Developers Finger Next-Gen Bottleneck

Forget about processors and hard drives - one developer says we're ignorning a bigger speed throttle.

Sony and Microsoft have a nice back-and-forth going now, with each trying to upset the other with ever more impressive hardware specs. But while they (and most observers) are concerned with how fast their processors are or who has the bigger hard drive, one developer says in a new interview that people are ignoring the albatross around gaming's neck.

Saints Row is Volition's first Xbox 360 game

It doesn't matter how fast the chips inside your box are if you can't get the data from your storage disc to those chips fast enough, Jacques Hennequet of Saints Row developer Volition told Gizmodo.

"The Xbox 360 is a wonderful machine and we can do a ton more, but one thing that hasn't changed is the DVD transfer speed," Hennequet said. "It's become the new sound barrier."

Even the PlayStation 3, with its fancy, high-capacity Blu-ray drive, may not be in a much better place. Sony's new system uses a 2X Blu-ray drive, which gives a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 9 MB/s, as opposed to the theoretical ceiling of 16 MB/s for the 12X DVD drive in the Xbox 360.

Faster alternatives are available in the PC world, but in console land the drive-speeds are fixed in place. So what's the answer?

"What I see as potential solution," said Hennequet, "is, in the next, next gen, an increase in RAM that is so enormous you can store gigabytes [in memory]."

Until the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720, then.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games