the like - and again, you have the possibility that the I/O board in the external enclosure would hinder performance. The potential is certainly there for external drives over those interfaces to be just as good as internal for HDDs.
SSDs would be limited, but objectively, they're limited by internal SATA as well, with the top end being PCIe connected.