Penny-Arcade- interesting note about MGS4 install times

[omgwtfbbq]

Saiyar said:

Kasz216 said:

starcraft said:

Saiyar said:

Kasz216 said:

Saiyar said:

 

I am a bit confused as to why you think this is relavent? The size of the game data isn't going to change just because it is on DVD instead of blu-ray

It will if it's on 2 or 3 DVDs. The data would be split up so their would be less space to cover.

Now i am really confused. Just because it is split up doesn't mean there is less space to cover (it is not like the 360 can read form 3 DVDs at once). 25GB on a BD is the same as 25GB on 3 DVDs.

The only thing I can think of he might mean is that fact that most Blu-Ray disk games reproduce identical data due to the Blu-Ray disk drive's lower maximum read speed. Thats why you can have multiplatform games that come on a DVD9 for 360 but take up 15GB of a Blu-Ray disk for PS3.

But he is a bit confusing today, so he may mean something else.

 

Yeah it does.

When Blu Ray is trying to find something on it's 25GB disc it takes longer then DVD despite being slightly faster because it has 25GB to work through instead of 9.

The bigger the size of the disc, the slower the readtime is going to be, hence why the PS3 does reproduce a lot of identical data.

Since Metal Gear Solid takes place in many different locations that are very varied it would actually be quicker to have differnt locations on different discs since their shouldn't be too much reuse of graphical assets.

 

You are talking about seek times, not read times. Across a whole disc Blu-ray is slower but Blu-ray has a slightly faster seek time than DVD over a similar sized data sector so unless the placement of game data is very random this shouldn't be an issue.

I think you must be confusing seek times and reading speed.

The Blu-Ray specification states 1x speed is equal to 36Mbps, which makes 2x Blu-ray 72Mbps. http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#bluray_speed
The dvd specification states 1x speed  approx 10.5Mbps, or126 Mbps for a 12x DVD drive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd

the 12x DVD drive has a noticably higher read speed than the 2x Blu Ray. Which means when loading (as loading is generally done from a contiguous or multiple contiguous chunks of data), the reading speed is the limiting factor, and loading times for the same amount of data will be faster on the Xbox360. 

As for seek times, I can't comment as I don't know the data (seek times are dependant on the drive itself, not part of the specification), but a low seek time would help when the data placement is random, not when the data placement is contiguous (as it usually is for loading large chunks of data). So I'm sorry to disappoint you, but you've completely misunderstood the point here, and have been spouting nonsense for the entire thread.

edit: I will mention, just to play devil's advocate, that a DVD actually reads faster the further out on the disc the data is, whereas the blu-ray speed is constant. The minimum speed of a 12x dvd is slightly lower than that of a 2x Blu-ray. clever developers will, of course, place large data near the outside of the disk to improve load times)