PS3 slow load times?

koneko

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/04/ps3-to-load-games-slower-than-the-xbox-360/

"From the "PS3 can't get a publicity break" file comes news that the system's Blu-ray load times will be slower than the DVD speeds of the Xbox 360. "

Clicky above link to read more.



Though as someone mentions in the comments, Sony are telling devs they have to support the HD so with caching it may reduce load times if that happens, but it would still have a long initial load when you start up the game. Time will tell.

Smellyirishman

Interesting, and some lovely Sony Flaming Bait, but it will probably turn out to be a complete none issue in the end.

Oh, and just to get it over with, L0lz teh P$3 gonna take forevaz to lood the gamez, mayhaps killzone will be loaded bye th3 time PS4 cums round.

LookingFor

Blu ray's read speed is slower than a 12x DVD drive's peak read speed, but it has a constant read speed. It's not fair to compare its speed to a peak speed that you'll only get on the edges of a DVD disc and conclude that it is slower by that amount. Load times, particularly for streaming, are also heavily dependent on seek times on a disc even more than read-speed, and Blu ray could have much lower seek times than a DVD thanks to all the extra space - you can copy the same data over and over again across the disc to reduce the amount the read-head has to move to find it. Apparently also, DVD drives are usually slower with dual layer discs unlike Blu ray.

In the end, every optical disc format is slow. The standard hard disk is one tool to help with loading a streaming beyond the initial load, but it's up to developers to use it properly. If you look at games from the PS2 and Gamecube, some had slow load times, and some were amazingly fast - it's up to the developer.

Vegeta

The 360 has crap load times as it is. PGR and Oblivion jump to mind.

I was playing oblivion the other day again and just turned it off cos the loading times destroy it.

Hope its not true of the PS3.

Vegeta

LookingFor wrote:

Blu ray's read speed is slower than a 12x DVD drive's peak read speed, but it has a constant read speed. It's not fair to compare its speed to a peak speed that you'll only get on the edges of a DVD disc and conclude that it is slower by that amount. Load times are also dependent on seek times on a disc, and Blu ray could have much lower seek times than a DVD thanks to all the extra space - you can copy the same data over and over again across the disc to reduce the amount the read-head has to move to find it. Apparently also, DVD drives are usually slower with dual layer discs unlike Blu ray.

In the end, every optical disc format is slow. The standard hard disk is one tool to help with loading a streaming beyond the initial load, but it's up to developers to use it properly. If you look at games from the PS2 and Gamecube, some had slow load times, and some were amazingly fast - it's up to the developer.

After the initial load some games on the PS2 had no load times.

One of the Soul Reaver games had no load times i think

RE*AC*TOR

I don't think this will be a major problem.

However, assuming games on the PS3 will use more data, higher res textures, sounds etc. Not only will they read the data slower, but they have to read more data too. It could compund the issue a little.

shortys94

i dont know about all of you but i can wait an extra few seconds(?) for decent next gen gfx

steviec

Well with the amount of RAM and hard disk caching available, developers should be able to significantly cut load time, or do things like EA have done with their sports game, keeping the match engine stored in RAM constantly so you can play a quick practice play on a blank pitch while the game loads the stadium and stuff for the full match.

I'm 42 hours into Saint's Row and I'm not sure if it even has a loading screen. There is a screen where it tells you the name of each mission that flashes up for a couple of seconds but that's it. One end of the city to the other, inside and outside buildings, go into shops and buy new clothes etc. etc., never a stop for a second to load stuff. And this on the same console as Oblivion, with arguably more going on on screen, more variety of environments and much faster travel speeds through the environment. So it just shows the difference clever software can make.

Retr0gamer

I'd say that the longer load times won't be an issue. I'm sure the blu-ray disc can just stream data on the fly just like every console since the PS1.