O tempora, O mores: consoles used to store the entire game in ROM. Up to about 64Mb.
The modern need for patches and DLC makes that impossible now, in addition to the other reasons. But I think it would still be possible to greatly improve load times with a bit of optimisation - it's just not commercially important. Maybe if the console QA system imposed maximum load times it would be different - but then you'd see compromises made elsewhere, such as in level size.
(I play Cities:Skylines, where one of the more popular mods is simply called "Don't Crash", which lazy-loads other mod data to improve performance and reliability)
Remember that the 3DS is still very successful, and runs just off carts (well, also downloadable titles). It seems to run very smoothly.
In practice, there have been a few games that have had patches released -- in almost all modern games a tiny fraction of the game is code, which can be easily replaced, leaving all the art and music which (hopefully) don't need as much patching.
Well, modern carts like 3DS are quite different from old cart systems in the sense that they are handled more like storage devices than extension of the memory. I think GBA was the last system that allowed for example running code directly from the cart, without loading it first to RAM.
Games on the 3DS aren't typically renowned for their over-the-top graphism quality in the overall videogame scene; if you expected the same quality with the same resolution on the desktop, then you'd be doing what pjc50 said: compromises
Sad but true. Too many beautifully rendered games that aren't terribly engaging because amazing graphics are what the mainstream market demands. (I've avoided buying the latest gen consoles partly because of this, but mostly because I just don't get the time to play games that much these days.)
That being said there are also many beautiful games that are amazingly fun, and the graphics do add to the experience, but they're more like the icing on the cake. That's not quite the metaphor I'm groping for, but you get the idea: the gameplay is a fundamental that has to be right, and then the graphics can really add something; without the gameplay the experience is always destined to be flat.
It will be interesting to see what happens with VR games. With a regular game you can always do something else - check your phone, walk away for a moment. In VR you are stuck staring at a loading screen unable to easily do anything else. We are already seeing cases where people will abandon a VR experience just because they cannot handle the load times. Content creators take note.
The current (market) price for 64 GB of RAM is roughly the same as the price of a modern console. So doing that would essentially double the price of the console.
Double the cost, not necessarily the price. And maybe not even double, considering the price is already under-valuated, and buying tons of RAM chips from the factory must be cheaper than market price.
The game is CPU-bound on some of its rendering, so reducing the load on the CPU by using uncompressed audio allowed them to maintain graphical fidelity with reduced minimum requirements in terms of CPU.
Wouldn't the next logical move would be to switch to fast Flash memory that can move a GB/s or so? At the moment loading times seem to be bottlenecked by hard drives and optical drives.
Flash memory is still about a magnitude cheaper than RAM.
That's what computers are doing by switching entirely to solid states, but I was more thinking your console library would still be on a (very) cheap hard drive and when you start up a game it just starts loading everything it can into RAM while you play.
> when you start up a game it just starts loading everything it can into RAM while you play.
That's kind of what happens now (loading screens), but the problem is that console hardware is designed to barely pull off and play acceptable games and no more. From what I remember, the Xbox 360 was originally designed with 256 MB of RAM, but got bumped to 512. Games up until a few years ago had to deal with that. Many games go through many build cycles of simply optimizing RAM usage. When you have more demands on RAM during gameplay, there isn't any left over to load future levels. Add in that many games today are open world, and you don't know where the player is going to be, it's not worth it. Even PC exclusive games don't have this feature.
Which side are you arguing? Everything you're saying sounds like reasons to just throw cheap RAM at the problem and load one level, then put the whole game in RAM while that level is being played.
I imagine with some filesystem trickery you could even do it without the game even knowing, it just magically gets everything it asks for virtually instantly.
I'm arguing against it, on the basis of economics and (to a lesser extent) game design.
Console hardware is almost always sold at a loss. No company would build a console full of RAM (no matter how cheap it is) with almost no load times. Most people (having acclimated to loading screens) would rather buy the cheaper "good enough" alternative.
Aren't Nintendo rumored to get back to sorta-ROM cartridges with their upcoming NX console? (The cartridges would be made of strictly speaking rewritable flash memory.)
If a console just let you install a PCI-E-based storage device, like the Samsung 950 Pro[1], you could likely speed up load times by an order of magnitude or more.
The reason GDDR is normally used in GPU's is the workloads are more predictive, you are doing the same calculation thousands of times, just iterating across a buffer. This is why SIMD/Cache prefetching shine in GPU's. It makes memory latency not as important.
The ability to increase the GPU Ram has the same possibilities, but is VERY expensive right now. a 24GB graphics card cost about $5,000 and most of that is due to who currently needs high GPU Ram. These are for Scientific Computing and Data Analysis and boy I would love to have one. Image having these on your Spark Servers and using all the fast GPU Ram?
We have a couple of Quadros with 12GB at work. They aren't really fast compared to GTX, but dat RAM makes a difference. We really need to have RAM revolution on GPUs.
