Super-size Three: PS3 can read Pioneer's 16-layer, 400GB Blu-ray Discs

by Randy Nelson on Dec 3rd 2008 3:30PM

16 layers. 400 giga ... bites? Sounds like the fast food burrito equivalent of the Death Star. Ah, but it's not. It's a Blu-ray Disc, and those are gigabytes. So, this massive (current dual-layer BDs hold 50GB), entrancingly translucent disc? PS3 is compatible with it.

Thank goodness. This will hopefully put an end to the flood of multi-BD games on the system.

This disc, suitable for use by Tron, was first revealed this summer by its creator, Pioneer, and will be available en masse in 2010. Good news for those with large ... image collections: a writable version of this jumbo jet of Blu-ray Discs is also in development.

[Via PS3 Fanboy]

Source

Tags: blu-ray, blu-ray-disc, optical-discs, pioneer, PS3, storage

Reader Comments (126)

Damn that disc is sexy :P~

*dies*

I'll read her 16 layers.

I was gonna say, "I'd layer 16 times"

Metal Gear 5 confirmed.

It will come out in 2012 and Kojima will complain about size constraints, saying that his true vision couldn't be realized with less than a terabyte..

I wonder what a real GTA game would look like with all that space at its disposal. I can only dream.

Well, it's not the space on the disc, it's how well the hardware can show what's on the disc.

So you wouldn't have any more on screen at any one time, the city would just be 8x bigger

its also not the size of the boat...

a lot of space for problems and glitches too.

and who said any game developer wants to use this capacity.
heck only 1 game has truly used the 50gb blu ray disc capacity yet.

GREAT TECHNOLOGY THOUGH.
just dont see it being used anytime soon.
even after 2010.

developers have to cut costs and save money on development.

Maybe if they spend the money to make a good quality game then money will be no issue since people will buy it the bunches.

Actually, one could argue that the only two games that did fill it up used hours of lossless audio which is(audiophiles stay out of this one) a huge waste of space for relatively little benefit.

Imho, 50GB is all gaming should ever need but either way 400GB is a HUGE TECHNOLOGICAL ACHIEVEMENT!

Well if you think about it, PC games with uber high-res textures and massive maps (read GTA4 and Fallout 3) are still fitting comfortably onto a single dual-layer DVD.

So all you'd be doing by putting textures with multiple times the resolution into the game is making the game multiple times harder to run. Same goes for the PS3, although some guy down below posted that the PS3 in fact cannot play these discs.

If someone said it below it must be true.

It would still be hold down by not-so-good-GPU-in-PS3

"
GTA4:
1280x720 2xAA on X360 ~30fps
1152x640 NO AA on PS3 ~26 fps

1152x640 = 737,280 pixels vs. 921,600 in 1280x720

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=137829&page=4
"30.704fps average on a 360 runthrough, compared with 26.522fps and 26.274fps on two separate PS3 captures of the same mission."
"

And all told - even X360 version of GTA4 still leaves something about 1GB of FREE space on GTA4 DVD.

Read this:
http://www.digitalfoundry.org/blog/?p=58

Your copy of Wipeout HD is in true 1920x1080 practicaly only when you are not driving.
And has screentear in every frame... (hidden by overscan in HDTVs - but turn on 1:1 - pixel in pixel display LOL then you will see )

When something will show on screen it will scale down up to 1280x1080.
And the screen tear will move to the middle of screen :)

Wipeout scaled due to not enough power in PS3
http://www.digitalfoundry.org/blogfiles/wipeout1280-2.jpg

http://www.digitalfoundry.org/blogfiles/wipeout1280-1.jpg

forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1221442&postcount=1195
"WipEout 720p, screen tear every frame - thankfully in the overscan area for most folks."

"Two-player split-screen is confirmed 30fps, same level of screen tear as single-player at 720p60."
forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1221444&postcount=1196

forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1221597&postcount=1199
"No, as you can see from the shots it's different. However, it is generally in the same area and on most screens will be obscured by the overscan area.

1080p has far more pronounced and variable screen tear."

-----

So "boo-yah"! ;)

haha el serp nice way to throw that crap in there.
he was comparing 2 versions of the same game.

and you had to throw in a PSN title example.
pretty weak.
your losing ground and your comments are going down the drain...

el serp-
just because sony says 1080p and beyond HD and its in our HDNA,''
Doesnt mean they are the best choice for HD media.
blu ray reads slow.
ps3 RAM could be higher.
most ps3 games didnt even offer 1080p output in 2007 anyway.

Wow you fanboys love to make argument over anything that get post about the PS3. It's the most sad thing I have ever seen. This just show the capability and capacity of what the blu-ray standard is capable. no reason to argue like bitter enemies over pieces of plastique. act like adults.

leo must have missed my comment on the MGS4 forum today.

sorry not all my comments are anti-ps3.
just the ones i believe.

@ haggard
corrent me if i'm wrong, but if you have more disc space aren't you able to render higher resolution backrounds and such? i mean, that was one thing i noticed about GTA when i first got it. compared to other games like mgs4 or gt5p uncharted etc...i honestly thought the back rounds, scenery etc didn't look nearly as detailed. i forget what game it was, but i think i remember some publisher saying that the 360 version of the game wouldn't have scenery that was AS detailed as the ps3 version, simply because of the limits of dvd9. going on a limb here, but i think it mighta been fallout.

but anyways, though lots of you guys are dreaming of super hd GTA and other video games. I'm thinking about backing up the data on my comp. I have a boat load of...stuff...on my comp (not porn) that i need to burn to disc. My 750 gb drive is full and i really want to keep it. Being able to put all the sweet tv shows and...stuff, i have onto 1 grand "media disc" would be 10x better than having 133 DVD-DRs or 62 DVD-DLs. thats sucky if you ask me. plus i've love to get entire movie box sets on one disc. die hard, star wars, star trek, complete series of tv shows etc.

Basically, no. If you have a higher-res background then it takes up more resources to continually render as you move about. This can be partially alleviated by efficiently compressing it, but as a console is stuck with one GPU for life, you cannot simply throw a larger storage medium at it and expect it to be able to render more things.

@Haggard
basically you're saying this based off an assumption that the PS3 is not capable of using more processing power. If i'm correct, i think the most SPUs used by any game has been 3 or 4...so doesn't that leave a lot more idle processing power? So in that case, it would allow more rendering to be done for back round scenery correct? the only example that i may point out to is MGS4 where kojima said the 50 gb disc was barely big enough to fit all the content. i'm sure if the disc was bigger he could have done higher resolution cut scenes, and better looking textures throughout the game. but thats just me the novice making an educated guess.

Mmmmm full TV seasons on one disc here we come.

I love my box sets and all, but really I could care less. I would much rather have a lot of the stuff I own on ONE disc rather than 5.

Full seasons? How about full shows? You could probably fit every season of the Simpsons in standard def on one of those babies.

You could do better than that by a long shot. You can download all of Buffy (encoded in a modern codec) and it'll be less than 70GB in size. That's 6 and a half seasons of an hour long live-action show. 420 half-hour episodes of a cartoon (they compress better because the images are simpler and change less) would be able to fit onto a 400GB disc several times over.

343-
no i think the stores would rather keep the simpsons bundles at $ 10 - $ 30 per season.

how much do you think they could charge for 1 disc of all the simpsons shows??
not $ 100.

they want to make money, not make things that make them less money.

To all that commented, all good points. But by that logic, you could essentially do all that now. Well at least full seasons and shows. And while I think a lot of people were hoping for that with the announcement of blu-ray/hd-dvd, we are still only getting the same amount of content per disc, just at higher, well, definition.

This will keep both parties happy. Still maintaining that high definition standard, while being able to fit it all on to one disc.

Though the entire run off the simpsons on one disc sounds awesome! :p

Too bad games made on this would be extremely expensive...

I have an odd feeling that I'm going to have to buy Blade Runner again

Don't forget Firefly/Serenity.

Now in over 9000p!

You'd be surprised how close u are Haggard. Some company in Japan has already developed the next-gen resolution called SHV:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4320p

"Super Hi-Vision's main specifications:
Resolution: 7,680 × 4,320 pixels (16:9) (approximately 33 megapixels)
Bits depth: 10 bit per channel
Colorimetry: Rec. 709
Frame rate: 60 frame/s. (progressive)
Audio: 22.2 channels
9 — above ear level (top layer)
10 — ear level (middle layer)
3 — below ear level (bottom layer)
2 — low frequency effects
Bandwidth: 21 GHz frequency band
600 MHz, 500~6600 Mbit/s bandwidth

Sorry, I went through the first season. I love sci-fi. I love sci-fi movies, and I'm a sci-fi lit addict.

Firefly SUCKS. I specifically waded through the first season because of Joystiq commenters because I heard it was good.

I forget to mention that I blame the bear, for some, uhm, reason.

damn youuuuu!

*shakes paw at screen*

I'm suddenly reminded of Crystal Pepsi. Damn, I kill for one....

Clear disc = sexy.

All optical discs are transparent, but they require a reflective surface to bounce light back. Transparent blue is hot though.

mmmmm.... cancer?
terrible rumour.

that's alotta bytes

That's a lot of porn.

In b4 a load of fat ugly people demonstrate how lonely they are when it comes to women.

But 500gb. Great. Now bring us a 1 disc "best of PS2" collection.

I'd put my big disc in her tray yeaaaahhh.... oh what... who you calling fat1?1

it cant be a load of ugly fat people, seeing as one of them would be a load itself

What good is a "Best of PS2" collection on current PS3s?

do _you_ come with the car?

oh you! heeheeheehee!

Does this mean game prices will shoot up again?

Filling up this disc will take 4x as long as it regularly does for a PS3 game.. Not to mention the price of each game will be 4x as much.

To be honest, it will take at least 20 years for these discs to become common anyway.Just think about it.

I really can't think of a purpose for such an enormous disc, can you? Awesome, but a tad impractical...

So how would read times using this disc be? The same? slower?

The same, or lower. The per-layer density is the same as standard discs (this is limited by laser wavelength and drive mechanics, which won't change), just in more layers. Same, as reading one layer will be the same speed, slightly lower if content is positioned 'above' contiguous content, and assuming the layer switching time is negligible in the face of seek time.

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Super-size Three: PS3 can read Pioneer's 16-layer, 400GB Blu-ray Discs

Reader Comments (126)

Posted: Dec 4th 2008 1:20AM (Unverified) said

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