The size of X-box 360 games

[mainman]

How big are X-box 360 games? I mean how big are the iso files of 360 games?

According to this article they are 3 to 5Gb's. http://www.gamesfirst.com/?id=1132

Condemned: 3.9 GB
Madden 06 NFL: 3.3 GB
Dead or Alive 4: 5 GB
NBA 06: 4.5 GB

How can this be? I mean, these games are HD right? HD movies are about 20Gb (the last Samurai is 28Gb), how can the difference be so huge?

Games for the PS2 and X-box were about 3 to 4 Gb, compareble with the average DVD movies. How can this be different in the HD era?

[zombie]

I'm not a gamer so forgive me if I'm wrong but aren't all 360 games in 720p HD, not 1080p? If so, that could be part of the reason they would take up less space than an HD movie disc.

[mainman]

Originally Posted by nyg

I'm not a gamer so forgive me if I'm wrong but aren't all 360 games in 720p HD, not 1080p? If so, that could be part of the reason they would take up less space than an HD movie disc.

720p and 1080i.

But would there be a HUGE difference in size if 1080p were inabled?

[zombie]

Originally Posted by mainman

720p and 1080i.

But would there be a HUGE difference in size if 1080p were inabled?

I dunno, so the 360 games are encoded at 1080i or are they just optionally scaled to 1080i from 720p? I'm sure someone here will have much better answer than I have... I'm just guessing but I am a bit curious as to what the answer is as well.

[aktonin]

On pc games, you will find that a 4 gig game can generally be played at different resolutions.

You don't generally find different editions of pc games, one for HD, one for low res.

With the exception of Peter Jackson's HD PC Game, King Kong

http://www.direct2drive.com/321/product/Buy-Peter-Jackson's:-King-Kong-(High-Res-Edition)-Download

I'll show you the difference between the Standard and the HD version.

Requirements: (Not recommended... just the bare minimum)

Standard HD
CPU: 1.0 GHz 3.0 GHz
RAM: 256 MB 2 GB
GPU: 64 MB 256 MB (with Pixel shader 3.0 & Vertex shader 3.0)
Sound Card: DirectX 8.1 DirectX® 9.0C compatible, EAX 3.0
Hard Disk: 1.5 GB 5.4 GB

But often they just use the same textures and often the same graphically rendering techniques for low res. and high res.


I've seen video footage of real in game graphics from both the Xbox 360 and the PS3, and I can honestly say, with some games, the PS3 blows the Xbox 360 out of the water.

Sometimes (but not always, because not all game developers know what they're doing with the PS3) the PS3 games look like Pixar, while some Xbox 360 games look like crap in Comparison.

That's why they use the same amount of disk space.

[Jazar]

Originally Posted by mainman

How big are X-box 360 games? I mean how big are the iso files of 360 games?
Games for the PS2 and X-box were about 3 to 4 Gb, compareble with the average DVD movies. How can this be different in the HD era?

HD Video takes up a lot of space, but games rendered in real time do not. MS Live Arcade has HD arcade games at only 20 megs. Of course with larger games you can have assets that take up a *lot* of storage space: Voicework, textures, Full Motion Videos, etc, but still can be kept somewhat reasonable.

Will the PS3 be able to effectively use the additional space of Blu-ray to make a huge difference with the X360? Probably not at first. Over time however the small size of the 360's DVD will start to be more of a limitation.

[AV_Integrated]

If you tell a 3d graphics engine to render a sphere, on a sparkling sky, at 1080p resolution it is relatively easy to do and takes almost no space. It isn't like a video game is made up of compressed video - the way a movie on a disc is. The video game uses a math formula to tell the graphics engine where to draw the sphere, what color it should be, how much shading it should have, etc. Shadow details, etc. are put not directly onto the game, but are added into the graphic capabilities of the system. The sun is here, the sphere is here, so the shadow will fall there. And it happens pretty much automatically.

As the sphere moves around, the shadow changes position. As the sun moves across the 'sky' the light hitting the sphere shifts, the shadow moves... But, the math used to tell the system to draw the sphere and the shadow basically stays the same.

At what resolution? It really doesn't matter! The hardware that creates the video matters a LOT, but the actual resolution of the game rendering each frame could be 720x480 or 1920x1080 and as long as the hardware can render those frames, then the math for creating them stays the same.