The biggest hurdle that the PS3 will have to overcome.

[Kwaad]

SpaceJase said:

KBG29 said:
All of these games had to go with a theme to thier look because they could not have a lot of differant textures, this is why MGS three is only in the jungle. Now with the Blu Ray and the ability to stream textures devs will be able to eat away at the disk like their is no tommorow filling it with a gigantic amonts of textures.

Gigantic amounts of textures also means gigantic amounts of development time. Every texture requires man hours to optimise, tile etc. Talking purely in terms of textures is wrong anyway. You need to think in terms of shaders - multiple layers of different filters - opacity, specular diffuse and so on. Shaders take a lot of time to get right. Having 7x more shaders means 7x more man hours.

I'm sure that the extra space available on blu ray will prove some worth before this generation is out - probably only to a handful of games though.

 I just wanna say you word that perfectly SpaceJase. You first build the texture. No matter what resolution it will run at, it needs optimized. So the actual total number of textures is what will cost the most. However what yo usay about the number of shaders is wrong. Bump-mapping, is a normal map, or multipul normal maps, computer generated from a complex 3D model. So actually most of the added shaders only add a little bit of render time. While the true texture count. (complexity of a game's detail, not resolution) is what will effect cost the most.