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Geldorn on 20 July 2008
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mrstickball said:
Retrasado said:
mrstickball said:
60GB will cost under $100. Rumored at $99 with extra XBL stuff.

slime - No one has said that it'll hurt the PS3. Just that this makes the whole installation issue vastly in favor of the Xbox 360.

theprof - It's kind of hard for a console to be near the end of it's life if it's successor hasn't been announced, nor is planned to be announced for another 2+ years, no?

No, it doesn't. It makes it the same for both the PS3 and the 360. The ONLY advantage to doing this is that now you don't have to listen to the 360's disc drive screaming like a 747 powering up for takeoff. You still have to wait for the game to install. This is the same as the PS3 except that the whole game is installing. Other than the disc drive stopping, this will do nothing but bring the game's load times down to the level that you see on modern PS3 games. If you think installing a game to the HDD will eliminate load times entirely, you are wrong. (try playing a few PC games) This feature is not going to bring the 360 significantly ahead of the PS3 because most newer PS3 games already have very low load times and the disc drive was never an issue for PS3 owners. It will give the 360 a slight advantage because load times will be lower than the PS3, but not by an incredible amount. I'm not trying to troll, but I think a lot of people are getting waay too excited about this feature. It will be nice, but it's not going to shift the balance of power very much, if at all.

 

Ok. Lets compare installations on both systems:

Xbox 360 Playstation 3
Optional Installation Mandatory Installation
-30% Load Time on All Games Unknown Benefits of Installation
Fastest Installation on all Games Installation Speed Varies by Game
Reduced Noise No Benefit
Reduced Wear & Tear on DVD No Benefit
4+ GB Installation Variable Installation

Now, maybe it's me, but having the OPTION on ALL GAMES to have a superior playing experience will always trump possible, and/or unknown benefits that are forced upon me, if I was a PS3 gamer. The only disadvantage of the X360 install is that your doing a full install, therefore more memory is taken up. Outside of this, the X360's installation procedure will be universally better. Every multi-platform game that has required mandatory installations on the PS3 have seen only a slight increase in preformance: I can only wonder what the advantage would be if a user installed the same game onto their Xbox 360.

Sony should adopt this strategy too, I think. Although the installation times and memory it takes up would be substantially higher than the X360, and maybe have slower load times (due to the fact that the same game will most likely take up more memory, therefore requiring longer access times), it's still a better idea than forcing you to do something.

 

Yes, let's compare installs. And let's do it fairly this time, so please change the following:

 

Remove "Unknown Benefits of Installation" and add "Reduces load times on PS3 titles"*

Remove "No Benefit" and add "Reduced noise"**

Remove "No Benefit" and add "Reduced Wear & Tear on Blu-ray"***

 

*) Comparisoms between recent crossplatform games (DMC4, GTA-IV) always note that, after installation, the PS3 clearly loads faster or has less pop-in due to improved streaming. Besides, the whole point of the installs on the PS3 side is to improve data-transfer rates because Blu-ray x2 is slower than DVD x12.

**) Blu-ray drives do make noise (especially while seeking). Installing does lower that. I'll admit it makes much less noise than the Xbox drive though. But you can hear it and it does become less with installs ;)

***) This is just silly. Of course installing parts of the data on HDD reduces wear and tear on the Blu-Ray drive. Every MB not loaded of the Blu-ray drive does so.

 

Please note this doesn't change the fact that optional installs clearly beat mandatory ones. But that doesn't change that you've vastly overstated the Xbox 360 advantage in that table of yours.