Technical Director for Ubi on PS3 and Blu-Ray

[JacksBleedingEyes]

Nobody seems to be mentioning the underdog of the last generation and mention how the cube manages to get it all in 1.8. Then again most of the games did have a cartoony feel to them. And then there is the dreamcast with their 1GB discs. I have a feeling the 360 won't suffer from its storage decision.

 

[pipo]

Nobody seems to be mentioning the underdog of the last generation and mention how the cube manages to get it all in 1.8.

To be honest, one of the best games on the Cube came on two discs.

But nobody complained about it. Go figure.

 

[hey69]

imagine how prety it would be if it had even 4.7gb to its disposal..!

 

[pipo]

Imagine the ~15FPS.

Edit: RE4 is fantastic, but I think it was pushing the Cube hard!

 

[Arwin]

GT4 was 4,658 mb big NTSC version and 600mb bigger on the PAL version.

Only if you got it illegally ...

 

[one]

Regardless, this information is only useful if we know how much redundant data is on the disc.

With more memory to be filled quickly next-gen can't remove the necessity of redundant data... it will increase.

 

[scooby_dooby]

With more memory to be filled quickly next-gen can't remove the necessity of redundant data... it will increase.

Not on DVD's it won't, but that's some nice FUD.

I'm sure it will on BR since the read and seek speeds suck, and they have a ton of room to waste.

 

[Darkon]

Well this is interesting.......

A 12x CAV drive like the one in the 360 will be 12x speed for around 15% of the outer disc, that figure is peak performance. The closer to the inner ring it gets the slower accesses get (5x speed on the inner ring) - probable average: around 8x speed. Another interesting thing seems to escape everyone is that the 12x DVD drive in the 360 only reads dual layer discs at a maximum of 8x speed. As it was in single layer, the 8x speed is peak performance. The 2x speed BD drive performs quite well in this case: a BD25 on PS3 fares better than a DVD9 on the 360. The great majority of 360 games are and will be pressed on DVD9s. Another interesting point with existing CLV BD drives is that they do not have the dual layer penalization with DVD dics. If a BD drive is rated to read DVDs at 8x, it will read dual layer DVDs at 8x as well. This is why Sony is comfortable with its choice and knows it will hold its own against MS's choice in the DVD format.

.....can anyone confirm this

 

[one]

Not on DVD's it won't, but that's some nice FUD.

I'm sure it will on BR since the read and seek speeds suck, and they have a ton of room to waste.

Wow, is it FUD? I think the claim "compression can overcome everything" is more uncertain. Except for obvious reduction of disc space, redundancy introduces no performance penalty unlike compression.

At least you have to consider layer switching cost for DVD9. The easiest way to be without it is to have the same data on both layers.

The only way to reduce redundancy on optical disc is to have standard HDD on which you can put frequently referenced data.

 

[ArturNOW]

http://www.osta.org/technology/dvdqa/dvdqa4.htm

"Constant Angular Velocity (CAV)
The CAV mode spins the disc at a constant RPM throughout the entire writing process. Consequently, the data transfer rate continuously increases as the optical head writes from the inner to outer diameter of the disc. For example, a 5x CAV DVD-RAM recorder begins writing at 2x at the inner diameter of the disc accelerating to 5x by the outer diameter of the disc."

http://www.videohelp.com/dvd

12x CAV (avg. ~8x) read speed is max 15.85MB/s = ~7 minutes

I still haven't found anything about DL disc read speed. What exact DVD drives Xbox 360 uses?

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/profile/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=23916169&user=skektek

 

[ArturNOW]

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/toshiba5112-dvdr/

Here I've found a test of DVD recorder with 12x CAV read speed for 1-Layer DVD - it's shown on one picture. Beneath it is the test of reading 2-Layer DVD. As you can see max read speed is 8x CAV and average 6,2x and min about 3,5x. Assuming that all or most Xbox360 games are on DVD-9 discs we can treat its DVD drive as 8x CAV.

 

[Sis]

Wow, is it FUD? I think the claim "compression can overcome everything" is more uncertain. Except for obvious reduction of disc space, redundancy introduces no performance penalty unlike compression.

At least you have to consider layer switching cost for DVD9. The easiest way to be without it is to have the same data on both layers.

The only way to reduce redundancy on optical disc is to have standard HDD on which you can put frequently referenced data.

What's funny is that we have a real product today that we can verify whether or not load times are terrible given the lack of redundant data and/or this new dual layer issue.

Of all the games on the Xbox 360, I have not come across a single one where the load time was remarkably long. And since I can only assume that these games are utilizing the full system memory, I would mark any debate about load times on the 360 as indeed FUD, in the literal sense of the meaning.

Unless you have examples of real games on the 360 where this is a real issue, I would suggest that the debate is somewhat moot.

 

[Sis]

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/toshiba5112-dvdr/

Here I've found a test of DVD recorder with 12x CAV read speed for 1-Layer DVD - it's shown on one picture. Beneath it is the test of reading 2-Layer DVD. As you can see max read speed is 8x CAV and average 6,2x and min about 3,5x. Assuming that all or most Xbox360 games are on DVD-9 discs we can treat its DVD drive as 8x CAV.

It appears to be the layer change cost. note the comparison products quarter of a second layer change penalty.

Also, this would affect Blu-ray read speeds as well, if a game came on a BD-50 disc, though obviously the Xbox 360 will be more widely affected by this, since the majority--if not all--games will come on DVD9 discs.

I would think that you could structure the data such that you avoid layer changes. Anyone know if this is a common practice?

 

[Platon]

I would think that you could structure the data such that you avoid layer changes. Anyone know if this is a common practice?

I thought of that as well. I mean things that you intent to stream on the fly during game play you keep on one layer, while things you load during loading screens doesn't really matter if you have to switch layers, I mean would a couple of seconds really matter so much?...

 

[cthellis42]

Also, this would affect Blu-ray read speeds as well, if a game came on a BD-50 disc, though obviously the Xbox 360 will be more widely affected by this, since the majority--if not all--games will come on DVD9 discs.

Do you know why the earlier comment mentioned Blu-ray drives would not be affected by the layer-switching on DVD9?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Of all the games on the Xbox 360, I have not come across a single one where the load time was remarkably long. And since I can only assume that these games are utilizing the full system memory, I would mark any debate about load times on the 360 as indeed FUD, in the literal sense of the meaning.

The fact that game load times aren't currently remarkably long does not elliminate the possibility that they could be faster using redundancy on a HD optical media. First gen titles also aren't the most stressful on the system. In a couple of years' time when developers want to get more data off the disc to create their richer environments, the availabilty of data through redundancy will show whether or not it's beneficial.

 

[Sis]

Do you know why the earlier comment mentioned Blu-ray drives would not be affected by the layer-switching on DVD9?

I don't. I'm also guessing that the issue is the layer switching cost, which I don't know how the Blu-ray drive gets around it. So far all of those who keep talking about the issue have yet to link to data about the issue.

 

[Sis]

The fact that game load times aren't currently remarkably long does not elliminate the possibility that they could be faster using redundancy on a HD optical media. First gen titles also aren't the most stressful on the system. In a couple of years' time when developers want to get more data off the disc to create their richer environments, the availabilty of data through redundancy will show whether or not it's beneficial.

Well, I thought about that, but that assumes that we aren't seeing games use the entire system memory, correct? Regardless of whether games use better/more textures, we should be able to extrapolate something from today's games; primarily that they are able to load in reasonable amounts of time.

The question of whether the load times are reasonable or not is somewhat subjective, of course, but if someone has examples of horrible load times on the 360 I'd be interested to hear them.

 

[ban25]

In Champions of Norrath (PS2), game data was kept on one layer with speech on another. The result was a very noticable lag whenever a character began to speak, including things like your character saying "I'm out of mana" after you had already refilled it.

I would think that you could structure the data such that you avoid layer changes. Anyone know if this is a common practice?

 

[Arwin]

The question of whether the load times are reasonable or not is somewhat subjective, of course, but if someone has examples of horrible load times on the 360 I'd be interested to hear them.

I don't have a 360, but the developers of MotoGP, when asked about what they wanted to do better next time, said they were embarrassed with the load-times for their game, which was currently around 40 seconds.

Found the link here: http://gamasutra.com/features/20060808/motogp_06.shtml

The new generation of consoles have up to 8 times the memory of the previous generation and yet the DVD read speeds have increased by only about 3 times. Even assuming a perfect data read rate it would take about 32 seconds to fill 512Mb of memory. In practise you need to factor in seek times as the game loads different files, and so MotoGP’06 takes about 40 seconds to load a level. And 40 seconds is a long time.

There are many different ways of speeding up load time from having fully stream-able worlds to keeping as much as possible data resident in memory. The old MotoGPs employed none of these techniques. They’d never needed to. They could fill the Xbox1’s memory in 12 seconds and better than that they could dump all that data to its internal hard-drive so that next time round it loaded 10x faster.

On the 360 we were aware of our shortcomings but the engineering effort required to rectify them was so huge, and the launch window so close, that they never got addressed.

On our next game this will be a high priority.