Xbox360 Games: No Hard Drive Required

[kokyunage]

Todd Holmdahl, Corporate Vice President of the Xbox Product Group at Microsoft, is quoted on TeamXbox (http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/1190/Xbox-360-Interview-Todd-Holmdahl/p2/) that Xbox 360 games do not require the HDD or a Memory Unit...

Why is this important? Because the hard drive will be as useless as it is on the Xbox when dealing with games (i.e. caching whole games to reduce load times). No development house will program a game to utilize the HD if they don’t have to, especially when the game might get ported to the PS3 which doesn’t have a HD. The PS3’s lack of hard drive might actually benefit Sony: commonly ported games are less likely to utilize the specialized features of the Xbox360 which aren’t present in the PS3.

[darkwarrior]

Considering how cheap a few gig is now, no HD is stupid considering the possibilities of having a HD vs not having one and only having 512MB of RAM. Yes, its dedicated unlike a PC's but its still not going to be much eventually, especially if you've got something like a full single layered blu-ray trying to cache there.

[bapenguin]

it's not, NO HD, it's not required for games to run. This really is a non issue I think. It basically just means Microsoft will release an X360 in the future without a HD for cheaper. There were very few games this gen that took advantage of the HD anyway. For those that want the HD for their media etc, you still have it.

[Splat]

Yeah. No development house programmed any games with multiplayer support, or 480p support, because hey they're not standard! Oh wait. I bet games will add support for data caching if it will help substantially reduce load times. Would you rather the news item be "Xbox360 games require HD to run" WOOPS I FORGOT MY DETACHABLE HD AT A FRIENDS PLACE NO GAMING FOR ME. :rolleyes:

[alkalinejeebus]

I am almost certain that most if not all games will utilize the hard disk's caching features if it is attached. It will make games run faster by reducing load times which will be a benefit most developers will want to take advantage of.

[bapenguin]

I am almost certain that most if not all games will utilize the hard disk's caching features if it is attached. It will make games run faster by reducing load times which will be a benefit most developers will want to take advantage of.

True, if done automatically through the compiler/or the API a developer might not have to worry about it...the system could cache automagically if it detects the hard drive is attatched.

[Meatgortex]

The vast majority of games for the first xbox (after the first year) used the HD to cache game data. It was an easy thing to do and the reason why most multiplatform titles have shorter load times on xbox.

It might not be an exotic use of a HD and it didn't eliminate load times, but having a HD doesn't mean you don't have load times. BF2 I'm looking at you.

[Paranoia]

I'll take HDD over Memory Cards.

[Mrbunchypants]

When you think about cost, in might cost more for the HD. not only do you have to add power for it, that means a bigger power supply, but also not alot of companys make 1 Gig, or even 10 Gig HD's anymore. If you have to make something special then that drives up the price.

This is one way sony will be able to keep there price down. since cell is going to be in everything from cell phones to tv's. less production cost = the console cost less to make = sell it at a lower price = can compeat with the xbox 360 even though it comes out later.

At least thats how I see it.

[Paranoia]

When you think about cost, in might cost more for the HD. not only do you have to add power for it, that means a bigger power supply,

Same can be said about the PS3, since it will have optional HDD thus it also needs to have bigger power supply.

This is one way sony will be able to keep there price down. since cell is going to be in everything from cell phones to tv's. less production cost = the console cost less to make = sell it at a lower price = can compeat with the xbox 360 even though it comes out later.

The switch to cell tech is not going to happen overnight, so don't expect the price to come down any so soon.

[Reanimated]

What a stupid fucking post. Way to COMPLETELY misunderstand what the guy said, dipshit.

The X360 HDD will be used in much the same way that the Xbox HDD is. Will it be REQUIRED to RUN games? No, because, obviously, it's detachable.

[Heretic Machine]

So in conclusion, we have a some-what useful hard-drive that gives it an advantage on multiplatform games. While Sony's big deal in the Cell processor, which is a highly questionable piece of technology, and Blu-ray disks who's space will be wasted on multiplatform games since they'll have to fit it on a normal DVD for XBOX 360 :p

Advantage: 360.

Besides that, just commenting Blu-ray here, we still haven't had a two DVD game as far as I know... Which brings up the question of what we'd do with all that extra space on a Blu-ray disk? Answer: Pre-rendered cinematics. Welcome to Xenosaga kids, the 30 hour game with 28 hours of pre-rendered footage!

[Paranoia]

Terminator 2 Extreme Edition (6.5 GB) shows that you can still put HD quality content on a DVD.

[Chandler]

What a stupid fucking post. Way to COMPLETELY misunderstand what the guy said, dipshit.

The X360 HDD will be used in much the same way that the Xbox HDD is. Will it be REQUIRED to RUN games? No, because, obviously, it's detachable.

So...as a developer, can I cache my games or what.

By the way, I think caching is useless, I was playing doom3 on xbox and wtf I have to wait 10 mins at the start to play? I'd rather have 30 second waits between levels.

[cppcrusader]

Interesting, I'm sure you'll have to have the HDD for their backwards compatibility though, since its a requirement of all Xbox games to use it. I do agree that since they won't require it this time around the likelihood of a developer specifically doing something on HDD will decrease substantially.

[Wadmaasi]

Terminator 2 Extreme Edition (6.5 GB) shows that you can still put HD quality content on a DVD.
Wasn't it Titanium Edition?

[Rangoth]

They didn't require the use of the HDD on the current XBOX did they?

[kokyunage]

You have to read in between the lines. What this means is despite the Xbox360 having a better initial feature set, some of those features will be useless. Someone posted that after the first year, most games on the Xbox360 cached games to some degree. Well, I'm sorry, that's bullshit. Compare load times of Jade Empire when the game exists on the harddrive to when it's running of the dvd. I can see at least a 40 percent decrease in load time.

What this means by the time developers fucking start using the harddrive the PS3 will be out by then. Which means developers will stop using it because the PS3 doesn't have one standard (at least for the game that will exist on both platforms).

[Cha-Ka]

They didn't require the use of the HDD on the current XBOX did they?

That's not really a fair comparison becuase removing the XBox's HDD required cracking the case and some technical know-how, right?

This is sad news about 360's HDD support. As others have said, this will only discourage developers from creating HDD content since it won't be available to every 360 owner.

[Reanimated]

The multithreaded nature of both consoles negates the need for caching to a large degree, as does the use of faster drives. All this "blah blah PS3 this" and "blah blah Xbox 360 standard that" is a pile of hore shit.

[Kagger]

Besides that, just commenting Blu-ray here, we still haven't had a two DVD game as far as I know... Which brings up the question of what we'd do with all that extra space on a Blu-ray disk? Answer: Pre-rendered cinematics. Welcome to Xenosaga kids, the 30 hour game with 28 hours of pre-rendered footage!

If I'm not mistaken, Star Ocean 3 had 2 discs for the US release...though I may not be right

[Paranoia]

Wasn't it Titanium Edition?

Never heard of that edition. Extreme Edition is the real deal.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00008PC2O/ref=pd_sxp_f/103-0644017-5597445?v=glance&s=dvd

[*Legion*]

By the way, I think caching is useless, I was playing doom3 on xbox and wtf I have to wait 10 mins at the start to play? I'd rather have 30 second waits between levels.

Wow, there's burn marks on the ground where the straw man was.

[Splat]

You have to read in between the lines. What this means is despite the Xbox360 having a better initial feature set, some of those features will be useless. Someone posted that after the first year, most games on the Xbox360 cached games to some degree. Well, I'm sorry, that's bullshit. Compare load times of Jade Empire when the game exists on the harddrive to when it's running of the dvd. I can see at least a 40 percent decrease in load time.

What this means by the time developers fucking start using the harddrive the PS3 will be out by then. Which means developers will stop using it because the PS3 doesn't have one standard (at least for the game that will exist on both platforms).

So games load faster on the xbox over the ps2 because...? Certainly not because the ps2 has more textures to load. But most developers WILL tweak every system in a cross platform release for optimum performance, and that means turning on hd caching on the 360. You seriously have zero ground to stand on.

[eatme]

No HD required: we've known this for months. Where's the news?

Jade Empire load times: they sucked because Bioware was lazy and didn't stream enough sound and music.

Using HD on the 360: if the 360 gets significant penetration, of course they will. If only 10% of their sales are on 360, of course they won't.

[kathode]

Why is this important? Because the hard drive will be as useless as it is on the Xbox when dealing with games (i.e. caching whole games to reduce load times). No development house will program a game to utilize the HD if they don’t have to, especially when the game might get ported to the PS3 which doesn’t have a HD.This is completely incorrect. The HD can give you very real performance benefits, particularly in loading. Developers would be stupid to ignore it, particularly since every 360 available at launch will have one.

[Cyrano]

So, the upshot of this is that developers will hopefully use the HD for caching on the 360 the same way they do on the Xbox, with the difference being that games will still be able to run if the HD is detatched.

This sounds like more work for developers. I wonder if they will just not use the HD for caching rather than make the game work with or without the HD.

[Crenor]

Actually, games do not require the HD because it was only just announced at E3 that the XBox 360 WOULD come out with a HD standard. Before that the HD was going to be an extra. So developers that have been making the games were not developing for the HD.

Having said that, developers all like using it though, it increase load time, and when you hit a save point it will save much faster. It is not that big an issue with porting.
The Xbox only allows you to load to a maximum of 14 seconds (or 15..) and Sony gives you a full 30 seconds to load. So you actually might need to use the HD to meet this requirement for the Xbox

[bapenguin]

This is completely incorrect. The HD can give you very real performance benefits, particularly in loading. Developers would be stupid to ignore it, particularly since every 360 available at launch will have one.

Maybe you can answer this....similar to my point earlier....

Do developers have to specify HOW the hard drive is utilized in cacheing. Do they have to make calls to read/write routines for specific stuff, or is it built into API functions or used automagically?

[bickle]

Because the hard drive will be as useless as it is on the Xbox when dealing with games (i.e. caching whole games to reduce load times).

Useless? This is the BEST reason to have a hard drive. And fyi: it doesn't cache whole games.

[Rangoth]

Does anyone know if Microsoft has set a limit as to how big they are allowing developers to have their saves? Some on my XBOX are fairly decent in size for a console and I doubt would fit on a memory card. If they set a limit I think it would hurt them.

[riposte101]

What a stupid fucking post. Way to COMPLETELY misunderstand what the guy said, dipshit.

The X360 HDD will be used in much the same way that the Xbox HDD is. Will it be REQUIRED to RUN games? No, because, obviously, it's detachable.

This is the exact thing that was said at Gamefest. You must make the games so that they do not require the HDD because it is removalable.

[trip1eX]

I thought the Gamecube had the best loading times of all the consoles.

[Okamura_Takashi]

Do developers have to specify HOW the hard drive is utilized in cacheing. Do they have to make calls to read/write routines for specific stuff, or is it built into API functions or used automagically?

If the 360 is anything like the Xbox, and I'm assuming it is, then you have to write your own support functions for caching. The same read/write functions just get pointed to the utility drive.

[cppcrusader]

They didn't require the use of the HDD on the current XBOX did they?

Yeah, Microsoft required developers to use the HDD in some fashion, otherwise they wouldn't be a licensed developer. Since the built in HDD was probably the best feature of the Xbox, at least in my opinion, it was good way to make sure that it got used. Though I doubt they would have really needed to worry about devs using the HDD.

[Furious Wang]

This is probably the dumbest conversation I've ever seen on this site. How can Sony fanboys possibly be trying to spin the fact that the Xbox 360 has a harddrive into a negative? My God, what is wrong with you people?

The 360 will have some (not all, but some) games that will cache to the harddrive to decrease loading times.

The PS3 won't have *any*

There is no possible way to spin that into a positive for the PS3. At all.

Jesus Christ.

[Karmakaze]

Do developers have to specify HOW the hard drive is utilized in cacheing. Do they have to make calls to read/write routines for specific stuff, or is it built into API functions or used automagically?

I highly doubt there's anything automatic about it, but it I guess there could be a caching API in there easily enough.

That said, even without an API, with 3 cores there's no reason why you can't have 1 core copying the DVD contents to your HDD, while the other 2 are busy loading the game. If the HDDs not there just load from the slower DVD instead.

edit: Still, I'd prefer that devs could assume the HDD was always there with at least 4 gigs of scratch space, cause then much more complicated load schemes are possible:

1 Core streams data from DVD to HDD
2nd core manipulates that data on the HDD (decompression, etc.)
3rd core loads the game

[buckfutter]

I find it hilarious that insane MS fanboys think that it's some grand Sony fanboy conspiracy whenever something doesn't go their way. And vice versa.

It's as simple as this, the use of HD cache may still be possible. The problem is that if the HD is required to be optional for every game, then games which make heavy and specialized use of a cache install will not happen. This is not, however, as "big" a problem as it seems because both the 360 and the PS3 wil have optical drives with vastly improved read speeds; far more comparable to that of a considerably slow 5400rpm hard drive.

In addition, anyone who says that HD caching must happen because stuff like 480p was optional on the Xbox and developers still used that is completely missing the point. If a user didn't have a 480p capable TV, did the game fail to run? No. If a game looks for a HD to write to and there is none, will the game fail to run? You bet your ass. Different things entirely.

[Wonka]

I think that some of you guys are reading way way way too much into this one little quote. It doesn't make any sense for MS to include an HDD in every unit and then hamstring developers by saying that they cannot use it for anything other than save games and caching.

To my mind Mr. Holmdahl is pretty clearly saying there that Xbox 360 games do not "by definition" require the HDD, and then he follows up by saying that LIVE! acccess does in fact require this. Nowhere does he say that Xbox 360 games CANNOT or for some reason ARE NOT allowed to require the HDD, and since LIVE! requires it anyways, I have a hard time imagining why it would be a big deal if someone did require it. from the way he answered it, I suspect that the (up to this point rare) existence of a game like Blinx that makes extensive usage of the HDD probably just skipped his mind when they asked him that.

[rpdillon]

This is probably the dumbest conversation I've ever seen on this site. How can Sony fanboys possibly be trying to spin the fact that the Xbox 360 has a harddrive into a negative? My God, what is wrong with you people?

The 360 will have some (not all, but some) games that will cache to the harddrive to decrease loading times.

The PS3 won't have *any*

There is no possible way to spin that into a positive for the PS3. At all.

Jesus Christ.

Hey clueless...that logic doesn't follow. The 360 will come with a hard drive...that you may or may not use. So, games don't require the hard drive, since you may or may not have one attached.

The PS3 doesn't come with a hard drive. You can buy one separately if you like. So, games don't require the hard drive, since you may or may not have one.

In both cases, games can choose to take advtantage of a hard drive, if present. Or not. In no case is it guaranteed that the system will have a hard drive attached to it.

So, at the end of the day, this is only a question of bundling. 360 comes with a hard drive, PS3 doesn't. Pick one. End of story.

[TrackZero]

Meh, the comment leaves me with some questions. Specifically that even though games may not require the HDD, will these not be code in their API that has easy to implment caching that does turn on when the HDD is present? Because that'd seem like a logical thing to do either way.

[Cyrano]

Actually, games do not require the HD because it was only just announced at E3 that the XBox 360 WOULD come out with a HD standard. Before that the HD was going to be an extra. So developers that have been making the games were not developing for the HD.

The 360 was announced in May, and this interview is dated June 23rd, so that's probably not the case.