Even if the disc is full, the vast majority of the data on a DVD is not at the outer edge. Only the data at the outer dge will be read at maximum speed, so to compare the maximum speed of a DVD drive to the constant speed of a blu-ray drive is flawed. Most of the data is going to be read at speeds slower than that, and thats what programmers design for.
A 12x DVD drive would not even be close to a 4x blu-ray drive through most of the disc, and it would only be close, but still slower at the very outer edge of the disc, compared to a Blu-ray drive that would read at 18MBps everywhere.
To say a 2x Blu-ray drive compares to a 12x DVD drive speed-wise is a pretty accurate statement in my opinion, it's not a big difference. The key element here is that for stuff like game data, if designers do suddenly fill up the disc w/ 20gb's of textures, it would take an incredibly long time to load them, so it is unlikely many games will really take advantag of the space, other than FMV playback.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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Even if the disc is full, the vast majority of the data on a DVD is not at the outer edge. Only the data at the outer dge will be read at maximum speed, so to compare the maximum speed of a DVD drive to the constant speed of a blu-ray drive is flawed. Most of the data is going to be read at speeds slower than that, and thats what programmers design for.
A 12x DVD drive would not even be close to a 4x blu-ray drive through most of the disc, and it would only be close, but still slower at the very outer edge of the disc, compared to a Blu-ray drive that would read at 18MBps everywhere.
To say a 2x Blu-ray drive compares to a 12x DVD drive speed-wise is a pretty accurate statement in my opinion, it's not a big difference. The key element here is that for stuff like game data, if designers do suddenly fill up the disc w/ 20gb's of textures, it would take an incredibly long time to load them, so it is unlikely many games will really take advantag of the space, other than FMV playback.