Is this the truth about Blu-ray Drives?

[Mmmkay]

Load times on 360 launch titles is longer than on Xbox and PS2. There is just so much more memory to fill.

I bought 4 launch titles with my 360 and only one of them has poor load times, PGR3. Kameo, NFS, and CoD2 have very good load times. Which tell me that it's not the speed of the drive that counts, but how you use it

You guys need to stop being so clinical with your analyses.

 

[Platon]

Isn't it possible to load just enough to get you started and then load the rest on the fly, minimizing load times?...

 

[London Geezer]

Isn't it possible to load just enough to get you started and then load the rest on the fly, minimizing load times?...

Of course. One doesn't need to fill up the RAM to get the game started.

 

[seismologist]

I'd like to know if Blu Ray will help with game engines that use streaming. Like Naughty Dog's games. Would it be possible to have a much larger variety of textures stored on disk and just stream them into memory to be used on the fly?

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

There's nothing really special about Bluray in its ability to help streaming. How well you can stream pretty much comes down to real-world throughput. Bluray is just like any other optical disc format in that regard. I'd probably expect real-world throughput on a 1x Bluray drive to average around the same as the DVD drive in the PS2 (about 4 MB/sec).

 

[seismologist]

I was thinking that larger storage gives you a much wider variety of textures. The way you could use those textures (without constant loading throughout levels) would be through streaming.

 

[see colon]

CLV and CAV mean nothing without speeds associated with them. for example, i have 2 older cd drives, a 4x CLV and an 12x CAV, and the 12x is faster. all CLV means is that the inner most part of the disk is read at the same speed as the outermost part of the disk, so you get consistant read speads for all of your content. while that counds good (and it's not bad), if you have a slightly faster CAV drive you could put all of your important (frequently accessed) data on the outer part of the disk, so it will read faster.

and as for seek time... no optical drive has "good" seek time. some are just better than others.

-edit- fixed acronyms

 

[ERP]

I'd like to know if Blu Ray will help with game engines that use streaming. Like Naughty Dog's games. Would it be possible to have a much larger variety of textures stored on disk and just stream them into memory to be used on the fly?

Depends on the seek times. If Blu-ray drives have higher seek times than DVD then it'll be worse.

Streaming off an optical drive is largely gated by the number of seeks you make.

You might be able to offset some of this by duplicating data accross the disc, but IME this is generally a waste of effort..

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

CLV and CAV mean nothing without speeds associated with them. for example, i have 2 older cd drives, a 4x CAV and an 12x CLV, and the 12x is faster. all CAV means is that the inner most part of the disk is read at the same speed as the outermost part of the disk, so you get consistant read speads for all of your content.

Ummmm... actually, you DON'T get consistent read speeds with CAV. Rather, the RPM rate of spindle is staying constant, so the speed at which a point on the disc moves is slower at the inner radii than at the outer radii, hence your read speed is slower in the middle than around the edge. "4x CAV" typically also refers to the maximum speed, which means around the outer edge. At the innermost radius, the actual speed is probably more like 1.7x.

CLV means that the RPM of the spindle changes so that whatever radius the head is at, the rotational speed is adjusted so that the linear velocity of a point at this radius is moving at a fixed speed. So you get your consistent read speed. Your 12x CLV will basically be giving you 12x throughput all the time.

and as for seek time... no optical drive has "good" seek time. some are just better than others.

For a given speed and age of drive, CLV will always be worse than CAV in this area since constantly adjusting the spindle speed doesn't happen instantly. Bluray is also just generally worse than DVD because it needs to also have a dual-laser head so that the drive can read DVDs (more mass in the head).

 

[see colon]

Ummmm... actually, you DON'T get consistent read speeds with CAV. Rather, the RPM rate of spindle is staying constant, so the speed at which a point on the disc moves is slower at the inner radii than at the outer radii, hence your read speed is slower in the middle than around the edge. "4x CAV" typically also refers to the maximum speed, which means around the outer edge. At the innermost radius, the actual speed is probably more like 1.7x.

CLV means that the RPM of the spindle changes so that whatever radius the head is at, the rotational speed is adjusted so that the linear velocity of a point at this radius is moving at a fixed speed. So you get your consistent read speed. Your 12x CLV will basically be giving you 12x throughput all the time.

yep, i typed my acronyms backwords

 

[Frank]

Actually, if the disk clamp, optics and seeker mechanism are up to par (which is mostly a question of specifications), you can get a MUCH higher speed with BR than with any other optical storage. You can make the disks from something like an aluminium alloy, that allows you to spin it real fast. CAV at 10,000 RPM.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

I can understand layers beyond the reflective ones being made of something like aluminium or steel, but I think the layers below those still need to be transparent to the laser. I'm sure someone can find some sort of alloy which has a crystalline stucture just the right size to be transparent to wavelengths in that range, but I wouldn't know enough about how.

On an aside, wouldn't the fatigue issues of aluminium be a problem?

10,000 RPM is wishful thinking, though. I doubt Bluray will ever be made out of anything all that unusual in terms of material, though there was that whole thing about using a cardboard substrate way back when, but it was still bonded to a regular polycarbonate underlayer, I think. Besides which, if they do that, there really *will* be a significant cost to the media.

 

[zidane1strife]

I can understand layers beyond the reflective ones being made of something like aluminium or steel, but I think the layers below those still need to be transparent to the laser. I'm sure someone can find some sort of alloy which has a crystalline stucture just the right size to be transparent to wavelengths in that range, but I wouldn't know enough about how.

The data's kept close-to/practically-on the surface protected by a thin special protective coating.

 

[-tkf-]

First BR Burner test:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/68839

Eine BD-RE wird mit durchschnittlich 8,6 MByte/s, eine DVD-9 mit 6,0 MByte/s, eine DVD-R mit 11,6 MByte/s und eine CD-R mit 4,4 MByte/s ausgelesen.

Average read = 8.6MB pr sec

And regarding HD movies:

So benötige man zur Ausgabe von HD-Filmen eine 3-GHz-CPU und eine Grafikkarte mit mindestens 128 MByte Speicher, empfohlen werden gar eine Geforce 7800 oder ATI Radeon X1800.

So, a 3ghz CPU and a 7800 if you want HD playback on your PC, plus you need a HDMI capable graphic card as well.

 

[Phil]

Bluray is also just generally worse than DVD because it needs to also have a dual-laser head so that the drive can read DVDs (more mass in the head).

If we're comparing identical data on either a DVD or a Blu-Ray disk, I would think the Blu-Ray seek times should be at an advantage since the data would be more closely packed which would mean that the laser needs to travel less to reach the same data.

I.e. If we fill up an entire DVD with data, a seek from the outer to the inner disk would take longer than an identical seek-request on a Blu-Ray disk, where *that* data would only take up around 1/3rd of the outer diameter of the disk with the rest being empty space.

 

[zidane1strife]

Dual Laser head?

Didn't sony build a single supah laser head capable of reading all formats(bluray/dvd/cd)?

press release

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

Looks more like 3 edge-emitting lasers stacked on each other so that they can lead out the same lens, and you can still see from the press release photos that the new head in its housing is nearly 4x the size of a conventional DVD/CD head, so that still pretty much shows it is going to be slow to move no matter how far it is.

Average read = 8.6MB pr sec

That sounds about what I'd expect. The article does seem to say that it was 2X.

 

[dodo3]

http://www.cddimensions.com/storage_solutions/sony_blue_laser.asp

Okay, I have a question.

Are all of the features of the BW-F101 going to be implemented into the Blu-ray disc optical drives?

 

[Belmontvedere]

You have to ask yourself what will the extra space afforded by BR discs offer? HD quality FMV cutscenes? The kind of content required by gameplay (3d models, textures, artwork, audio, etc.) is not nearly as much of a pig in size.

So say Square puts FF13 (atleast the PS3 version...) on BR discs. The actual game content, which compared to the super high quality video would be a relatively small amount of data, can be stored with alot of redundancy on the outer edges of the disc to make performance acceptable (lower seek time, faster loading, etc.). The larger video content can be stored without redundancy on the slower parts of the disc, and because it's read sequentially the performance would be acceptable.

Atleast that's how I see it. BR ultimately won't mean much for games. You have to be an eagle eyed perfectionist with perfect vision to tell the difference between HD and SD video. And even if you can tell the difference, what is the point? So you can see the zits actors chins? How is that going to give you a better experience? I'm supposed to pay hundreds of dollars for that "upgrade"? OT rant, but HD movies mean jack shirt to me.

 

[zidane1strife]

Looks more like 3 edge-emitting lasers stacked on each other so that they can lead out the same lens, and you can still see from the press release photos that the new head in its housing is nearly 4x the size of a conventional DVD/CD head, so that still pretty much shows it is going to be slow to move no matter how far it is.

Well the initial(or one of the first.) model of their previous combo head was 4x from the get go, iirc.