Optical disc formats & next gen consoles.

[AlNom]

Yeah, it's not a trivial matter to deal with higher energy lasers. You may also consider that it will be that much more sensitive to perturbations in the physical medium i.e. vibrations.

 

[function]

I thought all blu-ray drives are CLV by design, no?

Also, can you post a link stating that ps3's is 2.4? Everything I've read, which has been years ago by now, specifically stated 2x.

I'm actually hoping for 12x blu-ray drives next gen with noise dampening. I know the 360 slim is certainly quieter than my Xenon or Jasper models.

Edit: Though this discussion should probably be moved to the optical disc thread in the main gaming section. >_>

All Bluray drives seem to have a 2x CLV mode, presumably for movies, but PC drives that have higher speeds (like 8x or 12x) do so in a CAV mode. Or at least all the PC drives I've seen specs for work this way.

I can't find a link to the PS3 drive being 2.4x now, but I've always assumed it's just standard to truncate the figure to 2x. I wouldn't be surprised if all 2x CLV drives were the same.

12x Bluray would spin significantly faster than 12x DVD iirc, more like the spin speed of 16x DVD. If it's anything like the16x PC DVD drives I've used it would be noisy as hell and vibrate much at full speed, and normally be forced to drop to lower speeds (sometimes substantially lower) due to read errors. The original leaked 360 specs showed a 16x DVD drive iirc, thank goodness they lowered it!

There used to be a way to force your 360 drive to run at a lower speed (something to do with forcing read errors until the speed was reduced). As well as quieter drives, some 360 owners reported reduced loading times and increased streaming performance, presumably due to reduced read errors.

 

[kagemaru]

All Bluray drives seem to have a 2x CLV mode, presumably for movies, but PC drives that have higher speeds (like 8x or 12x) do so in a CAV mode. Or at least all the PC drives I've seen specs for work this way.

I can't find a link to the PS3 drive being 2.4x now, but I've always assumed it's just standard to truncate the figure to 2x. I wouldn't be surprised if all 2x CLV drives were the same.

12x Bluray would spin significantly faster than 12x DVD iirc, more like the spin speed of 16x DVD. If it's anything like the16x PC DVD drives I've used it would be noisy as hell and vibrate much at full speed, and normally be forced to drop to lower speeds (sometimes substantially lower) due to read errors. The original leaked 360 specs showed a 16x DVD drive iirc, thank goodness they lowered it!

There used to be a way to force your 360 drive to run at a lower speed (something to do with forcing read errors until the speed was reduced). As well as quieter drives, some 360 owners reported reduced loading times and increased streaming performance, presumably due to reduced read errors.

I see, interesting. Thanks!

 

[function]

I could be wrong about the 2.4x thing (still can't find the relevant info again) but here is a PC BR drive from 2006 that has 4.8x read speeds for single layer BD-ROM, and 4x for dual layer. So that would kind-of-almost fit with 2.4x read speed for single layer PS3 games.

http://www.dailytech.com/LG+Electronics+Introduces+4X+BluRay+Recorder/article2565.htm

 

[patsu]

PS4 should certainly have a much faster optical drive than the 2x BD drive PS3 has.

I imagine that's more important than going to more layers, though Sony has certainly demonstrated the ability to do that as well.

Yes on both counts, although for persistent storage, I prefer Sony virtualize it. In current gen, developers have to install some of the contents on HDD anyway. With CPU and GPU running faster than spinning media, I think they need HDD or equivalent mechanisms to mediate the seek and loading ?

The nice thing about a physical media is the notion of ownership. It is also pretty lightweight in terms of server + network infrastructure support. The immutability of a disc may also be useful as a "hard" authentication mechanism, say for P2P serving.

So I hope Sony consider what they want to do in the next 10-20 years and advance accordingly. Please create more job opportunitie$ for the western world. Your money is bigger and bigger at the moment. 8^P

 

[Thowllly]

I think I didn't make it explicit enough, so here is one more try

Current pipeline most likely is
load block of texture from disc, texture it to screen

what I'm proposing is
load block of texture from disc in size optimized form - decompress block, recompress block in gpu friendly format - texture it to screen.

No, the current pipeline is not like that, as has already been pointed out twice. What you're proposing is what Rage is already doing (except using a custom jpg like format, not jpg2000)

 

[manux]

No, the current pipeline is not like that, as has already been pointed out twice. What you're proposing is what Rage is already doing (except using a custom jpg like format, not jpg2000)

I would be curious about comparison of rages source material to jpeg2000 size wise. Even the conclusion in linked paper agreed with what I was saying.
(where the paper discusses was this http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/real-time-texture-streaming-decompression/)

As faster CPUs and systems with more CPUs or cores become available it will become advantageous to use compression formats that achieve better quality and higher compression ratios at the cost of more expensive decompression. As more CPU time becomes available compression formats like JPEG 2000 and HD Photo typically achieve acceptable quality at higher compression ratios and as such improve the streaming throughput as long as the throughput is not limited by the time required for decompression

edit. For the sake of clarification original proposition was that megatextures cannot be made any smaller anymore hence any increases in quality needs more space. I'm just expecting there still is some ways to go before we hit the limits of compression assuming we have the necessary cpu power AND the need for making source material smaller.

edit2. Rage seems to use jpeg like format which most likely is not comparable to jpeg2000 if file size is the criteria. Most likely it's speed versus file size optimization.

edit3. I think it will be interesting to follow what sebbi finds out http://www.sebbylive.com/2011/07/17/project-texture-compression-dxtc-transcoding/