Is The PS3 A Blu-Ray Trojan Horse?

I certainly wouldn't bet against that idea. After all, there's no other reason why the console is so expensive.

Well Sony clearly have an 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' attitude to this idea. It worked with PS2 so they do it again with PS3. So far its working in their favour because many people are suckers like that (each to their own mind), but the field of play in the industry has changed now.

Because of Wii and 360, Sony could still end up last in the console stakes, but first in the Blu Ray/HD-DVD war. The question begs which are they more concerned about, games or dvds? Is forsaking one business to help fund another really wise? Now we know what all the media hub spiel was about.

It's Sony, trying to convince the Trojans that their Greeks have gone home, when the sacking of Troy is on the horizon. I have to say I believe more in MS vision now, because MS wants games as 360s main focus with HD-DVD as an extra add on option. That's the way it should be. This is still a games industry after all.

I'm really getting tired of this "look how bad Sony is, infiltrating the industry with its evil blu rays". Take a rain check people, yes, Sony know that their "cheep blu ray players" will boost sales. But please, I think everyone is forgetting a major factor, 54gb of storage space is a very good benefit to have as a gamer. What? You don't want a blu ray drive in your PS3 I hear you cry? Don't be so naive.

As one of the heads of insomniac games quite clearly pointed out in a recent press release, 54gb of space is pretty necessary. How long did it take you to complete gears of war? 6 Hours? Maybe 8? What about The fact is that Gears of War filled up the entire DVD with information, it’s not that the developers didn't want to add more, they couldn't. The DVD player in the Xbox is no different from that in the PS2 and even those disks got filled up. To get good graphics and a good length game, on today’s generation of console's you need blu ray. I love gears of war and my Xbox for that matter. But I'm getting sick of Xbox whores and people saying that the only reason why the PS3 has blu ray is to get their foot in the HD media market, because it is also a huge benefit to gamers.

And before people say... “look at oblivion, that is huge!” This argument is about games with graphics as good as gears... i.e. use streaming textures and therefore get the best graphical results with the highest res textures, therefore taking the most disk space. Sorry to break it to you guys... but Halo 3, is going to be a pretty short ride because of DVD's limitations…

2x Blu-Ray in PS3
9 MB/s

12x DVD in 360
15.9 MB/s

You where saying something about streaming textures?
so... for 200 less i get a faster drive that is better for games. And worse case scenario I just have to swap discs at some point... "OH NOES!"

Never had to do that on PS2.... er... wait.

Please. This isn't a secret. Blu-ray is not better for games. It's got a lot of space, but its still probably cheaper to manufacture 4 DVD's than it is to make 1 BD. And of course sony is passing the savings on to you ;)

And for fun, 1x HD-DVD:
36Mb/s

Yup, Sony's looking out for ya.

Also, as regards to the "infiltrating" last I checked most people who rag on MS as a company do so because of their shady business practices, like, oh I dunno, making an operating system with a built in web browser so other web browser makers couldn't compete. Pesky Trojan horse stuff.

and for the sake of being "fair and balanced" I liek that sony allows you to put whatever size drive in the thing you want. I can get 120gig laptop drive for way less than 180 MS!
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Pay attention to your units! The HD-DVD speed you show is in Megabits per second, the others are in Megabytes per second. That 36Mb/s is actually 4.5MB/s.

And that speed issue is why the 360 won't have an HD-DVD drive as standard anytime soon, games written to stream textures at 15.9 MB/s will barf if the drive only provides them at 4.5MB/s or even 9MB/s if they get a 2X HD-DVD drive.

>Is The PS3 A Blu-Ray Trojan Horse?

Er.. Um.. Duh!!!!

I don't really care about swapping disks either, if anything in Shenmue and final fantasy it was an achievement for me. However there is one snag, Resistance fall of Man is 14gb big, now my friend, what do you think the developer would do... Make the game shorter to fit on DVD9 or reduce the amount of content if Sony went down the same route as Microsoft... lets be honest, no one is going to release an extra disk for 2 levels. And I have never know of a shooter that has used more than one disk. Either way, Sony has offered developers a bit of freedom, so we should be thankful for that.

As for the speed... Oblivion loads faster on the PS3, this is because the clever dudes at bio ware duplicated the data (because they can with the amount of space) and so therefore in turn making the files easier to find thus, load quicker than on the Xbox even though the PS3 has inferior read speeds. When it comes to the matter of streaming, I’m pretty sure that the read speed is efficient enough for that, remember, it streams, it doesn’t load the whole level...

That's all well and good Phil. Nice to hear your opinion anyway.

If PS3 had no Blu Ray no one would honestly care, so long as the games are good and regardless of how many dvds they come packaged on. I still play my PS2 and still see good games on it, regardless of one dvd or more. Nothing wrong with the current format, no matter how hard you try to sell it too me.

Indeed Nintendo and MS have done trojan tactics before which I haven't been happy about, and when they have (or anything else stupid) I've been one the first to make my point. Check your fanboy stungun because I sure ain't one . I'll give them all a kicking if they step out of line, and right now its Sony's turn.

Sony will tel you what they want to tell you. Maybe my loathing of them right now is fork tongued (blame Sony for that), but its not blind. I see greeks baring blu ray gifts. Agree or disagree, up to you.

I'd like to know if that's your personal opinion, or who you work for, Phil.

The HD battle does look like its going the way of Blu-Ray.

Which is interesting due to sonys track record with there own formats.

Hehe, yes its my opinion mate. I’ll take the fact that you think I work for someone as a complement as it means i’ve put up a good argument. I have a Wii, 360 and PS3 and to me what matters is that I can play the games I love. So I don't really care just as much as you think I do. Just this forum is about the PS3 being a Trojan horse and that blu ray is only there so Sony can win the format war. Which I think is some of their game plan; however I really think that the benefits to us as gamers outweigh this.
Calling the PS3 a Trojan horse is saying that Sony’s only intentions are to take over the blu-ray industry with its new console. Which I think simply isn't true. I spent 150 more on my ps3 than the 360, but the controllers are cheaper (they don't take batteries, i.e. come with charging facilities built in), i got more hard drive space, I didn’t have to buy a wifi adapter, got a blu ray player and got this horrible feeling that I will lose money because I want to replace my Xbox for the new Xbox Elite because they couldn’t get HDMI sorted in the first place so I’ll lose money on selling the 360 and have to spend more on getting the new one, I think I got a pretty good deal on the PS3. Then again, I lost rumble feature meaning ill have to buy new controller when they decide to get their act together, not so sure about how the graphics look compared to the 360 and I will get bored of it in a couple of weeks because there are no really good games out yet.

My point is there are good and bad things about the Playstation 3. But the amount of bad press that surrounds it is ridiculous; every forum has someone trying to bash the console into the ground by saying stuff like the only purpose of blu ray is to win the format war. It's cool to do it right now, maybe it won't be so cool when metal gear solid 4 comes out, who knows, but give it a chance to breath instead of trying to kill it at birth.

While I appreciated your urge to defend the console that so many others feel like bashing, your not very good at it. First you site that Resistance is well over the size of a DVD and therefore if it was on 360 it would have been a shorter game. Then when i point out the slow load times you say "well it loads faster if you fill the disc with repeated data". so what if i want to make a really long game that doesn't load slowly? Would i then have to duplicate data across a BD to speed up load times and then run out of room for my game and spread it across two BD's? (which would cost a fortune to manufacture by the way).

The facts are plane, BD's hold a ton of info, which is great for high def video, but they only read fast enough to easily play that video. It's a video disc by design and using it for game has somewhat crippled the PS3. It's not terrible for games, but its not as good as a high speed DVD drive.

Over the course of a lengthy game i will spend 50% more time watching a loading screen on a PS3 which will certainly amount to way more wasted time than swapping a DVD once every ten hours.


Your so cold! :(

J/k
I figured the HD-DVD spec seemed absurdly high but thats how it was listed on wikipedia (the source for all cromulent info) so how was I to know :-D
That's also why i tacked it on at the end as it seemed suspect.
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Perhaps some might see the anti -PS3 slating as bad, but I'm afraid Sony's antics over the last couple of months has earned our wrath. We don't do it just because we hate them for the sake of hating them.

Sony makes some great games which I've enjoyed, consoles which I own and they are improving a lot. Sometimes things they do just wind me up other.

What things? The Lik Sang Biz now stops me from enjoying PSP games not available in my region (since then they are now harder to obtain elsewhere, especially bad when PSP is losing out to DS) as well as the PS2 mod chip lark, which only serves that same purpose, so I can experience what others elsewhere have (really don't see why its the problem they claim it is, when only the minority ((or is that majority?)) of hardcore gamers do it). Praise the lord for Swap Magic on PS2.

I won't even touch the PS3 backwards compatibility issue, which makes me glad I'm actually keeping my PS2.

I admit, I will buy a PS3 eventually but Sony must earn my trust and money. When the show some respect and thought in what they do in certain situations, I'll indulge more.

On the HD-DVD page on Wikipedia this comparison lists the HD-DVD raw read speed as 36.55 Mbit/s, Blu-ray as 54.0 Mbit/s and DVD as 10.08 Mbit/s. They are presumably the 1X speeds, so the max data transfer speeds in 360 and PS3 are presumably;

360 (12XDVD) 120.96 MBits/s or 15.12 MBytes/s
PS3 (2XBlu-ray) 108 MBits/s or 13.5 MBytes/s

It would take a 3.3X HD-DVD to be able to deliver the transfer rates the 360 currently has. Until drives like that are available (4X?) the 360 won't have an internal HD-DVD drive.

Expect one next year in the Xbox 360 Frontier edition. :-)

The PS3 is a trojan horse for Blu-Ray? For f*ck's sake, I've been saying all this for months.

Make me President of the world - honestly, you'd love the world according to me, you really would.

Ok, let stop this right now. There are people arguing here about how much faster the xbox drive can load a game. But this hasn't been mentioned. The majority of load time is actually taken up by seeking for the required file, not the actual reading of it. By duplicating the data you decrease the seak time so much, that on some games the load time is even less than the xbox. And even if you duplicate you still have 28gb which is three times as much as the xbox's dvds. If you need proof have a look online at how bioware figured out how to make oblivion load faster on the PS3.

OK, lets look at this with numbers.

First of all, I was mislead by Wikipedia above, the Blu-ray 1X data transfer speed is 36 MBits/s. The 54 number appears to be for movies as players are required to spin at 1.5X for movie playback.

Anyway, the average seek time I've seen quoted for Sony-made Blu-ray drives is 210 ms, or the equivalent of reading 1.89 MBytes from the Blu-ray disc in a PS3 (36/8*2/1000*210). So if you are reading 1.89MBytes from disc, seek times are likely to be half of the total time to retrieve that data.

If you can double up the data stored on the disc and organise it to minimise seek times, you could theoretically half the average seek times to 105 ms, or the equivalent of reading 0.945 MBytes from disc, or 967 KBytes. Reading our 1.89 MBytes file now has only a third of the time spent seeking the data as opposed to reading it.

So what effect does this have on typical file sizes? Here is a chart I've just nocked up showing how fast you can read a set of file sizes with Blu-ray single data, Blu-ray doubled data and 12XDVD. I've assumed a 170ms seek time for DVD since that's what the page above says for the Sony Blu-Ray drive.

0.5MByte - 9.266s - 0.161s - 0.203s
1MByte - 0.321s - 0.216s - 0.236s
1.5MByte - 0.377s - 0.272s - 0.269s
2MByte - 0.432s - 0.327s - 0.302s

As you can see, once you get to 1.5MBytes, the DVD drive wins out due to its higher transfer rate, the amount of data is outweighing the time taken to seek. So to randomly find files under 1.5MBytes on the disc, the doubled up data idea works really well.

However, here's the bad news. Most of the time with loading levels for games, you seek once then read the whole thing in one go. Multiple megabytes in a go, filling the memory of the console. This applies to games with streaming data too, since you have to load the data required for the first section of the level before you can start to stream anything and this initial load is where players will notice the delay.

Once the initial data is loaded, you have more opportunity to load different models, textures and the like by streaming them in as the player navigates the level. This is where the double data method will really shine, but it can't be used for game like Shadowrun, for exmaple, where the player can teleport to other areas and will expect no lag.

Doubling up your data is a method that apparently works well with Oblivion, but may not work so well with other games. Other games may require a lot of optimisation of data for it to work. It's all swings and roundabouts, but for that initial load, higher rates of data transfer are much, much better.