Quote Originally Posted by Diraco View Post
Pretty silly thread at this point, but I can't help myself! The PS2 was fairly impressive back in its day, but c'mon. It's using a 5400rpm hard drive on a UDMA66 connection. Even if it has an infinitely fast IO subsystem, it grabs textures and models off a drive with a random read speed of ~0.5MB/s. Also, the video memory bandwidth wouldn't matter for model loading speed; only the speed of its DMA controller would matter (said to be ~133MB/s when reading through the IO processor, 2.4GB/s from main memory).

The PC I used for that video has an SSD with random read speed of ~80MB/s. Even if windows' notoriously lousy threading and IO scheduling slow the drive down by 100X, it should be at least as fast as a PS2, but in reality it's 10X slower! Seems impossible that it could be that slow from a harware perspective -- I suspect that XI intentionally throttles model loading rate on the PC...
Actually, I think I read that it does just that because when the PC version was released PCs weren't exactly as capable as the PS2 when it came to graphics. Square's solution was to treat PCs as being less capable. Of course, it's a non-issue now but then we're back to the argument of rebuilding the game, only this time the PC version.