Can Xbox 360 get back the missing GB from it's DVD?

[vazel]

1. Both Gears of war and ME streams everything no matter if you have a HDD or not, thats the way their engine works apparently.

Yes because they have to be conscious of the user base without an hdd.

2. Ofcourse HDD caching doesn't do as much for performance as installations. With installations you usually copy the entire content on the disk to a harddrive. Since the harddrive reads faster than a disc (or you could even read from disc and harddrive at the same time) its allways going to be faster than something which o nly caches a gigabyte of information at best.

The fact that people can't tell the difference in performance with the vast majority of games with and without an hdd shows that the hdd is rarely used or the performance of automatic hdd caching is very negligible. And I'm sure we would hear from the developers themselves touting any meaningful use of the hdd as a feature of their game like with Oblivion where the performance improvement is noticeable.

 

[AlphaWolf]

The HDD in use isn't exactly blazing fast.

 

[-tkf-]

The HDD in use isn't exactly blazing fast.

5400 rpm in both PS3 and 360

 

[mjdted]

Thought this might be of interest in the context of this thread.

And the issue isn't just about the game being too big, Hollenshead says that developers lose upwards of 2 gigs of space per a disc because of information Microsoft requires developers to put on the discs.

2gb's lost per disk? Is that normal for game console dvd's or is that a bit excessive?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I presume he's talking about the 6.8 GB available capacity versus the 8.5 GB raw DVD capacity. As this is a journalist's remark and not a quote from the interviewee, I expect the journalist has got his wires crossed and misreported, as is standard practise these days . So I don't think there's anything new here.

 

[grandmaster]

He wins right now because pretty much all 360 games fills more than 90% of the disc.

If you look at any torrent site you like you won't find a single 360 game that has less than 6.X gigs... Even that Live arcade Compilations cross that line.

For me, the fact that basically every single game already fills almost the entire disc is quite telling wheter or not 360's dvd will hold or not throught the rest of the generation.

The format of the final, pressed DVD-9 bears very little relation to the base code. Having handled lots of debug code in my time, you'd be surprised at how many games are delivered on DVD-5.

GTAIV has 6.45GB of data or thereabouts, btw, and its performance in terms of texture pop-in is essentially like for like compared to the PS3 version. The only time I could cause the 360 version problems was by 'dive-bombing' while in the helicopter; hardly typical gameplay.

 

[-tkf-]

The format of the final, pressed DVD-9 bears very little relation to the base code. Having handled lots of debug code in my time, you'd be surprised at how many games are delivered on DVD-5.

GTAIV has 6.45GB of data or thereabouts, btw, and its performance in terms of texture pop-in is essentially like for like compared to the PS3 version. The only time I could cause the 360 version problems was by 'dive-bombing' while in the helicopter; hardly typical gameplay.

Are you saying that many games end up needing dual layer because of the "added" 2GB from microsofts end?

 

[Cheezdoodles]

The format of the final, pressed DVD-9 bears very little relation to the base code. Having handled lots of debug code in my time, you'd be surprised at how many games are delivered on DVD-5..

Care to explain? Are you talking about reduntant data etc?

I thought iso rips is a 1:1 exact copy of the originial? Allmost all iso rips i have seen are over 6gb in size.

 

[zarbaj]

I presume he's talking about the 6.8 GB available capacity versus the 8.5 GB raw DVD capacity. As this is a journalist's remark and not a quote from the interviewee, I expect the journalist has got his wires crossed and misreported, as is standard practise these days . So I don't think there's anything new here.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/37903.html

he said "MS already takes couple of gigs off", it's at the end about 4:00.

 

[grandmaster]

Care to explain? Are you talking about reduntant data etc?

I thought iso rips is a 1:1 exact copy of the originial? Allmost all iso rips i have seen are over 6gb in size.

I'm assuming that once encrypted, the disk is filled with redundant data that's difficult to compress, yes. For example, Dragonball Z: Burst Limit debug code is a mere 3.85GB.

Are you saying that many games end up needing dual layer because of the "added" 2GB from microsofts end?

The content protection system demands it, yes. This is why stuff like the Xbox Live Arcade classics - about 300MB of actual code - ends up being a full 8.5GB in its encrypted state.