Loading comparison

[freedquaker]

Ok, lets share some theoretical knowledge then...

X360 has a 12X DVD drive which is about 16 MB/sec. But there are objections about it that its the "peak" rather than constant and would be on par with Bluray's 2X 9 MB/sec in real performance. According to what I have found on the net so far, X360 gets an average 12 MB/sec, which is about 1/3 faster than Bluray, but thats far from the end of story. This 12X mode is not sustianed on Dual Layer DVDs and but reduced to 8X, which is on par or slightly slower than Bluray, which is not good for X360 considering most games will appear on dual DVDs (?).

After reading "Oblivion" reviews all around, I come to the conclusion that PS3 loading times are much better than X360 but the creator Bethesda told that PS3 loading times were actually worse than X360 and they had to duplicate the data several times to reduce the loading times (which is the result that we care about), meaning even if PS3 may have a slower drive, the disadvantage could be eliminated by this technique. The superior aspects of the game is probably due to greater optimization, rather than hardware superiority though.

We cant decide for sure whether or not Xbox360 has a faster drive, even so, there are a few more complications.

- Duplication of data on vast Bluray capacity might help PS3 reduce loading times.
- Hard disc allocation or some sort of caching/installing will certainly help loading times decrease.
- Again thanks to much larger Bluray capacity, games will tend to have much larger data required to stream or load, which means longer load times, to which even Hard disc might not be sufficiently good.

I want to give an example regarding the last point. I have played many PC to N64 ports (such as Quake, Quake2, Daikatana, Fifa Series etc) and all of those games had much faster loads on N64! PC Versions all had previously fully installed themselves and using utiling the hard disc, but still N64 was faster in all of them. How come?

Because N64 games were most small, usually ranging between 8-16 MB, whereas PC games were at least 100 MB. Daikatana, especially, had lenghty loadings on PC but was quickly loaded on N64. Why? Of course the data size, which was hundreds of MB on PC but only 16 MB on N64. The Graphics differed a lot for sure, but the optimizations were also a big part of it. On PS3, many developers will not try too hard to downsize their data (especially graphics and textures) which will inevitably lenghten the loading times. This was usually the case with the PS1 and PS2.

Remember Crash Bandicoot Series during Naughty Era, they virtually had no loading, maybe only a couple of seconds! What about PS2 Crash Bandicoot loadings? Terrible! You know what I mean? Its not totally the machine's fault, which can create miracles at right hands, but the important point is what we get eventually, right? (not what we may potentially get). And many developers tend to abuse this extra capacity rather than optimize it.

Note on "Resistance". Insomniac games are a Playstation expert team. Their games traditionally hardly ever had any loadings (Remember Spyro series on PS1). The same goes for Naughty Dog, both are 2nd party developers (or should I say 1st party?). If only all teams were all that talented, and kudos to Bethesda for this aspect!