Even if the disc is full, the vast majority of the data on a DVD is not at the outer edge. Only the data at the outer dge will be read at maximum speed, so to compare the maximum speed of a DVD drive to the constant speed of a blu-ray drive is flawed. Most of the data is going to be read at speeds slower than that, and thats what programmers design for.
A 12x DVD drive would not even be close to a 4x blu-ray drive through most of the disc, and it would only be close, but still slower at the very outer edge of the disc, compared to a Blu-ray drive that would read at 18MBps everywhere.
To say a 2x Blu-ray drive compares to a 12x DVD drive speed-wise is a pretty accurate statement in my opinion, it's not a big difference. The key element here is that for stuff like game data, if designers do suddenly fill up the disc w/ 20gb's of textures, it would take an incredibly long time to load them, so it is unlikely many games will really take advantag of the space, other than FMV playback.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Richard Lawler @ Feb 11th 2006 10:27PM
Even if the disc is full, the vast majority of the data on a DVD is not at the outer edge. Only the data at the outer dge will be read at maximum speed, so to compare the maximum speed of a DVD drive to the constant speed of a blu-ray drive is flawed. Most of the data is going to be read at speeds slower than that, and thats what programmers design for.
A 12x DVD drive would not even be close to a 4x blu-ray drive through most of the disc, and it would only be close, but still slower at the very outer edge of the disc, compared to a Blu-ray drive that would read at 18MBps everywhere.
To say a 2x Blu-ray drive compares to a 12x DVD drive speed-wise is a pretty accurate statement in my opinion, it's not a big difference. The key element here is that for stuff like game data, if designers do suddenly fill up the disc w/ 20gb's of textures, it would take an incredibly long time to load them, so it is unlikely many games will really take advantag of the space, other than FMV playback.