Loading Screen!!!

[RyaNtheSlayA]

it's all in the disc drive... it don't matter the horse power, our CD-Roms and DVD-roms haven't gone up in power that much for a long time. And with modern games loading up so much data into memory it all just takes some time.

Then some stuff is also compressed to conserve even more space, this stuff has to be decompressed.

Then there is also the concern of actually building the scene which could take some time as well depending on the complexity.



Loading off a harddrive reduces this a lot because there isn't that influential bottle neck that is the disc drive getting in the way, but there is still noticeable load time. And hard drives aren't that fast either in comparison to the rest of the machine. Consider this, a hard drive can push anywheres from 44MBs/second to 120MBs/second on average depending where on the disc you are accessing(a 7200 RPM drive used for example), the processor of a Pentium machine with a front side bus of say 1066mhz can push over 4 gigabytes of binary machine code through it's bus per second. A big difference there!

It isn't like the early days when a cartridge was put in the machine which basically had a straight bus to the main board. The cartridge slot was usually clocked at a pretty comparable speed to the rest of the machine allowing for what could appear to be seamless loading. Some games though had longer load screens for decompression (think Donkey Kong Kountry). We probably won't be seeing high speed solid state memory as storage media for our video games for a LONG time, so get used to it now. Or ever that is, discs are just cheap, they cost less then a penny to produce and can withstand a lot of abuse. Yeah you can crack a disc, but dropping it, magnets, sands of time, weight, everything about them make them really useful. As long as you don't smash your disc it can last for 50+ years. A hard drive or cartridge barely makes it 20 (pull out old NES and Atari carts, they are dieing fast).

The stuff is just expensive... to get a DVD worth of memory in silicon, well... we'd probably be paying more for the games then we do for a PS3 itself.

Dont forget even and HDD game has load times, accessing the drive and loading sprites etc.

[executioner]

I've heard tons of scare stories on PSP loading times, and yet to experience anything too offending myself. My most played games, like Darkstalkers, Patapon and LocoRoco rarely require ten seconds of loading. I recall some games taking twenty seconds or so to load, but they weren't very common.

Using isos with cut down on loading times on the psp.