1Up compares PS3 and Xbox 360 graphics

Per frame, certainly. But I would imagine, especially if you take MegaTexture and friends into account, that artists could come up with enough content that it’d have to be stored at lower quality to fit on a dual layer DVD. This is mostly a guess, of course; I don’t have enough information to run actual numbers on it.

Despite the fact Bluray can hold more isn’t there an issue with the BD player in the PS3 not being able to stream data off of it any faster than the Xbox 360 DVD drive? The point I am getting at is even if you can put double resolution textures on a BD doesn’t it take 2x as long to get them off of there? This is a real problem unless you preload everything and the PS3 has less memory than the 360. Am I missing something here?

From what I can tell, the drive in the PS3 actually delivers data faster than the drive in the 360, if the 360 game uses dual layer discs. I may have misunderstood that, though. Either way, these things have hard drives. You can at least cache some data to the HD before loading a level, and pull it from there instead of the disc. It wouldn’t be much of an issue if it came down to that.

The PS3 can load a lot of it onto the hard drive, though. You can even install entire games to the HDD. Then it can quicklyly move it into RAM. Right? I could just be talking outta my ass here.

No, you’re absolutely right. 360 games have to run without the hard drive. But they got oblivion to work OK, so it can’t be as much of a problem as we all thought.

they could squeeze in some 128x128 textures for the assholes who ruined everything by not owning a HD (I know it’s MS’s fault but if absolutely noone bought anything but the HD version we’d be sitting pretty, even if it is ridiculous to expect noone to buy a core. So… assholes.)

Yeah, the hard drive should have been required on the 360. It’s really dumb it wasn’t.

Also, with the HD videos, TV shows and movies available now, I find myself deleting a lot of content (game videos, and demos) in order to fit everything I need on the drive. Kinda sucks. 20 GB is just far too little. They really need a good 60-100 GB model.

I wish they’d just let us plug in external HDDs already.

Well, id Software is doing a Wolfenstein game (with Raven, I think) where supposedly there’s all kinds of unique texturing as well as no loading - the whole game is streamed as you play.

And it’s a 360 exclusive, so… ??

Aye, and Carmack is on record as saying he’s super impressed w/ the 360 hw and it’s dev tools, isnt he?

Am I the only one that thinks the framerate in the 360 version of Oblivion could’ve been a lot better? Especially when on horse back, it slows down quite a bit.

You really have a 360 without the hard drive? I thought you were a myth, like leprechauns and the tooth fairy.

Who are you talking to, stusser?

I dont know, but beachLOTSOFRANDOMNUMBERS is right, the framerate in oblivion was kinda lame on the 360. But it isnt exactly GoW so it doesnt hurt the game much.

I’d say it was on par with the lame framerate of the entire GTA series on ps2.

No, i have a hard drive. Doesnt really change anything, though…

Yes it does, oblivion is waaaay worse without one from all accounts.

So they’re going to limit themselves to content that fits on a DVD, runs acceptably and looks suitably impressive. Doesn’t mean they couldn’t have made something better with the same budget if they had had more storage space.

(Doesn’t mean they could’ve, either. I’m just sayin’.)

The big development cost is content, not technology. That’s why you see a lot more artists, designers, and scripters listed than programmers.

So, saying “they could have made enough content to require more than DVD storage for the same cost as would fit on DVD storage” seems to be oxymoronic.

It is a given that all things considered, more space available on the disc is always better, even if for no other reason than it means developers can spend more time on gameplay logic and less on clever compression techniques.

The real question is: are the other PS3 tradeoffs (shipping a year later, having only half the memory, etc) going to negate the benefits of a large disc format?

Everything is a trade-off when it comes to development, the PS3 is clearly better than the 360 in some ways and the 360 is clearly better in other ways. Honestly, over the life of the consoles I happen to think the 360’s superior memory size is going to give it a slight edge over the PS3 in terms of delivering great graphics, but as has been repeated over and over, the systems will end up being virtually the same with exclusive software and services (like Live) being the only differentiators.

Are you saying the guys coding gameplay are usually the same guys coming up with the compression tech for textures and sound and fmv?

Do they re-invent the wheel to drive to work, too?