Which is better, playing games from cd or hard drive?

[Jbroad572]

Which will yield better performance? Playing from the cd rom or from the HD using something like Alcohol 120?

 

[SadisticOne]

Using Alcohol 120 may only give you a slight performance boost (CD checks at game startup,) but not much content is actually read from the CD any more, for any game I've played. If you find one that is... (Diablo2 maybe?) then yes... there'd be a more significant boost.

 

[dnuggett]

From the HD. CD's cannot keep up with the access times that a HD can do.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

The comparative speeds of CD's, including the fastest, in the 48x realm, is a small percentage of the speed of the slowest hard drive, so doesn't that answer the question? Add in crap like "Safedisk", which slows things down still more, and it's no wonder that there is such a thing as "Unsafe Disk" to peel that nasty stuff off, even for honest folks who own the games but can't play them because the copy protection is incompatible with so very much of the hardware we use.

:|

 

[jvarszegi]

I just want to add one more thing: if the CD image is compressed, it will slow down load times vs. an uncompressed image.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If nothing else, if you are going to be playing the game for some time, it really saves wear + tear on your optical drives if you image + emulate a CD using your HD. I recommend that for using Playstation emulators and the like.

 

[biostud]

doesn't most games include a full install, and then only use the CD for check when starting.

 

[tweeve2002]

Originally posted by: biostud
doesn't most games include a full install, and then only use the CD for check when starting.

Yes I would say that 95% of the new games coming out do.

One advantage of using a image of a CD is that not only does it save ware and trear on the optical drive but on the CD it self. The amout of scratches on my CDs when down alot sence i started making images of every game I could.

 

[jvarszegi]

Originally posted by: tweeve2002

Originally posted by: biostud
doesn't most games include a full install, and then only use the CD for check when starting.

Yes I would say that 95% of the new games coming out do.

One advantage of using a image of a CD is that not only does it save ware and trear on the optical drive but on the CD it self. The amout of scratches on my CDs when down alot sence i started making images of every game I could.

Right. And once you decide to do that for convenience, you can also save space on your hard drive by choosing a minimum install.

 

[Auric]

Alcohol 120's virtual CD component is based upon the free Daemon Tools so if you want you can use Alcohol or other to create images from protected CD's and use DT to mount them sans nags. Another option is no-CD cracks, especially where HDD space is limited but having to wait for new ones after game patches come out is somewhat inconvenient.

 

[tweeve2002]

Originally posted by: Auric
Alcohol 120's virtual CD component is based upon the free Daemon Tools so if you want you can use Alcohol or other to create images from protected CD's and use DT to mount them sans nags. Another option is no-CD cracks, especially where HDD space is limited but having to wait for new ones after game patches come out is somewhat inconvenient.

one problem with NO-CD cracks is that at times you cant play multiplayer with a no-cd crack unless everyone is using that crack. Cd images dont have that problem.

 

[Auric]

I have not heard of that, at least when legitimate keys are still authenticated by a master server. If the crack is to bypass the authentication server, then everyone using it could only play on cracked game servers.