Absolutely, I definitely agree. In fact I think limiting your space and in some ways even the amount of horsepower keeps you thinking, keeps you clever. A lot of really great techniques employ a less-is-more mentality, and I'm the one beating the Wii drum louder than anyone here, after all.

I just think the space issue is perhaps taken a little bit more to heart when it's the developer of PGR that says it, by far the one of the least likely to wanna lick Sony naughty bits.

Whether it's actually needed is sort of a matter of perspective I suppose. Crysis looks insane partially because it's built for more capable hardware than the PS3 and 360, but do we *need* that extra power? At the end of the day possibilities are just possibilities. I could've been a pilot.

From what I gather, the use of canned lighting in adition to dynamic lighting is something that's making a return in games lately, with COD4 and Killzone 2 looking awesome very much thanks to it. I'm completely lost when it comes to tech stuff, but from what I understand Bizarre is doing something similar here and it yields better results than relying simply on dynamic lighting (like Acert talked about earlier) and it would seem to me that doing this on.. say, GTA's scale could get pretty crazy.

And 640k is enough memory. As time goes on, assets will get larger and larger and no matter how good compression gets, 9 gigs won't be enough. I'm not saying that it's not enough for now -- but as you can see here -- we're already seeing the effects of that limitation.

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NCAA 2008 could be a game about a guy running around the city picking his nose, I really don't care what the game is, if its fun or sucky. but the problem here is that RSX and PS3 memory limitations is limiting game graphics from developers forcing them to come up with compromises eg cutting graphical effects and cutting the framerate in half.There will always be games that run ok on RSX and fit into the PS3 memory limitations but it hurts to think that developers of new generation Sandbox type games will have to dumb down graphics, textures, and fidelity to accomodate RSX and the PS3 system memory eg GTA4 having a much smaller playing area then GTA San Andreas and poorer graphics than on competiting systems.Sure you can make huge stadiums like NCAA 2008 by repeating textures and other procedural tricks but to get a the fidelity of NCAA 2008 on the 360 on that scale, it's just not going to happen on with less RAM and less graphical umpf of the RSX.

Kind of laughable that your comments can be turned around on a console that is 1 year newer and $200 more expensive. Each system has strengths and weaknesses. Many of us -- and the market in general based on the success of the PS1 and PS2 -- believe adding an extra $200 for HD Optical media was a huge mistake.

As for sandbox games, you got it all wrong. They actually are not the biggest games because of the very point no one has the time or money to create enough unique content to fill the entire world with unique content -- and even if they could, time is spent better elsewhere. Hence Oblivion uses procedural trees at creation time and tweaked them and imported them into their game onto the optical media. And Oblivion isn't even really huge -- about 4GB. And yet the game is 16 sq. mi. Games like GTA:SA were a little over 1GB.

I already discussed how PGR is using a lot of actual photos for their source material for textures and how they use a mixture of dynamic and prebaked illumination solutions. Static shadows and lights are higher quality but also much larger; dynamic shadows and lights are realtime and don't really impact optical media. So your sandbox games with day cycles aren't going to have as many texture layers in most cases.

We all knew that DVD9 would have limits. But hint: So does BDR. So will your rant begin when a single game exceeds BDR? I already heard a comment that that a dev needed to cull some media to fit into 25GB -- and Kojima himself said it was a limit. And lets not forget that BDR can have some pretty poor transfer rates.

And a gaping hole in your rant:

BDR wasn't available in 2005. Sorry, it wasn't commercially to the mass market. Actually, Sony about died a million deaths in Summer 2006 trying to even get diodes. It. was. not. possible. in. 2005.

But I am surprised not to see you ranting in all the threads about PS3 games have lesser graphics and slower framerates. IGN slammed PS3 NCAA 2008. And why not?

The PS3 is $200 more and 1 year younger.

Oh, and G80 (8800GTX) shipped in quantities in Fall 2006. Sony could have used a next gen unified shader GPU for the PS3. Instead they used technology older than the Xbox 360's.

Oh noes! Sony isn't giving us a next gen experience! Oh noes! Developers have to cut their graphics and design plans!

The consoles are about working with what you have when you release. BDR wasn't commercially viable in fall 2005. There is still a format war and the cost is far too high for a market that traditionally hits mainstream success at $199.

The PC, on the other hand, is the perfect platform for people who want the best of the best at no expense, damned be the market and damned be companies that have to make a living by selling to an install base. Damn them all I want the best, regardless of the cost and when it will be 1 uped!