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GTA V: Rockstar Doesn't Recommend Installing Play Disc on Xbox360

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artemicion

Golden Member
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/09/16/rockstar-doesnt-recommend-installing-gta5-play-disc-on-360/

Just a small PSA and also to solicit some discussion. Seems odd that they designed the game to stream game data and whatnot from the hard drive and optical drive at the same time. Any other games do this? Seems to cripple digital download versions of the game. I always thought transfer rates for hard drives dwarfed transfer rates for DVD drives, so kind of surprising that it would make a difference for GTA V. Can't decide if it's poor design on Rockstar's part or what.
 
I'm guessing that by using both drives at the same time, to stream data, they are getting more out of it by alleviating a bottleneck. Perhaps a limiting factor of the hardware and what devs has access to. I recently learned that MS doesn't allow programming to the metal but Sony does. However it's probably just that the HDD doesn't have as much bandwidth potential that using the DVD''s streaming of additional data along side of it has.
 
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halo 3 also did something that caused bungie to recommend not installing it to the hdd due to having worse performance than from disc.
 
It already requires installation of the other disc, so installing both forces a slow mechanical drive to bounce between the equivalent of two separate batches of data. There's no mystery here, it makes perfect sense. Has nothing to do with the game itself and only the limitation of working with mechanical drives. There just aren't many games that requires an install separate from the game disc so it hasn't come up much.
 
Theoretically, if there was a digital version, it would be optimized so that the lack of a disc wouldn't be an issue. It would also be a massive download so I don't see that happening anytime soon.
 
cyclohexane said:
They should charge less for the digital download version if it's going to be slower.
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Not necessarily. The reason the disc version would be slower is because the installation disc would be installed in one location on the drive and the play disc would be installed on a separate location of the drive. A digital download version would likely be installed on one continuous block of data.
 
FYI, I dug around and found Bungie's explanation of why you shouldn't install Halo 3 to the hard drive:

http://halo.bungie.net/news/content.aspx?type=news&cid=16252

Makes sense, but not sure the same technical explanation applies to GTA V. It sounds like Bungie was in a position where they develop Halo 3 before Microsoft finalized the install-to-hard-disc option, so they didn't really have the chance to optimize performance. I haven't read anything about not installing the later Halo games to the hard drive, so it sounds like Bungie eventually worked around the issue and it's not exactly the same as the GTA V issue.

Here's more explanation of the GTA V issue, for any of you who are curious:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-09-16-rockstar-warns-dont-install-gta5-xbox-360-play-disc

FWIW, there is a PS3 digital download version, and the jury is still out on whether it has been optimized to somehow work around this issue.
 
HardOCP linked to a YouTube video exploring the problems that arise when you install the play disc to the HDD on the Xbox 360. Apparently it increases pop-in on vegetation and distant LOD objects. The creators of the video said that these problems don't occur if you install the play disc to a USB flash drive, so that's something to consider.
 
Its gotta be a bug. Just guessing but the game is loading the world to the HD because it SHOULD be faster and you need that speed for multiplayer. The content left on the disc is dialogue, music, mission specific stuff. Although, and this is speculation since I don't know how the hardware works, but there is a chance city data is striped and split between both and the game is able to load from the HD and the disc at the same time, increasing load speeds by 2x when loading a specific area, and thus loading it all from the HD may end up being slower.

I would love to hear about Playstation 3 (I have the disc version PS3) performance between disc version and station users who purchased the download version where the entire game would be streamed from the HD.
 
Atomic Playboy said:
HardOCP linked to a YouTube video exploring the problems that arise when you install the play disc to the HDD on the Xbox 360. Apparently it increases pop-in on vegetation and distant LOD objects. The creators of the video said that these problems don't occur if you install the play disc to a USB flash drive, so that's something to consider.
Click to expand...

Putting the disc on a USB drive would eliminate the head thrashing that using a single HDD would do.
 
Yeah, I was thinking using a USB flash drive might solve the issue. Bandwidth is pretty limited via USB, but it's still probably faster than the ODD reads the disc.
 
exdeath said:
Mechanical media, lulz

Oh wait MS won't let you replace the HDD with a SSD, oh noes hacking!
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Never did see what Microsoft's issue with this was, besides selling you overpriced, proprietary storage. Sony seems to do just fine letting you upgrade the HDD in the PlayStation. Though their idiocy with the Vita makes up for it.
 
mmntech said:
Never did see what Microsoft's issue with this was, besides selling you overpriced, proprietary storage. Sony seems to do just fine letting you upgrade the HDD in the PlayStation. Though their idiocy with the Vita makes up for it.
Click to expand...

It's the same issue any company has with making modifications to the system... if you screw it up they'll have to waste money on a warranty claim. Now I'm not saying MS didn't have accessory $ in mind with how aggressively they faught the hard drive thing, but there are valid business reasons for not wanting people screwing around with hardware.
 
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