PS3 Games Will Be Very Slow To Load
September 4th, 2006 by korok15 | General, Playstation 3, Xbox 360
Apparently, size is not all that matters. At least, that’s what we can say for sure about the ongoing war between the two upcoming media formats: Blu-ray and HD-DVD.
Blu-ray discs can hold up to 25gb of data on a single layer (50gb on a dual-layer disc) and HD-DVD discs can contain 15gb, or 30 on a dual-layer disc.
At first glance, one might say that Blu-ray is superior to HD-DVD because of its capacity, and to a certain extent that would be true. But their are other factors to consider. Thanks to the higher capacity, game developers would be able to pack a lot more content on the discs. Such content would include uncompressed visuals and textures which could make a game look and sound like never before if done properly.
Bigger disc size means more time needed for the drive to access the data. Blu-ray drives can read at a speed of 2X at 2mb per second. That’s not very fast considering how much data needs to be accessed at one same time. This could make loading times sky-rocket in huge games. And if we are to believe game developers, they plan on taking advantage of all the space they can.
To put things in perspective, an HD-DVD disc can be accessed at a speed of 12X at 16mb per second. That’s a lot faster than the Blu-ray drives, but still slower than today’s DVD drives which can read up to 16X. The Xbox 360 runs DVD 9gb games at 16X and some seem to take forever to load, so you could imagine how long a 25gb PS3 game would take to load at 2X.
Did Sony make the right decision to put PS3 games on blu-ray format? Should they have just made games on normal DVDs and kept the blu-ray player for movie playback? Would HD-DVD have been a wiser choice? Of course, it’s too soon to know for real, so we’ll have to wait until November when the PS3 launches so we can make some hand-on comparisons. Until then, we’ll just have to speculate as to what the outcome of this battle will be. After all, only one format will win, and become the standard for years to come.
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It does not really matter how long it will take a ps3 to load 25gb as surely only 256mb could be loaded into ram at any one moment(not quite sure how much ram it has but i think its 256mb)
The PS3 has an hard drive as standard aswell (unlike the 360), so games can cache on the hard disk to speedup performance. Still, 9mbs is pretty slow, though i spose most of the space that blu-ray games will use up will be uncompressed video and audio.
Well, there are some xbox 360 games that do use the hard drive (such as oblivion) but even then, it deosn’t really cut on loading times. Plus, the hard drive can create even more performance issues itself, like having the cache full which would slow down performance instead of speeding it up. I have no idea how the hard drive will work on the PS3, but I’m pretty sure it will be the same thing.
Is this going to be the same idea as Beta vs VHS? Blu-Ray also has plans for 100GB+ discs or is capable of it anyway.
I would love to have a PS3. Not only will it be able to process graphics in realtime with its super-duper, built for video-games, processor, it will also be the only Blu-Ray Player on the market for under $1000!
The other thing I like about Blu-ray is that it will have uncompressed audio and on my home theater, that should be pretty sweet!
The only trouble is, if blu ray is only used by ps3 users, it might go the same way as umd’s!
I feel that the 360 games have long loading times. Why is this? Uncommpessing all that data first. With the 360 only using duel-layer DVD’s developers are forced to use more compression techniques. As with blu-ray they have more freedom. Ask the developers which format they would prefere to stick their games on, bet your ass they all say blu-ray. I predict games will come out on the HD-DVD for 360, forcing 360 owners to adopt the HD-DVD add-on. Or there will be much more content to download because all the game will not fit on the DVD, bit like GTA IV. Games will be split into episodes just because of the DVD.
Blu-ray reads faster then 2mb a second. Otherwise playing a movie in 1080p would be impossable.
The actual speed i dont know but according to another source its about 8.5 mb/s for a 2x blu-ray drive. http://www.emedialive.com/articles/readarticle.aspx?articleid=11404#iiia