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Developer duplicates data due to slow PS3 load times

by Steven Williamson on 22 January 2007, 12:26

Tags: PlayStation 3, Sony Computers Entertainment Europe (NYSE:SNE), PS3

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According to EGM magazine, Oblivion developer Bethesda Software aren't happy that they've had to duplicate data for the PS3 version of Oblivion to improve the loading times.

Todd Howard, the executive producer of Oblivion said that "Drive speed matters more to me [than capacity], and Blu-ray is slower."

The Xbox 360 uses a 12x DVD drive with transfer speeds at 16MB/second, whereas Sony are using a 2x speed BD drive, with speeds of 9 MB/second. Bethseda are trying to solve the problem by duplicating data in order to use up the extra space on the Blu-Ray disc.

A number of gamers have carried out their own tests on the loading times between the Xbox 360 and PS3 games and found that in the majority of games there is no noticeable difference. However, loading times in Fight Night Round 3 are significantly slower on the PS3 version.

Of course, loading times don't mean that the game is any worse, it just means that you'll have to wait that little bit longer to play!


HEXUS Forums :: 19 Comments

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Posted by 5lab - Mon 22 Jan 2007 12:33
doesnt really explain how that helps at all - perhaps if the game data is nearer the edge then the read speeds are quicker?
Posted by Steven W - Mon 22 Jan 2007 12:40
5lab
doesnt really explain how that helps at all - perhaps if the game data is nearer the edge then the read speeds are quicker?

Yeah, he doesn't go into details.

Possible explanation: Put important game data on multiple places on the game disc and that way you decrease the amount of space the laser needs to travel to load the data you use often?
Posted by kalniel - Mon 22 Jan 2007 15:38
But no-one's saying anything about seek time - the article just mentions how bandwidth is slower for blue-ray. Seek time would surely be negligable compared to loading things.

However I can see them having duplicate data within a loading chunk - for example: Say you normally have cells that are loaded one at a time for the areas. With a cache system you can load the surrounding areas as well, ready for when the player crosses them. This is all adjustable in the PC version.

Now say that you want to reduce data loading from the CD - instead of loading cells one by one you actually store information in ‘super cells’ which are say 4x4 cells. Now you load up more at a time, but have less loads - however you have a problem in crossing some boundaries that mean you're having to load up quite a lot of ‘super cells’. So what you can do is design supercells to have some overlap and cache the next one - this then requires these super cells to contain duplicate information, ie the same cell might be contained in more than one super cell. This would be data intensive, but might help with loading times.

Just a theory :)
Posted by DavidM - Mon 22 Jan 2007 15:45
Software devs used to use the same tricky on floppy drives to get around long seek times…
Posted by MadduckUK - Mon 22 Jan 2007 16:38
kalniel
Just a theory :)

why would you need to physically have more than one copy of the info on the Disc for that? surely the PS3 could take the nessasairy “cells” for the surrounding area anyway, all a super cell would do is force the PS3 to load bigger chunks of data at once? id do the opposite and have it constantly loading small pieces.

bit of a puzzle this one. cant be for seek time tho surely? thats really clutching at straws

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