The Impact of Blu-Ray

It’s no secret that Blu-Ray is something that Sony has been trying to push as a key differentiator between the PS3 and the 360, but I’ll never truly believe the reason Sony has given for the decision to make it a standard item inside the PS3. With that said, there is a question that needs to be asked. Have we yet to see any signs of Blu-Ray having a significant impact? The answer thus far is no. There has yet to be a PS3 title that is showcasing anything that isn’t also possible with the 360’s standard DVD. Will PS3 titles have better graphics due to Blu-Ray? It’s highly doubtful that Blu-Ray will lead to better graphics because the PS3, due to split memory pools containing 256MB worth of GDDR3 memory and 256MB worth of XDR memory can at best dedicate 256MB worth of ram to textures at any given moment whereas the 360 uses unified memory for a total of 512MB. That alone is a major limiting factor to Blu-Ray’s space advantage.

There are however methods to gain use of more ram as from e-mail exchanges with developers I found out that it’s possible for the PS3’s GPU (RSX) to texture from the XDR, but there is a penalty for texturing from the XDR ram because in order to do so it would need to travel over the cell’s FlexiO , which some developers have actually done. There is also another way of going about doing this which is by copying from the XDR to the GDDR3 memory kind of like a fast cache and just proceed to stream in the content. Even with such methods available, the Xbox 360 just has more memory to work with, especially when you factor in the costs associated with running the operating systems for both consoles which I’ll get into later.

There are many titles that are currently claiming to already be filling up an entire Blu-Ray disc, but I’d be lying to myself if I said I actually see visual signs of it. There just isn’t anything yet that makes me say “This is a result of having Blu-Ray”. From talking to developers none seem to be concerned with the 360’s disc space and there are some that say they expect disc space to become an issue only if games use a lot of high definition movie content. With the graphical horsepower we have today the need for CG video is dropping significantly, but even so 360 titles like Blue Dragon appear to have a healthy dose of CG video and “The Darkness” reportedly has over 4 hours worth of high def movie footage in addition to the actual game, all on the same disc.

Maybe Blu Ray will lead to longer games? Blue Dragon for the 360 has over 40 hours worth of gameplay and Elder Scrolls Oblivion has over 120 hours worth of gameplay. Then compression needs to be taken into consideration which has come a very long way and it’d be wise not to underestimate the real-time decompression abilities of these new consoles. Blu-Ray doesn’t necessarily mean developers will have no need to compress their game data because compression can help improve load times. Now am I saying that Blu-Ray is worthless? Of course not!

Naturally PS3 titles due to Blu-Ray will be able to hold more content than 360 games, but is it the type of content that will make or break a gaming experience? How much more exactly before it reaches a state of diminishing returns? Will games be over 400 hours in length to make use of Blu-Ray’s disc space? One thing that escapes most people is that anything that makes it into a game level is taking up space in memory. Now if the PS3 had a gigabyte maybe even 2 gigs worth of ram, for example, then in that case Blu-Ray would end up being a major factor between the 2 machines, but as of now it seems more like a luxury or convenience rather than a necessity.

While still doubtful that Blu-Ray will be anything more than a luxury this generation I’m still on the lookout for any signs of if Blu-Ray’s disc space will be a major factor this generation. Now don’t mistake this for some-anti-Blu-Ray rant because it’s nothing of the sort. I’m simply saying Blu-Ray’s impact hasn’t been quite as significant yet. It’ll be even harder to see the impact in the near future as a number of pretty big titles such as Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto 4 and Resident Evil 5 will be making their way to both the 360 & PS3.

Now between Blu-Rays immense amount of storage space and it being a new High Definition Movie format which will enable all PS3s to play Blu-Ray movies there seems to not be a single drawback to the inclusion of Blu-Ray…or is there? Well there is one drawback. The 360’s DVD drive pulls information off of a 12X DVD disc twice as fast as the PS3’s 2X Blu-Ray does off of a Blu-Ray disc. The 360’s 12 DVD drive has a speed of 16.5 megabytes per second compared to the PS3’s 2X Blu-ray drive which has a speed of 8.7 megabytes per second. I found this information regarding the speed of the ps3's blu ray drive and 360's DVD drive while reading a developer's rants on what he thought about both these consoles and he said both consoles are extremely powerful, but are neglecting something rather important. He says processing speed continues to increase, GPU performance continues to increase and the amount of available memory is increasing and yet there have been no such similar improvements as to how fast they can read data from the disc. He suggests either giving the console 1GB of ram or come up with a solution in the future. I’m not immediately counting out Blu-Ray because it deserves a chance to prove itself so I’ll still actively be on the lookout for any decisive signs which may make its true impact a bit more clear.