Archive for May, 2007

I was reading Business 2.0 this month, when I noticed this quote:

gamers complained that the speed of the Blu-Ray drive was too slow when doing what drives in consoles are supposed to do: load games.

Now, this is nothing new. Many other magazines and journalists have said the same thing.

But has anyone actually tested this?

I suspect not. I’ve definitely never seen any of these business writers cite any tests or evidence to back this up. If anything, it’s probably based on abstract high level spec sheets that skip over important considerations such as CLV vs CAV (angular velocity measurements vs linear velocity measurements) and layer switch issues.

OK, guys. Let’s do some digging. This shouldn’t be too hard to do:

• Find a good optical drive benchmarking tool that will test this kind of thing. Needs to run under Linux so that it can be used on the PS3 and on a PC.
• Identify some good tests discs. Will want to test both single layer and dual layer DVD and blu-ray test discs. I wonder if there is a big performance drop when using dual layer discs rather than single layer? Is there a speed hit when doing seeks from one layer to another? The latter should show up on a random access test.
• Get a PS3 with Linux set up on it to do the Blu-Ray tests.
• Get a Linux PC to do the DVD tests. Linux is preferable since hopefully both PS3/Blu-Ray and PC/DVD test machines can use the exact same benchmarking application.
• Run the tests several times to get a good sample.
• Post Results

Does anyone else think that this would be an interesting test to run? Can anyone provide some technical tips to refine this strategy? Will anyone volunteer to help do any of this?

BTW, I know that the game, “Oblivion” has better load times on the PS3, but that is merely one anecdote. I’m hoping to gather more general benchmarks.

Business 2.0 Article
GameSpot Comparison of Blu-Ray/DVD speed by specs (no actual benchmarks)