| ▲ | wvbdmp 10 days ago |
| The whole world took a wrong turn when we moved away from physical media. |
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| ▲ | tetris11 10 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| In terms of ownership, yes absolutely. In terms of read/write speeds to physical media, the switch to an SSD has been unsung gamechanger. That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn |
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| ▲ | crote 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn Cartridges were also crazy expensive. A N64 cartridge cost about $30 to manufacture with a capacity of 8MB, whereas a PS1 CD-ROM was closer to a $1 manufacturing cost, with a capacity of 700MB. That's $3.75/MB versus $0.0014/MB - over 2600x more expensive! Without optical media most games from the late 90s & 2000s would've been impossible to make - especially once it got to the DVD era. | |
| ▲ | Cthulhu_ a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe, but I'd argue the on-board storage chips literally an inch away from the CPU / GPU of the PS5 are faster these days. But in between cartridge consoles and fast hard drive consoles there was a disk-based gap where seek times were an issue. | |
| ▲ | BizarroLand 10 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I hate it when you buy a physical game, insert the disk, and immediately have to download the game in order to play the game because the disk only contains a launcher and a key. Insanity of the worst kind. | | |
| ▲ | hbn 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Nintendo is pretty good for putting a solid 1.0 version of their games on the cartridges on release. But on the other hand, the Switch cartridges use NAND memory which means if you aren't popping them into a system to refresh the charge every once in a while, your physical cartridge might not last as long as they keep the servers online so you could download a digital purchase. I've kinda given up on physical games at this point. I held on for a long time, but the experience is just so bad now. They use the cheapest, flimsiest, most fragile plastic in the cases. You don't get a nice instruction manual anymore. And honestly, keeping a micro SD card in your system that can hold a handful of games is more convenient than having to haul around a bunch of cartridges that can be lost. I take solace in knowing that if I do still have a working Switch in 20 years and lose access to games I bought a long time ago, hopefully the hackers/pirates will have a method for me to play them again. | | |
| ▲ | wtallis 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > the Switch cartridges use NAND memory which means if you aren't popping them into a system to refresh the charge every once in a while, your physical cartridge might not last as long You've been paying attention to the wrong sources for information about NAND flash. A new Switch cartridge will have many years of reliable data retention, even just sitting on a shelf. Data retention only starts to become a concern for SSDs that have used up most of their write endurance; a Switch cartridge is mostly treated as ROM and only written to once. | | |
| ▲ | hbn 2 days ago | parent [-] | | What's "many years"? I've read about people's 3DS cartridges already failing just sitting on a shelf. | | |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are you sure those flashes are capable of refreshing? |
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| ▲ | maccard 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The read speed off of an 8xDVD is ~10MB/s. The cheapest 500GB SSD on Amazon has a read speed of of 500MB/s. An NVMe drive has is 2500MB/s. We can read an entire DVD's capacity (4.7GB) from an SSD in under 10 seconds, compared to 8 minutes. | |
| ▲ | crest 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Or the launch day patch is >80% the size of the game, but I don't want to go back to game design limited by optical media access speeds. |
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| ▲ | breve 10 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hard drives and optical discs are the reason they duplicated the data. The duplicated the data to reduce load times. |
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| ▲ | habbekrats 10 days ago | parent [-] | | do they even sell disc of these game?... | | |
| ▲ | jsheard 2 days ago | parent [-] | | They do, but it's irrelevant to performance nowadays since you're required to install all of the disc data to the SSD before you can play. The PS3/360 generation was the last time you could play games directly from a disc (and even then some games had an install process). | | |
| ▲ | Cthulhu_ a day ago | parent [-] | | I believe even then it was already "most", at least for the PS3; that was the era where always-online devices became the norm, where game developers were more eager to release patches after release, etc. |
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| ▲ | jayd16 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The (de)-optimization exists, essentially, because of physical media. |
