Saw that Mark Deloura (former head of Sony Developer Relations and an industry friend of mine) had some things to say about my recent Blu-ray disc speed/capacity post. Not a surprise considering his background, but I have to say the most interesting aspect of the conversation is that we're basically in violent agreement on most aspects. Strange but true.
Some quotes and comments:
My good friend Ozymandias has been going off lately about the decision to put a Blu-Ray drive in the PlayStation3. Aside from the fact that he works for Microsoft, I really don't see how he could argue that the Blu-Ray drive is not exactly the right move for games on PS3, when it comes to capacity. Here are two reasons why.
Mark goes on to list a historical perspective discussing how games have grown over time, as well as a content perspective where he gives some hypothetical numbers to illustrate why he believes games will need significantly greater capacity in this generation than afforded by DVD-9. I won't quote his entire article here - it's worth reading for yourself - but I'll say that we're in a bit of an argument bind in that the numbers we have to play with are a bit apples to oranges. Here are just a couple of examples:
The texture resolutions have increased closer to 16x, which would push us to 32GB if all that data was texture. Yikes!
Resolutions have increased, but so has compression technology - especially over what was available five years ago for the PS2. Add to that the greater real-time decompression capability of today's more powerful hardware, and that it's really not possible to compare the two without a great deal more sophisticated side-by-side testing on common assets. And that'll be tough, unless Mark has an old PS3 devkit he might want to bring over for an afternoon? Wink
Audio on PS2 was mostly stereo, two channels. PS3 is 5.1. That's a 3x size increase without even considering fidelity.
True, but the Xbox had 5.1 audio and managed to fit just fine on standard DVDs. Sure, you might have multiple languages and other localized content stored on the disc, but you don't have to have it there for the game. Shipping distinct localized versions of the game works just fine (and has been common for years).
Default video format has moved from 480i, or roughly 640x480 at 30 frames per second (9.2 million pixels per second), to 720p. 720p is 1280x720 at 60 frames per second (55.3 million pixels per second). That's about a 6x size increase. 6 x 2GB would again push us over the DVD-9 size.
This one comes back to codecs and compression again. We don't know what these numbers are based on (MPEG2? VC-1? Super Special Sony Fractal Compression Technology? Wink), nor do we have common assets and tools (aka Sony/Microsoft Devkits and SDKs) to get real numbers off of common assets. But as with texture resolutions, significantly more powerful hardware enables the use of much more efficient compression mechanisms that just weren't possible on the PS2 or Xbox.
Mark had some other candid thoughts as well, particularly around Blu-ray vs. DVD throughput and market demand. This is where the "argument" gets a bit odd, because... well, we're basically in agreement.
The Other Sides of the Coin: Throughput and Market Demand
Admittedly, Blu-Ray looks dicey from several non-capacity angles. Blu-Ray movies require a 1.5x Blu-Ray drive, or 54Mbits/second. Sony announced that PS3 uses a 2x BD drive, which is 72Mbits/second or 9MB/second. The Xbox360 uses a 12x DVD, which should give it about 16MB/second. That is significantly faster for games and will result in shorter load times. And that 12x DVD drive should be a whole lot cheaper. (Note that the PS3 drive will do 8x DVD, and even that is faster than 2x BD.)
What can I say? This is pretty much what I've been saying regarding drive speeds. <shrug> A good example of where we're pretty clearly agreeing. He goes on to poke a hole in the "cheap Blu-ray player" theory (which basically states that Blu-ray will drive PS3 sales just as DVD support did for PS2 sales).
Of course the big play from Sony is that Blu-Ray will not only be popular for games, it will also be popular for movies. One of the reasons the PS2 initially sold so well in Japan is that it was very inexpensive for a DVD player. But unfortunately we're just a bit early on Blu-Ray awareness at this point for something similar to likely happen with PS3.
According to Wikipedia, DVD players launched in Japan in 1996. They came to the US in 1997, and by the spring of 1999, DVD players had reached down to the $300 price point. PS2 launched in the US in 2000.
Contrasting that with Blu-Ray, BD players launched in Japan in 2003. They really didn't hit the US significantly until this year, 2006. BD players currently are around $1000 in the US. And the PS3 is launching this year, 2006. From one perspective PS3 is launching just one year earlier than the time from DVD launch to PS2 launch in Japan. But Blu-Ray drives and discs have been very sparse so marketplace awareness is slight - it is more accurate to compare against the BD launches of 2006, which would make Blu-Ray for PS3 significantly earlier in the marketplace than was DVD for PS2.
The result is that the Blu-Ray drives for PS3 are expensive, and the demand for Blu-Ray movies in the marketplace has not flowered open yet. PS3 could stoke that fire, but it doesn't seem likely that Blu-Ray will significantly drive sales of the PS3 beyond a small hardcore market, in the short term.
It seems the decision to include Blu-Ray on PS3 must have been a difficult one. Long term it seems like a smart move, at least from the perspective of capacity. But short term that decision has definitely had some striking ramifications for PS3.
Again, we seem to generally agree from across the (former) divide. Blu-ray as a system driver would be a lot more effective if there wasn't this whole format war thing going on. Until that's satisfactorily resolved (or dual-format players come on the market), consumers are just going to hold off. From my perspective it doesn't really matter as I'll have both a PS3 and an Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive the day they come out. But people with families to support or less disposable income are going to be deciding their PS3 purchase decision based on the system's merits as a game player, not a movie player.
Mark's final quote?
Now don't get me started about the idea of shipping an HD-DVD drive for Xbox360!
A consumer choice, my friend... a consumer choice.