Xbox 360 Owners, Don’t Install Grand Theft Auto V’s Play Disc

After watching that video. The digital foundry one. I'm still going to install it. Minor pop-in is better than a jet engine from my 360's loud ass drive.

hell yeah bro

Okay...annoying noise it is. Good to know.

At this time no one has written anything about the technical performance of the PS3 version. As someone with both systems, I'd like to have some kind of comparison, even if it's just a reviewer saying "they're the same".

If it means my disk don't need to spin for the many hours of playing gtav then i'll put up with a little pop in.

Damn. Well that sucks :/ I wonder if load times will be longer if the play disc is uninstalled

no worries i couldn't even if i wanted to. i still have my original 20gb harddrive. that shit can barely fit the 8 gb.

People on Something Awful suggested installing the Play disc on an USB stick. It reportedly worked better with loading times in other games, like Alan Wake, so it might fix the issue.

Since this is caused by installing the full game onto the system, will the PSN version have the same issues?

I can't confirm it since I haven't played the PS3 version yet, but what I've seen from people streaming pirated versions of the game, the PS3 version might be better.

The draw distance looked a bit nicer.

And of course it doesn't have this install bug.

You are the best kind of person Patrick Klepek.

Reminds me of how Installing Halo 3 gave you longer load times because they had specifically architected the placement of data on the disc to work in sync with the 360's seek and read speeds but their code backfired when it was looking for the same data on a hard drive.

I'm not sure if that bothers me or not. Damn indecision

@patrickklepek There is probably nothing to fix here. They seem to be simultaneously using DVD+HDD to increase the maximum read speed for textures and models.

If you copy the second disc to the same HDD the first disc is on, you can no longer benefit from that 15MB/s transfer you can get from the DVD.

*edit*: Corrected some typos.

This wouldn't have happened on the PC. THANKS R*

You are the best kind of person Patrick Klepek.

If it doesn't break the game, I'd rather have a quiet system and some pop-ins rather than my loud 360 and no pop-ins. That is a sacrifice I am willing to make.

The disc tray on my 360 has been pretty janky for a while now so I'm not sure if I even have a choice but to install it.

Can't wait until we're just done with discs.

Do you know how excited I am to have had my favorite internet celebrity reply to one of my comments?

I wonder about the technical issues behind this problem. Is it hard drive memory access of assets that the Xbox can't figure out or confuses?

Do you know how excited I am to have had my favorite internet celebrity reply to one of my comments?

Inferior console, and it shows.

Huh, well that's unfortunate.

Lemme break it down for GTA's target audience: It's like pouring two cans of beer into one beer bong versus using two beer bongs with one can each. The latter gets more beer in you faster, because you can only pour through one beer bong so quickly.

So, I don't think this is an "issue" so much as a "feature." Presumably, you can load more textures at once if some are coming from the HDD and some from the disc. If they're streaming from just one or the other, it runs into a bottleneck. Assuming that's what's happening.

Don't do what Donny Don't does.

Guys, just install the game disk to a USB thumb drive. Not only will it fix your drive noise issue. But it will probably load faster too!

install the play disc on a usb device instead.

_FIXED_

How is it this is found out just now? A product launch always comes with new, unknown issues, but don't developers have trial discs and other test equipment to account for issues such as these before launching a game? Or did they know this beforehand and launched it accepting the fault?

Apparently installing the disc to a usb flash drive overcomes the problem. I'd rather take a slight performance knock than listen to my xbox trying to spin a disc up all the time.

If you put one disc on the HDD and another on USB it won't have that issue, no word on if you put both discs on USB but I'd assume it'd have the same bandwidth issues.

Digital Foundry is supposed to have a deep-dive comparison at some point tomorrow, I believe.

I just wanted to honestly thank you Patrick for posting this news story. Without this, I would have installed both discs, specifically because I am stubborn and have an urge to install all discs presented to me.

Hmm...I think I'll try the installed version first, and if it's really this bad I'll uninstall it again and play from the disk. I'll probably spend more than 180 hours with this game, and I would appreciate it if my disk drive would still work after I'm done with this game. ;)

As someone who's mostly playing on Xbox 360...I think I can live with some pop-ins here and there. I'm more worried about the framerate, and I'd hope this game runs smoother than GTA IV (at least)...which runs pretty terrible imo.

So do I need like an 8gb usb stick or something I never tried installing anything to something other than the HDD.

Yeah, this is my plan as well.

I mean i played Mass Effect 1, now that game has some gnarly pop-in! I can live with the mild pop-in shown in that video.

Hmm... Tough call. I was going to install it on a 32GB thumb drive either way so maybe I will just install the one disk and not the other.

I don't think they have any intention to fix it, Patrick. I'm pretty sure it's designed to run better that way.

@humanity: 16 gig stick for that

From what I have read this issue only occurs if you play with both discs installed on the hard drive. So, for instance, you can install the play disc on a USB stick and supposedly it works fine that way.

I haven't done that- just spreading the word for anyone who needs it. Will probably need someone else to confirm if that works.

Just another reason to go digital only. I'm done with discs.

Okay...new plan. I'll just buy a 16 GB USB stick tomorrow (when I go to the store to buy this AWESOME game) and do what some people here are suggesting...problem solved (hopefully), everyone is happy (and by everyone I mean me) and I would have finally made an investment I should have made years ago.^^

Thanks, duders.

I'm sorry if I sound like the most ignorant person on the planet, but how does this not get caught during QA ? It's not like it's something that only a small fraction of people are gonna do. Nowadays, almost everyone installs their games given the choice. The game loads faster AND you don't get the airplane noise. Does this only with specific 360 or with every console ?

I remember the Bombcast mentioning the "Stop shipping broken games" during one of their GOTY deliberations. Guess what ?