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Monday September 4, 2006 4:43 pm

Wait For It… PS3 Loads to be Slower Than Xbox 360, Says Math

Posted by Michael Cardiff Categories: Hardware, PlayStation 3, Rumors, Xbox 360

PS3 On Side It’s been a few hours since we’ve heard some new bad press rumblings about Sony’s seemingly ill-fated PS3, so let’s fill that void… This time, it’s not-so-unbiased blogger Ozymandias, a.k.a. gaming strategist for Microsoft Andre Vrignaud. He reports on some technical details of the PS3’s Blu-Ray drive, pointing out that its read speeds, even for standard DVD discs, will be slower than those on the already-released Xbox 360.

Says Ozy:

At GDC Europe last year Sony mentioned in their presentation that the PS3 Blu-ray drive would have sustained peak transfer rates of 36 MBit/s (4.5 MB/s) at 1x speed. Since then it appears that the drive has been upgraded to a 2x drive, which would enable transfer rates of 9 MB/s. Assuming a full 50 GB Blu-ray disc, at this speed you’d need just over 90 minutes to read the entire disc through memory. Of course, you can’t fit all of that data into system memory at the same time, so you’ll either be streaming a great deal (hard even with faster optical drives) and/or caching data to the hard drive. There’s a reason the PS3 is so expensive - once Sony committed to Blu-ray as a corporate strategy, they were also forced to bundle the hard drive in every box to help mitigate slow disc data transfer rates.

For comparison, the Xbox 360 uses a 12x DVD drive, which can load at about 16 MB/s, making Microsoft’s read speeds about 2x greater. In recent days, this has lead to an online blogging argument, between Ozy at MS and Mark Deloura at Sony, about the importance of this comparison. Still, they seem to agree on the fundamentals of the mathematics.

Says Deloura:

“Admittedly, Blu-Ray looks dicey from several non-capacity angles. Blu-Ray movies require a 1.5x Blu-Ray drive, or 54Mbits/second. Sony announced that PS3 uses a 2x BD drive, which is 72Mbits/second or 9MB/second. The Xbox360 uses a 12x DVD, which should give it about 16MB/second. That is significantly faster for games and will result in shorter load times. And that 12x DVD drive should be a whole lot cheaper. (Note that the PS3 drive will do 8x DVD, and even that is faster than 2x BD.)”

First the official Playstation magazine editor states she doesn’t want the PS3, now former Sony execs are agreeing that the PS3 is too slow?? What’s next—Kaz Hirai admitting that Dead Rising is his favorite game ever?!?



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Comments:

9/4/06 8:16 pm

SO what is bery little difference.
wich is gay to put this imformation on the internet.

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9/4/06 8:32 pm

i think that whole article is really stupid, as you are making a comparison between the next generation Blu-ray drive and the standard dvd drive. the Blu-ray is different from a dvd and as such it may take some time before they are able to pick up the speeds, it was the same when the normal DVD first came out.

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9/4/06 8:53 pm

What did we really expect from Sony?

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9/4/06 9:12 pm

notyourbusines & steinein17.

The difference is Blu-ray will need to get more data through a slower pipe.

Considering the capacity some developers will code at a high level using dev tools so the data will not be efficient. Because of the large capacity that is free to use moany games will be built off spagetti code and the resulting Bloatware will need to be trickled at a 9MB/s - which is terrible.

If DVD at 4.7GB native capacity has a throughput of 16MB/s then higher capacity Blu-ray with more than 5 times single layer native capacity requires a performance that is proportionate to this IE: 5 x greater than DVD to provide the same experience.

Hence the Blu-ray needs 80MB/s. Considering other storage technologies such as IBM, Seagate, & HP LTO Ultrium offered 16MB/s in its first generation in 1999 and today offers 160MB/s for 800-1,600GB Ultrium media, Sony has done a a very poor low-tech job.

When we look at the target specifications for Holographic layer storage mediums being devoloped by Lucent Labs, Philips, Maxell Corp etc… the performance levels are more than 20 times faster then BD in its first generation. No matter how you wish to compare, BD is UMD like in its abilities - IE: Terrible.

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9/4/06 10:12 pm

A little too biased and misguided to be considered news.

These “findings” leave out the fact that both versions of the PS3 come with hard drives as a standard feature.  As the game plays, the disk is constantly loading information on to the drive as a cache.  Because MS opted to make the hard drive optional, programmers are limited to reading from the disk entirely.

How fast the disk reads isn’t everything.  Processing and storage play into it in a large way.  Sony has the bases covered.  You can crumple up this story and place it next to the Inquirer’s “Slow and Broken” article.

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9/4/06 11:14 pm

There is some good information in the Ozymandias thread as well, especially <a href=“http://ozymandias.com/archive/2006/08/31/Mark-Deloura-Comments-on-Relevance-of-Blu-ray-_2800_Oddly_2C00_-We_2700_re-in-Violent-Agreement_2900_.aspx#24”>this comment</a>. It appears that when the Xbox 360 is reading the higher capacity DVD-9 discs, the read rate is actually slower than BD-Roms. The full specs for the Hitachi drive used in the Xbox 360 are <a href=“http://www.hitachi.us/supportingdocs/support/manuals/gd7500,0.pdf#search=“Hitachi%2012x%20dvd%20read%20speed”“>here</a>

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9/6/06 2:34 pm

*shudder*
ahhhhhhhhhh….........

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