Technical Director for Ubi on PS3 and Blu-Ray

[Angelcurio]

I am still confused about this debate. At the end of the day, which aproach is the correct one for streaming purposes? Blu-ray with a slightly slower transfer rate but with better seek times, or the dvd 12x drive with faster trasnfer rate and worse seek times?

Or can we assume that in the end of the day the performance of both aproachs will be comparable?

 

[rounin]

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.

PGR3 loads are quite long. And MotoGP which someone has mentioned.

Are we also sure that the games for x360 nowadays all lack redundant data.

 

[expletive]

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

Which is to say its an engineering problem and not something inherent to the hardare platform/media?

 

[Sis]

PGR3 loads are quite long. And MotoGP which someone has mentioned.

Are we also sure that the games for x360 nowadays all lack redundant data.

And the PS2, which had smaller RAM and larger discs on which to store redundant data didn't have any games with poor load times? A developer admitting it was solvable, just not in the time frame they had implies it's a matter of development.

Anyway, the point is we have countless examples where load times are not a problem and in fact quite good on the 360, so all this debate about the 360 having poor load times (now or in the future) seems like an empty debate.

 

[rounin]

And the PS2, which had smaller RAM and larger discs on which to store redundant data didn't have any games with poor load times? A developer admitting it was solvable, just not in the time frame they had implies it's a matter of development.

Anyway, the point is we have countless examples where load times are not a problem and in fact quite good on the 360, so all this debate about the 360 having poor load times (now or in the future) seems like an empty debate.

That wasn't the stance you took in the post I quoted from you originally . Nobody mentioned loading on Oblivion yet either ...

Your current debate seems empty indeed (and really, are there so many titles on 360 that they are countless ...lets not get confused with the PS2 you were talking about earlier ) but we should consider on the PS2 there are titles like R&C and Jak and Daxter and SOTC which, after the initial load (and almost none on J&D or Jak) have no / extremely short load times.

I don't think its farfetched to say that given the arguments presented in this thread, whether by DeLoura or by the members who have posted, that there is reason to debate the issue of load times on x360.

 

[A176]

The thing with MotoGP is that most of the loading time occurs when the game starts up. It does bug me to a point, but once you get past that and you're jumping into those huge multiplayer races one after another...one really can't care anymore!

PGR3 on the other hand does load before each race, and its considerably long (if not longer than MotoGP's loading).

Again, luckily for both titles, the gameplay makes you forget most of it.

 

[Rangers]

Already covered.
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[Rangers]

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.

Not really because, I've been one saying PS3 load times are likely to be longer.

That appears with new info to not be the case.

It's never been "360 will/wont have horrible loads" it's been "360 will/wont load faster than PS3 and vice versa". That's been the question.
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[one]

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.

How did you verify those 360 games you played didn't have redundancy on DVD? And please, before resorting to the convenient keyword 'FUD', use your logic when you attempt to make a counterargument against my logical deduction.

Well, I thought about that, but that assumes that we aren't seeing games use the entire system memory, correct?

Data granularity should be bigger in next-gen since you can't load half a texture and use it.

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.

I assumed the case of 25GB single-layer BD. Besides, for BD50, each layer is big enough to hold redundancy. The layer switching latency for DVD in Xbox 360 is 75ms while the seek time is 115ms.
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23361

 

[one]

I am still confused about this debate. At the end of the day, which aproach is the correct one for streaming purposes? Blu-ray with a slightly slower transfer rate but with better seek times, or the dvd 12x drive with faster trasnfer rate and worse seek times?

Or can we assume that in the end of the day the performance of both aproachs will be comparable?

If the south bridge of PS3 is intelligent enough with a reasonable size of buffer, it may be able to read both BD and HDD at the same time.

 

[pipo]

First gen titles also aren't the most stressful on the system.

Re: MotoGP / PGR3

On the other hand, early dev kits are not optimized either. I recall a discussion about the drive emulation and compression being far from perfect.

 

[Sis]

That wasn't the stance you took in the post I quoted from you originally . Nobody mentioned loading on Oblivion yet either ...

My statement was simple: of all the games on the 360 that I've played, load times weren't bad. Since I've played greater than 10 games on the 360 with load times that are good, I can surmise that chances are load times are not an issue. We need some kind of baseline, though, otherwise we're just dealing with subjective "what's good enough". However, I'm certainly not seeing load times averaging 3 times as long as games from the previous generation.

EDIT: I see the quote: I asked for specific games where it's a problem; I think i was speaking too literally. I would rather I said, "on average" or something a little less black and white. Mea culpa...

How did you verify those 360 games you played didn't have redundancy on DVD? And please, before resorting to the convenient keyword 'FUD', use your logic when you attempt to make a counterargument against my logical deduction.

The FUD part is in your very first sentence: do you know if the 360 is using data redundancy and if so, to what degree? (Perhaps UD would have been a better acronym since your argument is based on uncertainty and doubt.) Do you know if perhaps compression is helping considerably with load times? What do you know about it, other than there's a new meme going around about the Xbox 360's slow DVD drive due to dual layers?

Regardless, if you position your argument based on an uncertainty, then I'm allowed the same: I shall assume that current games, regardless of redundancy or other developer tricks, load just fine and will continue to do so for the lifetime of the console, layer switching costs be damned. At least in my case, I've got real world examples of it being so.

Eh, this is such a silly argument, so I'm going to bow out. You guys feel free to continue arguing about just how slow the Xbox 360 will be able to load games while I continue to use it to prove otherwise...

(And just so we're clear, one, I meant no offense at the FUD comment; I was only trying to characterize your argument as being based on uncertainty, at least from my perspective...)

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Eh, this is such a silly argument, so I'm going to bow out. You guys feel free to continue arguing about just how slow the Xbox 360 will be able to load games while I continue to use it to prove otherwise...

Again you seem to have missed the point . It's not that 'XB360 is slow', but 'PS3 because of BRD is faster'. If PS3 can stream faster than XB360, that'll enable more Dairylea streamy-goodness like richer environments.

 

[Sis]

Again you seem to have missed the point . It's not that 'XB360 is slow', but 'PS3 because of BRD is faster'. If PS3 can stream faster than XB360, that'll enable more Dairylea streamy-goodness like richer environments.

If the debate is about which is faster, I would have stepped out long ago, or rather, not stepped in at all . I was only debating the point that Xbox 360 will have slow load times due to the dual layer speed penalty or having 8 times the memory but only roughly 2-3 times the drive speed of the original Xbox.

I do have a technical question, for anyone in the know or any devs still reading this thread: how does one go about using redundancy to speed up load times? I assume it has to do with limiting seeks (and on dual layer formats, limiting layer changes). But what's the process? And how much data is redundant? .5? 2x? If it's been discussed before, then I can do a search...

 

[scooby_dooby]

How did you verify those 360 games you played didn't have redundancy on DVD? And please, before resorting to the convenient keyword 'FUD', use your logic when you attempt to make a counterargument against my logical deduction.

Here's some logic for you, developers who are limited with disc space will sacrifice redundant data, for longer load times if they have to, in order to fit everything on one disc. No brainer.

Saying redundant data will definately increase is total FUD. It's a completely unverifiable statement that makes it seem as though there's no way DVD will suffice. You have absolutely zero evidence to support this i.e. That developers will prioritize load times over fitting unique content on the disc. If you said redundant data will increase OR load times will get longer, that would make much more sense. But as Sis points out, load times so far are generally very good.

Developers using DVD are already quite limited on space, and if they have to have longer load time then they will probably just deal with it. In general, PS2 had signifigantly longer load times than XBOX, did anyone really care?

 

[Black Dragon37]

Fud

 

[scooby_dooby]

Fud

Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. Usually PR talking points that are full of crap, meant to 'make the case' for a given product.

 

[Black Dragon37]

Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. Usually PR talking points that are full of crap, meant to 'make the case' for a given product.

Thanks.