| Fumanchu said: I don't understand how any legacy method of putting data on a disc could possibly affect the performance of a drive that reads the data at a constant speed - who cares where the data is positioned...what am I missing? |
I'm just going to analyse the data we have here, and I'm going to try putting my thoughts across as clearly as possible.
Regarding raw data loading speeds (throughput), the PS3 has two advantages over the 360: predictability and faster loading at some places in the disc. The 360 has one advantage which is that it can load data faster than Blu-Ray's speed limit, on a certain section of the disc.
This means that if there's some very critical data which has to be loaded quickly lots of times, 360 developers can put it on that section of the disc which makes for an advantage over the PS3. If this data starts getting too big, this advantage is lost. PS3 developers on the other hand may need to to put this crucial data in the hard drive if Blu-Ray's speed is too slow.
If there's no such crucial piece of data and Blu-Ray's speeds are enough, the advantage is on the PS3's side since data is loaded at the same speed throughout the drive, no slower sections unlike the 360's case.
From an optimization point of view, the PS3 is easier to optimize in terms of raw data loading. There's nothing to optimize as the drive has a constant speed limit across the disc... The only difficulty is that games have to be engineered to not require speeds higher than that, unless the HDD is used.
Regarding seek times, I haven't seen good enough information to go on, so I won't comment on that.
My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957
