Pioneer Reveals New Blu-ray Disc
As gaming technology advances the consoles and processing chips are upgraded to effectively render the increasingly complex and realistic images. With greater complexity comes greater file size and thus the need for improved capacity on the storage medium. Many are saying that the Xbox 360 is at a disadvantage by sticking to DVD discs as the industry is approaching the point where the cutting edge games are going to outstrip the storage capacity of DVDs.
Companies have been getting around this problem for years by including multiple discs and having the player swap out for the next disc at a certain point, but this is a stopgap measure and inappropriate for the open-world, sandbox games that have become so popular. Blu-ray is performing quite well as the next step in gaming storage and Pioneer has just unveiled a new disc that ensures storage capacity won’t be an issue for some time to come.
At the IT Month fair in Taipei they’ve just unveiled a new multi-layer disc that can hold up to 400 gigabytes of information distributed between sixteen layers that each hold 25 gigabytes each. The disc uses existing Blu-ray technology but features a dielectric material instead of the standard metallic reflective layer. Of course this might never be utilized for gaming as many predict that consoles are on their way out and that digital distribution is the future of gaming. Only time will tell.