Blue Ray Capacity Options

[Xplic1T]

It dawned on me, Blue Ray is equal to 50 gigs of data on one disk. I doubt games will even use 1/5 of that space especially for the first couple of titles to hit the ps3 but what about future games.

I can see BR disks for movies but not so much for games unless a brand new set of 1080p will unveil itself to be even more. Graphics being demanding yes but all and all i doubt games would take up that much space without over half being dummy space.

[calderra]

It dawned on me, Blue Ray is equal to 50 gigs of data on one disk. I doubt games will even use 1/5 of that space especially for the first couple of titles to hit the ps3 but what about future games.

First-gen BluRay will only go up to 25GB. But yes, that's a LOT of space, too much for any application except lots of HD-quality movies. IE: The long, non-interactive cutscenes of games like FF.

BluRay drives at first will also be really slow. Despite having over 5x as much space as a DVD drive, the PS3's reading speed will only be BluRay2x, which is about as fast as a 6-7x DVD drive. That means that if developers just ported a game straight from 360 to PS3 with super-high-res textures and super-quality audio and such to fill the disc (AKA: no compression), they'd have to deal with at least 5-10x as much loading time in every game. (2x the storage, nearly half the reading speed)

So not only is that more space than developers really need ("Oblivion fits on one DVD"), but it's more space than they probably ever want to use because choosing to use it to upgrade graphics will destroy load times.

Also consider, a 50GB BluRay drive could hold (in Xbox terms):
-Morrowind GOTY with all expansions
-Oblivion (+downloads)
-Knights of the Old Republic (+downlods)
-Halo
-Halo 2 (+new maps)
....and have quite a bit of space left over.

Do we really need THAT much storage right now? Especially with such terrible read speeds?

[KAGE360]

First-gen BluRay will only go up to 25GB. But yes, that's a LOT of space, too much for any application except lots of HD-quality movies. IE: The long, non-interactive cutscenes of games like FF.

BluRay drives at first will also be really slow. Despite having over 5x as much space as a DVD drive, the PS3's reading speed will only be BluRay2x, which is about as fast as a 6-7x DVD drive. That means that if developers just ported a game straight from 360 to PS3 with super-high-res textures and super-quality audio and such to fill the disc (AKA: no compression), they'd have to deal with at least 5-10x as much loading time in every game. (2x the storage, nearly half the reading speed)

So not only is that more space than developers really need ("Oblivion fits on one DVD"), but it's more space than they probably ever want to use because choosing to use it to upgrade graphics will destroy load times.

Also consider, a 50GB BluRay drive could hold (in Xbox terms):
-Morrowind GOTY with all expansions
-Oblivion (+downloads)
-Knights of the Old Republic (+downlods)
-Halo
-Halo 2 (+new maps)
....and have quite a bit of space left over.

Do we really need THAT much storage right now? Especially with such terrible read speeds?

unless the developer was to enhance the texture resolution from 720p on the 360 to 1080p on the ps3 (which wont be happening) there really isnt anything more that they could do to "upgrade" the graphics. compression techniques are improving and evolving every day, just like any other part of technology. in fact most compression techniques actually benefit a game rather then hinder it.

to push bue ray players in homes, THAT is the main reason there is a blue ray player in the ps3. if you believe otherwise your only fooling yourself.

[incognegro]

correct me if im wrong but using comression techniques grafix takes alot of cpu resources to decompress on the fly to display on the screen. If so then wouldn't that put too much pressure on the cpu? If so the ps3 would have and advantage if nothing is compressed. Sure the laod times are gonna be longer on the ps3 though, thats for sure.

[KAGE360]

correct me if im wrong but using comression techniques grafix takes alot of cpu resources to decompress on the fly to display on the screen. If so then wouldn't that put too much pressure on the cpu? If so the ps3 would have and advantage if nothing is compressed. Sure the laod times are gonna be longer on the ps3 though, thats for sure.

of course it all depends on what type of compression you are doing, but like i stated before there are some compression techniques that will actually increase game performance. while there CPU resources being used to decompress on the fly, it is not as big of a strain as you might think. also with a lot of the game being precederally created it helps on the compression. I honestly thought that a lot of the decompression was done during the load times and that you really only need to decompress on the fly when you are streaming off of the disk.

either way, compressed or not, the 360 was a well thought-out machine to ensure that each part of the machine worked with each other at a high efficiency rate and decompression bottlenecking the system shouldnt be an issue.

This post has been edited by KAGE360: May 30 2006, 07:50 PM