Is Blu-Ray better for Games.

[nAo]

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.

Maybe you should read that article (not just the title) since this thread is about its content, if you wanna discuss something else you can easily create a new thread.
The point it is..that article is full of completely wrong technical data, that's it.
Sometime it can even happen that one can derive the right answer from the wrong data/model but I don't even think that's the case.

 

[Darkon]

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

They are using the in game engine for the cutscene´s i believe

 

[SteveC]

This article seems to indicate that PS3 has slower load times than the xbox360.

http://www.gwn.com/news/story.php/id/11006/title/Oblivion_Developer_Blu-ray_Is_Slower.html

 

[Carl B]

It's like we're stuck in a loop here in this thread.

Realize Steve that that very article was the one that spurred the one at Ars.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

They are using the in game engine for the cutscene´s i believe

Dude is a JRPG. They use CGI cutscenes

It looks close to the game engine tho, if i remember correctly. Just like Lost Oddysey, lots of CG, but the switch from CG to in-game is flawless.

 

[nAo]

There should be in the air some kind of virus that makes you dumb , it's the only explanation..

 

[SteveC]

So you are saying that Bethesda is wrong then?

 

[nAo]

no, I'm saying that you're OT

 

[SteveC]

I wasn't responding to you nAo, but since you responded to me.

Opening post:

Mostly an article on load times. I'm sure some of you could shed some light on how to reduce them or this so called "problem".

http://arstechnica.com/journals/thum...2007/1/17/6658

My post:

This article seems to indicate that PS3 has slower load times than the xbox360.

http://www.gwn.com/news/story.php/id...Is_Slower.html

xbd's response:

It's like we're stuck in a loop here in this thread.

Realize Steve that that very article was the one that spurred the one at Ars.

My response:

So you are saying that Bethesda is wrong then?

The way I read the topic of the thread was the article at Ars that the OP writes as "mostly an article on load times". I fail to see how any of my posts deviated from the OP.

 

[scooby_dooby]

It is easy for artists to create large assets which are not optimized for storage.

But they still must be optimized for RAM and internal bandwidth constraints...

BD as the media format would eliminate those issues from the development cycle.

And the developers would then have the issue of dealing with the lower transfer/seek speeds of BR.

There's somewhat of an elephant in this room though, developers constantly say that it's actually seek times that most impact load times, and by all reports there is a signfigant advantage in seek times for DVD.

Is this actually the case or have I been misinformed?

 

[Carl B]

xbd's response:

Well, that's a good question. I figure it's probably situational and likely something which would likely be answered in conjunction with any answer Scooby were to receive for his own seek-time question.

Now, whether such an answer will be forthcoming is just something we'll have to wait and see.

 

[Rolf N]

And the developers would then have the issue of dealing with the lower transfer/seek speeds of BR.

There's somewhat of an elephant in this room though, developers constantly say that it's actually seek times that most impact load times, and by all reports there is a signfigant advantage in seek times for DVD.

Is this actually the case or have I been misinformed?

Seek times are a huge deal, yes. A BD-ROM pickup has more mass than a DVD or CD-ROM pickup because it is two pickups in one: one for BD, one for backwards compatibility. The naive implementation is two lenses and two laser diodes, and even though there might be ways to simplify that, it is a more complex apparatus.

Also historically CLV drives had slightly worse seek times than CAV drives, apparently because after a seek operation some drives wait until the spindle speed has been "corrected" before picking up data. That's not strictly necessary -- many PC drives, e.g. LiteOn branded drives, can start reading data at arbitrary rotation speeds and continue transfers even across acceleration/deceleration. We don't have such details about the PS3 drive yet so it's fair enough to assume it is affected.

And once again, the PS3 drive's transfer rates aren't actually slow at transfers in comparison to DVD -- and you're talking about the 360 drive here probably --, it's just the difference between CAV and CLV, where numbers don't mean the same thing.
And the other side of the transfer rate tradeoff, noise, needs to be considered as well. I know at least one person who I'd trust to bash the PS3 for having a noisy drive, if it had one.

 

[Fafalada]

My response:

I don't know if nAo was getting at that - but all you're doing is using circular reasoning.

And the developers would then have the issue of dealing with the lower transfer/seek speeds of BR.

That would assume you're actually hitting hw limits - and last 6 years have proven over and over again that majority of games doesn't even remotely approach that.
If you want empirical proof - go and compare average load times on PS2 and GC titles.

But I guess it'll never be good enough for people that optical drive load-times are software limited - because they can't use that to throw it into other people's face as a definite argument.
Hell last generation we had GC ******s insisting their 2-3x slower drive was the reason for fast load times, simply because Nintendo didn't provide the performance numbers, so they were free to make them up.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Hell last generation we had GC ******s insisting their 2-3x slower drive was the reason for fast load times, simply because Nintendo didn't provide the performance numbers, so they were free to make them up.

Faf, I do not think anyone is reading this portion of your posts in this thread... it feels like you are shouting in the desert, like so:

Which points me to the old philosophical question: if you make a valid technical point and nobody hears you, did you actually make a good point ?

... actually there are more reasons to cry than to laugh... .

 

[archie4oz]

Seek times are a huge deal, yes. A BD-ROM pickup has more mass than a DVD or CD-ROM pickup because it is two pickups in one: one for BD, one for backwards compatibility. The naive implementation is two lenses and two laser diodes, and even though there might be ways to simplify that, it is a more complex apparatus.

For really old Blu-Ray drives (like 3 years ago). The PS3 uses a fairly compact triple wavelength OPU.

From my own personal experience testing a Sony BD-RE drive (actually uses a Panasonic drive mechanism) and a Hitachi-LG drive of similar specs, for similar sized data sets the BD drive typically has almost the same if not significantly faster random seek times. That's generally because data sets between 4-8GB span the entire disc for for DVD-ROM while only covering a third of a BD-ROM, so on average a BD-ROM is going to have seek times in the range 50-100ms with a worst case scenario of around 200-230ms. The DVD-ROM drive will average between 110-150ms with a worst case scenario of around 170-230ms.

Of course once you start getting into larger data sets that that Blu-Ray can handle the average and worst case scenarios (which is an entire disc sweep which takes around 350-400ms) will eclipse the worst case conditions on a DVD-ROM. That being said, even with 23+GB of data with a 100 randomly generate seek sectors I still get around 100ms on average. Besides, if you find the need to randomly jump around to random sectors greater than 4GB in span, then your title has bigger issues than the capabilities of the drive.

 

[Fafalada]

Besides, if you find the need to randomly jump around to random sectors greater than 4GB in span, then your title has load times that go into several minutes anyhow.

Fixed.

Pana,
you're right - probably all posts that don't begin with "BRD is slow" are like shouting in the desert in this or Ars thread.

 

[inefficient]

But they still must be optimized for RAM and internal bandwidth constraints...

Xbox1 64MB of ram. Xbox360 512MB or ram. 800% increase.

There's somewhat of an elephant in this room though, developers constantly say that it's actually seek times that most impact load times, and by all reports there is a signfigant advantage in seek times for DVD.

Is this actually the case or have I been misinformed?

Seek times is what specifically goes into the toilet when reading between layers on a dual layer DVD disc.

And for data that can't be streamed off the disc and require random access patterns, putting that game on the HD is a huge win.

 

[Panajev2001a]

you're right - probably all posts that don't begin with "BRD is slow" are like shouting in the desert in this or Ars thread.

Well, at least we can have a good laugh (provided we had a few pints of beer to soak away the sadness of reading comprehension lost against good ol' F.U.D.)...

I do not know why, but I kinda laughed while reading your posts and looking again at the picture of the desert I posted and imagining you in one of the dunes just shouting out loud "OH HELL!!! YOU MAKE NO SENSE!!!!! GCN's DRIVE was SLOWER, IT WAS SLOWER and WHAT DID IT HAVE TO DO WITH LOADING TIMES ?!?! ARGGHHHHH!!!!! LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO ME!!!!" while jumping and stomping your feet on the ground.

.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Of course once you start getting into larger data sets that that Blu-Ray can handle the average and worst case scenarios (which is an entire disc sweep which takes around 350-400ms) will eclipse the worst case conditions on a DVD-ROM.

Actually I'll dispute that. What are the seek times like over 25 GB of DVD, when you factor in the swapping of discs necessary to make 25 GB even available to the DVD drive?

Nice post, BTW. Good to get real-world evidence that the close data density aids seek times, which is all but forgotten in discussions.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

And for data that can't be streamed off the disc and require random access patterns, putting that game on the HD is a huge win.

This is something that perplexes me about Bethesda's comments. Back in the day, when PS3 was dropped, it was assumed that was because PS3 didn't have an HDD and XB360 did. Then we learnt otherwise, and Oblivion had to work on the platform without an HDD. The port to PS3 can make use of the HDD. How can PS3 be worse off (ignoring questionable use of the BRD drive if they're having speed issues with it) then the HDD-less XB360 Core?

Personally, I think Bethesda haven't the first clue about developing for consoles and aren't using the resources effectively. For Elder Scrolls 5 (or 6, whichever it is) they shold partner up with a classy console developer to create the engine around Bethesda's design and IP.