Is Blu-Ray better for Games.

[scooby_dooby]

I'm really not sure at all anymore about the 8x thing. Either way.

Hitachi specs listed in the blog post do indeed state 3.3x-8x max DVD read speed on DL. Whether this means only on the second layer, or perhaps is some kind of compensation for a large layer switch penalty rather than an actual speed (which seems unlikely), or what I dont have a clue.

I'd say the drive speeds seem pretty comparable altogether is my current thought..I haven't seen a lot of devs noting a big read speed edge on 360 either.

It's funny because the worst 360 game with regards to load times so far was probably Oblivion, which I think they kept to a single layer. Then you have games like GOW, dual layer, and it loads very quickly.

 

[Naboomagnoli]

I can better Oblivion for long load times (this has to be seen to be believed):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naVshTpD9l0

 

[idsn6]

The most vocal Arstechnica editor in the Opposable Thumbs journal for gaming is Ben Kuchera. The journals are more opinionated and personal than front page Ars posts, with the unfortunate effect that Kuchera's notedly partial feelings are being taken for Arstechnica's as a whole.

 

[dodo3]

I don't take Ars seriously anymore.

 

[Brad Grenz]

Yeah.

The Opposing Thumbs journal's consistently negative, hyperbolic and ill informed stories about the PS3 are really off putting and have negatively affected my opinion of the site as a whole. It's a shame, because there was a time when Ars was a fantastic technical authority, but they're stooped to parroting the hysterics of sites like joystiq and kotaku.

 

[deathkiller]

Drives tend to be marketed using their highest read speed, the actual read speed vary between media. There is cases when a 16x drive is slower in average than a 12x drive, the only way to know the truth in this case is someone hacking a Xbox 360 drive and measure the average speed reading a Xbox 360 game.

Drives with lower max speed for dual layer media do exist.

 

[baten]

What I think nearly everyone is missing here, is that the article is about weather or not Blu-Ray is good for games, not specifically 2x BD-ROM drives such as the one in the PS3.

Very misleading and unfair against Blu-Ray because it seems that the only thing "wrong" with the PS3's BD drive is that it is at a very low speed. Slap a 4x drive in the PS3 and problem solved- no seriously, it's that simple.

So, the title should REALLY be "Are 2x BD drives good for gaming?" Because why talk about DRIVE SPEED and then title the analysis about the MEDIUM. Drive speed and the medium for the drive is a bit irrelevant. If they are going to do analysis on the MEDIUM that's one thing, but if so then throw that DVD down to 2x as well so the analysis can be fair- seeing as it's about the medium and not the drive speed and all....

Great attempt at a below-the-belt shot there, but a bit immature me thinks.

This is from somebody from another forum, it made a point to me.

 

[nAo]

Hahaha, the article must've really annoyed nAo..

Yeah, they did! I'm sick of these uneducated PS3 bashing! they're entitled to their own opinions as anyone else, but technical facts are..well..facts, not opinions.
I stopped replying anyway cause it's completely pointless, the author is not admitting his mistakes and the article is still on line. I should just remind myself that I don't care ...I don't care... I don't...

 

[Darkon]

Apparently you have to be a MS employee to be listed there , I’m surprised though that Hannibal is standing by Ben's article.

 

[BrianWebDev]

Missing the point.

I think alot of you guys are missing the point.

Blu-Ray itself has nothing to do with games. Yeah, you can put more data on the disc, or use less compression, but that is up to developers. If its the same texture on both DVD and Blu-Ray, but one is not compressed is that any better then the other? I don't think so.

So you have more room on the disc, developers will need more time to develope content for the games. Is a bigger game worth waiting extra time for? How much extra development time?

All the high resolution uncompressed textures only get you so far. In the case of PS3 & Xbox, they both only have a set amount of RAM. High resolution textures don't do you any good if you don't have the RAM to load them into to, all the uncompressed audio doesn't help you if you don't have the processing power to process them and so on.

Blu-Ray vs DVD has NOTHING to do with YOUR gaming experience. While this give you more space to store data, Data size has nothing to do with quality of a game. When has anyone judged their gameplay experince by how large the filesize of the the game.

 

[Darkon]

I think alot of you guys are missing the point.

Pardon me, but I think you are the one who's missing the point here , people are talking here about transfer rate, seek time of ps3's blu ray drive compared to 360 DVD drive.

And not about uncompressed textures, etc.

 

[Nesh]

Yeah.

The Opposing Thumbs journal's consistently negative, hyperbolic and ill informed stories about the PS3 are really off putting and have negatively affected my opinion of the site as a whole. It's a shame, because there was a time when Ars was a fantastic technical authority, but they're stooped to parroting the hysterics of sites like joystiq and kotaku.

Indeed. Even I who isnt very knowledgable on technology I sometimes would spend time reading their articles since they seemed so unbiased and seemed to see everything from all respectives.

They gave lots of valuable information about how things work.

Now they make a claim, do a very shallow review description or someimes dont even put the necessary effort to give the ins and outs.

How can ars technica for example go in an effort 7 years ago to explain PS2's GS+EE, how the VUs worked and the potential they ve got (When the PS2 was clearly a headache to work on) and today dismiss possibilities, and avoid very going in detail as objectively as possible?

I read this article (As well as many others) and they jump to the worse case scenario. even for things that wont be used that way or things that are just the exception. They even avoided tons of things that even I who's not a tech geek was expecting to hear. Things that are common sense and expected to be mentioned.


I am amazed by this. I was never expecting this site to go from "proffesional" to "imporffesional". And the thing is that this tendency is so white spread that it's sad.

This is evident even in these, when some articles, claims, statements appear and some of the actual devs dismiss some of them.

Its sad that the media doesnt provide at all the right information. Things have changed too much compared to a decade ago

 

[liolio]

Ok some have lost theirs basis about size :
1st) size doesn't matter that much...
2nd) it has to be hard...
3rd) has to be fast ...
4th) the last and not the least the main part is the way you use it...

All apologies but some just turn phallic when it comes to size... hum media

 

[BrianWebDev]

oh really...

Pardon me, but I think you are the one who's missing the point here , people are talking here about transfer rate, seek time of ps3's blu ray drive compared to 360 DVD drive.

And not about uncompressed textures, etc.

But, the title to this thread is: "Is Blu-Ray better for Games", nothing in the title asks about drive speed, while most of the conversatiion has been about that, I feel like there are other issues more important then drive speed.

Maybe you should be alittle more open to other ideas, and other directions for this thread to go.

 

[Carl B]

But, the title to this thread is: "Is Blu-Ray better for Games", nothing in the title asks about drive speed, while most of the conversatiion has been about that, I feel like there are other issues more important then drive speed.

Maybe you should be alittle more open to other ideas, and other directions for this thread to go.

The thread is about an article; the article is about load times.

 

[TheChefO]

I think alot of you guys are missing the point.

Blu-Ray itself has nothing to do with games. Yeah, you can put more data on the disc, or use less compression, but that is up to developers. If its the same texture on both DVD and Blu-Ray, but one is not compressed is that any better then the other? I don't think so.

So you have more room on the disc, developers will need more time to develope content for the games. Is a bigger game worth waiting extra time for? How much extra development time?

All the high resolution uncompressed textures only get you so far. In the case of PS3 & Xbox, they both only have a set amount of RAM. High resolution textures don't do you any good if you don't have the RAM to load them into to, all the uncompressed audio doesn't help you if you don't have the processing power to process them and so on.

Blu-Ray vs DVD has NOTHING to do with YOUR gaming experience. While this give you more space to store data, Data size has nothing to do with quality of a game. When has anyone judged their gameplay experince by how large the filesize of the the game.

Great post - sums up pretty much everything sans load times.:smile:

 

[Rengoku]

I think alot of you guys are missing the point.

Blu-Ray itself has nothing to do with games. Yeah, you can put more data on the disc, or use less compression, but that is up to developers. If its the same texture on both DVD and Blu-Ray, but one is not compressed is that any better then the other? I don't think so.

So you have more room on the disc, developers will need more time to develope content for the games. Is a bigger game worth waiting extra time for? How much extra development time?

All the high resolution uncompressed textures only get you so far. In the case of PS3 & Xbox, they both only have a set amount of RAM. High resolution textures don't do you any good if you don't have the RAM to load them into to, all the uncompressed audio doesn't help you if you don't have the processing power to process them and so on.

Blu-Ray vs DVD has NOTHING to do with YOUR gaming experience. While this give you more space to store data, Data size has nothing to do with quality of a game. When has anyone judged their gameplay experince by how large the filesize of the the game.

I wouldn't go as far to say that Blu-Ray has absolutely no impact on your gaming experience. Sure, at any given point, the RAM can only handle a certain amount of textures, but that doesn't rule out the fact that you can have more texture variety with the space that Blu-Ray offers. Instead travelling through dungeons in an RPG with the same reused textures as the dungeons before it, you can have much more variety. You can create larger unique looking environments without having them look repetitive. Its the same with audio, would it not be an improvement if more of the NPCs in your RPG world had voices? Or how about having more cars with unique engine noises in your racing game?

In the end, as your pointed out, it all comes down to budget and time. But developers are always expanding, they get bigger teams, they get more resources - and those who have Blu-Ray as a medium will definitely take advantage of the extra space.

 

[inefficient]

So you have more room on the disc, developers will need more time to develope content for the games. Is a bigger game worth waiting extra time for? How much extra development time?

This is not true. Very often having to work for smaller constraints makes dev time longer. Having more room for content does not mean you have to work longer to fill the disc. It just means you have more flexibilty and have one less thing to worry about.

It is easy for artists to create large assets which are not optimized for storage. Optimizing it for storage restrictions is an additional step. Not to mention having to optimize the storage for game that has to fit on mutiple discs because 1 disc is too small.

For example. Blue Dragon was too big to fit one DVD disc. They had at least 2 options. They could spend a lot of time trying to optimize their asset usage, maybe figure out places to higher levels of compression maybe find places to resue textures until it fit on one disc. Or they could split the game on mutiple discs. Both options would have increased the development cycle. BD as the media format would eliminate those issues from the development cycle.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

For example. Blue Dragon was too big to fit one DVD disc. They had at least 2 options. They could spend a lot of time trying to optimize their asset usage, maybe figure out places to higher levels of compression maybe find places to resue textures until it fit on one disc. Or they could split the game on mutiple discs. Both options would have increased the development cycle. BD as the media format would eliminate those issues from the development cycle.

Or... They could just drop all that 720p HD CGI, and use the ingame engine instead for cutscenes.

 

[-tkf-]

Or... They could just drop all that 720p HD CGI, and use the ingame engine instead for cutscenes.

Or downscale the CGI to 320*200?, i´m not sure that having to redo all cgi with the ingame engine would be easier,faster and cheaper and would provide the same value for the gamer. Not to mention if this would actually result in the game fitting on one DVD.