My XBox 360 vs PS3 comparison (mostly technical)

[MikeB]

MikeB said:

The PS3 Blu-Ray reading speed for games is roughly comparable to the Xbox 360 drive, the main difference is that DVDs can be read far quicker at the outer edges of the disc than the inner layers (3.3x to 8x or 4.125 to 10.8 MB/s Dual Layer). A Blu-Ray drive offers sustained reading speeds (9 MB/s) throughout the disc, which can potentially aid developers with streaming, as this approach is more predictable. Due to a higher density on Blu-Ray discs seek times may be a little longer though, similar as was the case with moving from CD to DVD. Overall the differences result to that on average a single layer Xbox 360 DVD (12x max speed) can be read quicker than a Blu-Ray disc (but that’s small enough to be easily installed on the PS3 harddrive, which is much faster), but reading dual layer DVDs on average would be slower. Most later high quality PS2 games seem to be dual layer and considering the more data required to take advantage of the higher Xbox 360 specification I think we can assume all future Epic high profile games will come supplied on at least 1 dual layer DVD (some on multiple discs, like is already the case for Blue Dragon).

This brings me onto Blu-Ray’s main advantage regarding gaming. You can store a lot more data on a Blu-Ray disc than on a DVD, over 5 times as much. Taking into account complex future games sporting 1080p visuals as well as high quality 7.1 audio, it’s not hard to imagine the PS3 will require much more storage than was the case with regard to the PS2, note that many PS2 games like God of War 2 are taking up a whole DVD.

This is like an addition to the original post, explaining the benefit of the additional space available on Blu-Ray disc to greater depth, taken from one of my posts from another thread:

First of game designers have multiple reasons to keep the amount of discs to a minimum, one is additional cost but not only with regard to the media itself, game design gets more complicated when your game spans multiple discs.

People often cite Blue Dragon as the first XBox 360 game to span multiple discs (3 of them). But please note Blue Dragon is a very Linear RPG/adventure, basically the simplest kind of game to span on multiple discs as developers may decide not to re-use game assets from earlier parts of the game, like textures and sounds (enemies, surroundings such as vegetation, etc), for other types of games like platformers, racing games, 3D shooters, etc this is usually a far more desirable approach. But even in a very Linear game you may require a user to come back to previously visited locations to finish a task (like in for example God of War or many traditional adventure games). If this would mean yet another disc swap, I think many developers will just make gaming sacrifices to work around the need for this disc swapping or maybe multiply data on the other discs (and thus the space available on 6 dual layer DVDs no longer equals the amount of data which is possible to store on a single Blu-Ray disc).