Corey said:
No, I was more thinking along the lines of game performance and capabilites, for example many much larger games espiacilly on the PS3 rely on rather large installs to reduce load times and make the games run smoothly, the wiiu disc drive speed eliminates such a need for installs at this point in time and with the current generation games but in the future when the more powerful machines are released and when developers are utilising the wiiu hardware the inability to do these mandatory installs could hurt the possibility of potential ports from the NextBox/PS4 and other 3rd party titles from reaching the wiiu altogether or at least prevent them from running at optimal performance. With a large portion of their userbase using 8GB hard drives there is no way devs could release a game with a mandatory 5gb install.
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You really think you will still have mandatory installs next generation? I don't think any of the next gen systems will have that bottleneck. But obviously it depends how future games are developed, if they require much more information to be transfered than the drive can handle... then upgrading your capacity is as easy as sticking a USB drive or inserting an SD card. User expandable storage is nothing new, people haven't had problems upgrading them on mobile, tablets and even Sony's Vita.
PS: I was googling the WiiU's drive speed and found similar thread, where a post mentions the drive's speed
The disc drive's read speed is 22.5MB per second. This is 5X Blu-ray, and 2.5 times the speed of the PS3's drive. Since it's exactly 5X Blu-ray I think it's safe to say that it's a theoretical maximum speed rather than a real-world average speed, but Blu-ray is really good at getting close to its theoretical maximum speeds.
As a result of that speed, there are going to be slow load times for developers who push the system. The fact that it's 2.5 times faster than the PS3 is almost entirely mitigated by the fact that the Wii U has twice the memory of the PS3 (actually more than twice, if it has any dedicated graphics memory at all). Doubling the speed of a drive doesn't have any effect on loading if you also double the amount of data that needs to be loaded - and the Wii U doesn't do much more than double the speed of the PS3's drive.
Minor perspective: to completely fill the Wii U's 1GB of RAM using its optical drive, at maximum speed, would take 48 seconds. (Games will generally keep some key data in RAM at all times, and only replace the things that change, so games won't take this long to actually load - but even half that time is not wonderful). This is faster than the equivalent figures for the PS3, but slower than the equivalent figures for the Xbox 360 (and in fact for every other console that ever used optical discs). |
