When will the 360 be maxed out?

[AnthonyW86]

TheNoobHolocaust said:

This is where the Blu-Ray disc really starts to shine, The 360 and PS3 may be on level playing field processor-wise. But because of Blu-Ray and its 25gb per layer disc, PS3 has more potential to make the games bigger, and better looking without compromising the game length/graphics.

I believe that we have been seeing this with recent games, 360 developers often lower the game resolution so they can fit the game onto a 4.5gb per layer disc.

For Example, Alan Wake had the potential to make the resolution 720p, but its assumed either they got lazy (unlikely for a game that has been in development for 4 years) or they couldn't find a way to fit the game onto a single 9gb dual layered disc without shortening the game (thankfully they didn't), so they reduced the game's resolution.

For another example, Final Fantasy XIII, which I think was handled better, Square Enix split the game onto 3 dual-layered discs, although the game's resolution was 576p (instead of the 720p on the PS3 version), the game wasn't drastically different form the PS3 version.

I think in the near future most 360 games will be made on more than one disc.

From my knowledge the resolution of a game has absolutely nothing to do with disc space, only the resolution(and overall quality) of pre-rendered video is limited by the space on a disc. The resolution in the current HD consoles is mostly memory limited. The advantage that the PS3 has of the X360 is that evey PS3 comes with a hard drive(opposed to 360's arcade version), so developers can use part of that space as additional memory(like the virtual memory used by PC's). Since the memory in the current HD systems is shared by the entire system, making room by moving certain system processes to the hard drive makes more memory available in the graphics department.

Besides this Blu-Ray does allow for more information streaming from the disc, but again this has nothing to do with image resolution.