Quote:
Originally Posted by PunkMunkey
If you've got a 1X speed Disc Drive with a transfer rate of say 10MBps is the data throughput not equal to a 2X speed drive with a transfer rate of 5MBps? And isn't data throughput the most important factor in load times?
Am I totally off base here?
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Pretty much, because that figure would only be useful if you were copying a file stored perfectly in order across the disc. Games need to zoom all around the disc to load textures, sounds, maps, models, etc, that cannot be stored in sequential order for obvious reasons. Devs can somewhat offset the super slow seek times of BD by essentially storing multiple copies of the same data across the BD disc (Bethesda did this for Oblivion), but even doing this (which negates the extra space of BD, btw) it was still not fast enough to avoid a 5GB permanent hard drive install. So it must be pretty darn slow.
If you were comparing only read speeds, though, a 2x BDROM drive like the one in the PS3 is 72mbps constant - whlle a 12x DVDROM like the one in 360 is 66-130mbps depending on location of disc. On average a 2x BD drive is about equal to a 5.5x DVDROM drive.