Tech Focus: Data Streaming and the Future of the Optical Drive

Over and above that, Microsoft has also expanded the Xbox 360 platform by allowing for USB flash drives to be utilised as hard drive replacements.

As you can see from the table below, culled from Digital Foundry's extensive flash drive benchmarking on the Microsoft console, the raw throughput of a relatively inexpensive USB stick can match the 360's hard drive. Indeed, as there are no mechanical moving parts, seek times between files could actually be faster than a hard drive.

Only when we went a bit mad and used a cheap no-brand MicroSD card in a USB adaptor did we see a radically reduced level of performance, but in most of our benchmarks, the cheap 16GB flash drive we bought from Amazon was a sterling performer.

Halo 3: Level Loading Tests

So what does the Battlefield 3 and Rage experience tell us about the future of the optical drive? After all, when the next-gen consoles arrive, core game assets will be even more data-intensive. Well, we can safely assume that the drive will actually still be there: pressing optical discs - even dual layer 50GB Blu-rays - is going to be a lot cheaper than shipping game-specific SSD-style cartridges. It's also safe to say that broadband infrastructure will not be sufficient to support workable downloads in all current territories, though if all games don't ship digitally day-and-date with their retail counterparts, that would be hugely unfortunate.

The problem I have with a migration across to PC-style game installing is that it impacts the console's defining "plug and play" characteristic. Already we have plenty of complaints about this - especially on PlayStation 3, where playing a new game can be friction-filled experience consisting of system updates, patches and of course mandatory installs. In an ideal world, I'd like to see any kind of forced install banned from next-gen consoles, but bearing in mind the Rage and BF3 experiences, is this possible?

Well, it's safe to say that optical drive performance can radically improve. Let's assume that next-gen consoles will ship with Blu-ray drives: 12x speed BD-ROM units are now in the mainstream, offering an enormous boost to throughput when stacked up against the 2x drive that is standard in the PlayStation 3. There'll still be issues with seek times of course - but we can assume that these will be faster, and we'd hope that all systems would ship with a decent amount of flash memory, a mechanical hard drive - or, as is the case with the higher-end Xbox 360 SKUs in the here and now, both. If Microsoft can ship an entry-level 360 unit with 4GB of flash RAM, who knows how much cheaper storage will be when the next-gen console hits in 2013/2014?

Assuming that all consoles ship with some form of fast storage as standard, perhaps Naughty Dog's Uncharted 3 can offer up a glimpse of the future. The game effectively maxes out a full 50GB dual layer Blu-ray disc, cramming it with 46.3GB of data driven by a mere 18MB executable file.

Diving deeper into the make-up of the new game reveals some interesting facts. 22GB is taken up by movie files - with every cinematic rendered twice: once in 2D, once in 3D. That's a colossal amount of data, but it's still less than half of the space used on the disc, meaning a phenomenal amount of assets related directly to gameplay. In addition to that, we see a large number of files compressed with Sony's proprietary archive format too - so not only did Naughty Dog require a 50GB Blu-ray, they even needed to compress their data still further to make it all fit.

That is rather impressive, but the fact is that Uncharted 3 has no mandatory install whatsoever. The seamless experience it provides is achieved entirely through some extreme hardcore streaming, just like Rage and Battlefield 3, the different being that Naughty Dog had a single, fixed platform to develop on (though even that caused some issues, as this hair-raising and very revealing post-mortem feature by 1UP explains).

While every game design will have its own hardware challenges, Uncharted 3 demonstrates quite effectively that extreme streaming of game assets needn't necessarily mean mandatory installs. On-the-fly streaming can achieve a hell of a lot, and the benefits of a high-speed storage device in addition to the optical drive can preserve the "plug and play" console experience. As we move towards the release of the next-gen consoles, the make-up of the optical drive and the flash medium will come into focus. Hopefully a standard platform along these lines at launch will mean that sub-optimal experiences with certain hardware configurations a la Rage/BF3 will no longer occur...