Blu-Ray Vs. DVD

[Buktu]

Ok..

Sony is bragging about their Blu-Ray drive in the PS3, but im just wondering.. How much of an advantage is the Blu-Ray drive over the DVD drive in the Xbox360?

Are we going to see games getting obviously limited because of the DVD drive? And are the loadingtimes going to be notably faster on PS3 compared to Xbox360?

 

[Joe DeFuria]

/Darth Vader

"Nnoooooooooo!"

 

[Tacitblue]

First and foremost and this probably goes even beyond trying to win the next gen dvd format is IP protection, pretty hard to make your own BD discs and sell them on the black market as pirate software. The software is what makes the money, not the hardware.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's like some nightmare merry-go-round. The same topics just keep coming back over and over again to haunt us! Maybe the forum search function is broken?

 

[Acert93]

It's like some nightmare merry-go-round. The same topics just keep coming back over and over again to haunt us! Maybe the forum search function is broken?

PPU!!


/ducks

 

[jvd]

Sony is bragging about their Blu-Ray drive in the PS3, but im just wondering.. How much of an advantage is the Blu-Ray drive over the DVD drive in the Xbox360?

Okay quick break down

The bluray offers 25 gigs per layer so a dual layer bluray disc is 50 gigs

A dvd is 4.7 or 8.4 total (sl vs dl ) So you can see the size diffrence .


What this means to us

Devs can fit more on 1 disc than they can on one dvd. However no game that we have come up with fills a dl dvd disc . Even so almost all next gen games should fit on 2 dvds which is about 16 gigs . I don't see any game even using up close to anywehre of the 25 gigs a sl will use



Now as for loading times well

I believe the 12x dvd drive offers about 16 mb/s speed peak while bluray 1x drive is 6.4 mb/s minimum. What its peak is i dunno(someone correct me if i'm wrong )

So it means most likely we will get faster transfer speeds and slower loading times on the dvd drives . esp if ms puts in a hardrive standard which i believe they are doing .


There are some cons too .

The bluray drive is going up against hd-dvd

a bluray drive costs more than a dvd drive

The media itself costs more than a dvd disc

bluray drives may be in short supply in may of next year (rumored launch date )

bluray movies will also be in limited supply as it will just be launching around hte time that the ps3 launches

So while the bluray drive

 

[Pozer]

Its a null argument as of now, no dev can afford to hire a 250 person art dept to fill a 50gig BR disc with unique content. Unless budgets triple and prices double and games take 7 years to make. (DNF doesn't count )

 

[archie4oz]

Unless you're Monolith.. Filling up 23-50GB of BD-ROM with content actually wouldn't be too hard...

 

[Ty]

Frankly, for a console, it doesn't make a bit of difference to me. DVDs probably (I would just guess on this) offer lots of space even with higher resolution textures.

I certainly would not use a game console for Home Theater use but I'm an elitist when it comes to some of that stuff (as much as my thread bare pockets will afford! )

 

[Acert93]

J Allard in a video interview actually talked at great lengths why they went with DVD for now. Well worth a watch (he hits every point I have made in other threads). MS is intent on getting a lot of these out NOW, so waiting on drives and media was not an option for them among other reasons.

One point he did make I did not know (at least one of the ones that stuck in my mind) was error rates of the media. With the information packed more tightly on the drive he said that it can slow down the process of transfering information.

If Sony does not ship with a HDD as standard I would expect Xbox load times to be a bit faster in general.

 

[mckmas8808]

But Sony wanted to put in a media that is next-gen with their next-gen console. I respect MS for putting in a DVD drive because they wanted to launch first so waiting was out of the question. But Sony going with Blu-Ray is a no lose answer for them. Yes, blu-ray movies are going to be in small amounts at launch but the PS3 can also play DVDs too so no big deal. When they make BD-Roms that are faster (i.e. 2X or 4X blu-ray disc) that disadvantage would turn into a advantage.

Sony's machine is for the future, not for the present. They want to give people a reason to watch movies on 1080p TVs. Can you imagne Blu-Ray movies on a 42 inch 1080p HD TV?

 

[inefficient]

I too think the decision for sony to put in BR is really about the movies not games. Movies are going to look amazing in HD.

But then some large PC games like UT2k4 already approach 6gigs. And the texture sizes for these games are optimized for gfx cards with 128mb of ram.
xbox and ps2 games are optimized to fit in a much smaller memory space. But once the next game games start comming, I can see resources in both textures and mesh data blowing up to exceed the space of a normal DVD.

On JAllard saying the BR might be slower...

The truth is because data is packed more densely on a BR disc, the drive does not have to spin as fast to read the same amout of data and a DVD has to spin. A BR disc spinning at a comparible speed of a DVD would be several times faster.

But then I don't think its officially known yet what RPM's either are going to use in their drives.

 

[Gubbi]

There's only one argument for putting in BR drives: To stop games being pirated.

Cheers
Gubbi

 

[Phil]

jvd of course left out that it's yet undetermined if Sony will actually only go with a 1x speed blu-ray drive (IMO unlikely) or in fact a 2x speed (IMO likely).

If we assume that Blu-Ray goes for a single speed drive, there's still one big advantage that more storage brings: because of the massive storage space, data can be stored in redundant blocks to reduce seeks (expensive on optical drives) and improve access times significantly. There are a number of games that already do this with todays DVDs (I think one of the GTA's comes to mind).

I think it is clear that over the next few years, data will increase up to a point in which a DVD will probably have sufficient space available, but will be too tight to also store them in a redundant form. Having 25GB available, even if not fully used, can be used to an advantage.

Another pro is also that with more space, developers may find ways to use that to include extras. Of course, not all are going to do this, but you never know. Next generation will last for 6 years after all.

If Sony does go with a 2x Blu-Ray drive - coppled with the larger storage and therefore the ability to have redundant blocks of data, loading times could improve quite a bit over what you could achieve with a 12x dvd-drive.

Costs would be a con for Blu-Ray obviously, but not one that should be relevant to us consumers as long as the price isn't forwarded to us consumers. Given Blu-Ray is also an optical format, the costs for those developers should be a minimum. Sony will have big costs, but they obviously decided it's worth it if they can get an advantage for the movie-industry.

 

[DemoCoder]

There's only one argument for putting in BR drives: To stop games being pirated.

Cheers
Gubbi

It won't, since sooner or later, someone will figure out how to press BR discs, or hack the PS3 to access BR-RW discs, or to burn games onto DVD-R discs.

The primary reason for BR is HD. Look, this is a platform geared to last until 2011 at the earliest. If in 2011, we're still watching SD movies, and games are fitting in 4.7gigs, it's pretty sad.

By most calculations, both the PS2 and XBox could have used CD-ROM drives, since most games will fit on 1 or 2 CDs. But eventually people started needing more.

Consoles should be designed to better than today's specs, not equivalent to today's specs. Did X-Box360 really need to launch this soon, only 4 years into its lifespan? By all accounts, XBox1 is now starting to make good money. Seems they could have waited 6mos-1yr.

 

[Acert93]

If Sony does go with a 2x Blu-Ray drive - coppled with the larger storage and therefore the ability to have redundant blocks of data, loading times could improve quite a bit over what you could achieve with a 12x dvd-drive.

Good points Phil. There is a lot of merits on both sides of the arguement and I think it has more to do with the goals of the console than anything else. I think it is smart for Sony (although I could see it hurting their consumer electronic division) but I also think it is best for MS to just stay out of the entire format war and when the dust settles some come out with a Media Center Xbox 360 with a large HDD for PVR and a BR or HD-DVD.

Like you noted in another thread, a large BR at the outside of the disk will be faster than a 12x DVD (slightly slower on the inside). Running it in blocks--as long as errors are kept to a minimum-- would increase load times.

Thankfully on the Xbox it will have a HDD standard and I EXPECT it to cache game content.

We just need to wait a little longer to learn more. Load times on both could be quick, or there could be other issues. Better just to WAIT before we get all worked up (i.e. those worrying about the Sony BR drive just wait... it may be 2x, it also may end up with a HDD standard).

Costs would be a con for Blu-Ray obviously, but not one that should be relevant to us consumers as long as the price isn't forwarded to us consumers. Given Blu-Ray is also an optical format, the costs for those developers should be a minimum. Sony will have big costs, but they obviously decided it's worth it if they can get an advantage for the movie-industry.

The cost is always past onto the consumer somewhere, somehow!

Sony recently made a comment about the price of the PS3 that was not encouraging (not talking about the $460 price in some other country, they made some comment about it being worth it when someone asked them about a specific high price tag, forget the exact wording). I EXPECT the PS3 to ship for $300. I would be dissappointed at $350 and laugh at $400. Same with Xbox 360--if they ship at $360 as rumoured I wont be too thrilled and just wait... if they go $400 I will puke.

I still think the biggest limiting factor on format is budget. I really feel for the smaller creative development houses. There is just not the time or money in this Publisher driven world to do most games right. With the sky high expectations for Next Gen, the quality of the art and assets in a packed world... it is hard to believe they will/can fill it with stuff. Just darn expensive!

 

[DemoCoder]

I paid much more than $300 for both PS1 and PS2.

 

[Acert93]

I paid much more than $300 for both PS1 and PS2.

Most people do not

Remember, the majority of gamers are casual. We, as hard core gamers, need to remember that.

 

[DemoCoder]

It has nothing to do with "hardcore" We're talking launch prices if you bought it from a store when it came out. PS1 + launch title + controller + tax = close to $400. In other words, the "take home" cost of these consoles is way over $299. So if you won't pay more than $299, you're not going to be playing one.

 

[jvd]

It has nothing to do with "hardcore" We're talking launch prices if you bought it from a store when it came out. PS1 + launch title + controller + tax = close to $400. In other words, the "take home" cost of these consoles is way over $299. So if you won't pay more than $299, you're not going to be playing one.

Dude whats this have to do with anything


Take home cost of the ps1 was 400$ish the same with ps2

If the ps3 costs 400$ then take home cost would be 500$ anyway you cut it , 100$ more than the other systems which will hurt . It will hurt with people buying less of what sony actually makes money off of .