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

I think Rockstar underestimated just how far people are willing to go to stop that damn jet engine from firing up.

"Hey guys, don't install the second disc, it'll run better"

"Nah it's fine"

As has been pointed out, mandatory install on HDD, play disc on USB. I've seen a dozen articles based on the Digital Foundry report, but none on their follow up with more info on the USB drive.

And, no, Rockstar isn't going to fix this. It's as designed I'm sure. The reason that you take a performance hit when installing both discs is because all of that content is coming in from one source and creating a bottleneck when the game expects it to come from two places.

@plwolf: Don't think you quite understood the problem here. It works better with the disc.

@jamesjeux007 said:

I sort of answered this in my comment which is next to yours. The game is streaming content from both your HDD and optical drive. Streaming content for both from the same drive is going to give you a performance hit, whether it's trying to read info from two places on the same drive at once or because the buffer for the HDD is maxed out. It's not that it's broken when installed, it's that the game is able to do more when not installed.

First off, this is probably something that just can't be fixed based on how they built the game. They already had to require an install to get the game running right on the 360, which is something I think only Halo 4 was able to enforce before this.

Second, it's not broken, there is just more pop-in

@plwolf said:

I've never understood how some people can think that going all-digital would be a good thing. You see the horribly restrictive parameters that got taken out of the Xbox One? That's basically what the "all-digital future" is going to be like. Discs may be a hassle sometimes, but at least I know I own them. :P

@plwolf said:

I've never understood how some people can think that going all-digital would be a good thing. You see the horribly restrictive parameters that got taken out of the Xbox One? That's basically what the "all-digital future" is going to be like. Discs may be a hassle sometimes, but at least I know I own them. :P

I think the 360 is just getting old...GTA V seems absolutely breathtaking in terms of size and "stuff that needs to be rendered all at once"...I think this might be the only way for Rockstar to put this game on a current gen console. GTA V looks pretty spectacular, and to have this game run on a 360 (as good as it does) seems almost like a technical marvel to me...but then again, I don't know shit.

@plwolf said:

That is just not going to help you here. If there even was a digital version, it would always have the pop-in since you couldn't split it up between the HDD and a USB stick.

Installing the play disk is optional NOT broken. It's because the game is built to stream from two different sources something streaming from one HDD isn't optimized for.

@plwolf said:

That is just not going to help you here. If there even was a digital version, it would always have the pop-in since you couldn't split it up between the HDD and a USB stick.

That was my sort of guess. The DVD reads speeds on the 360 are 15.85MB(yte)s. The hard drive is probably around 60-100MBs. This is probably something that can be fixed in a patch similar to Skyrim on the 360 when the game was installed. Its gotta be awfully confusing for games to be designed to stream data from two different .iso images at the same time with one read/write head.

I remember one time I installed GTA 4 on my Xbox 360 and had really bad texture pop in.

I wonder if you install the main disc and the play disc to the same USB flash drive...

Then install it onto a USB disk instead - apparently that solves the issue and you get the best of both worlds.

I wonder if you install the main disc and the play disc to the same USB flash drive...

That was my sort of guess. The DVD reads speeds on the 360 are 15.85MB(yte)s. The hard drive is probably around 60-100MBs. This is probably something that can be fixed in a patch similar to Skyrim on the 360 when the game was installed. Its gotta be awfully confusing for games to be designed to stream data from two different .iso images at the same time with one read/write head.

I remember one time I installed GTA 4 on my Xbox 360 and had really bad texture pop in.

edit: Holy crap this double posting stuff is terrible. I hit the post button once.

I saw that happening a lot on the review that GameTrailers had, I guess this explains it, I would have installed without a second thought. Halo 3 had something like this. The game was optomized to be run off the disc.

FYI: While playing the actual game I had no pop in while both discs were installed. HOWEVER I did have some major pop in during the intro cinematic (which is what the video above is). So, installing both discs (if you want to save your 360's laser) is not that bad. the intro jumps around a lot from location to location, which is what is causing the popin.

This seems significant! I don't have room on my HDD to install both discs anyways, so I wouldn't experience this. But this is good knowledge! A friend of mine is having some issues on the PS3-version. He says the game keeps freezing on a specific early mission. I have know idea which mission he speaks of, since I haven't played the game at all myself. But he said something about a bicycle.

Sounds familiar to anybody?

To be fair the MTBF/POH of an optical drive is like 12,000 hours. Other parts will break before the laser. It does stinks that you can't pop a new one in for $20 like a desktop in the event it does kick the bucket.

@huntergathers, @strainedeyes: Oh I didn't mean the game was "broken" as in "unplayable". But when the developer has to issue a statement saying "Please don't do that, it's not good !", it means they shipped the game with a broken feature in it. I don't care if it's really broken or it's "working as intended". If you don't want people to do it because it will have a negative impact on their experience, then don't put it in the game. Sorry I didn't make myself clearer, and thanks for your explanations :')

So final answer on the best way to resolve this? I have a USB stick with 20 Gigs free. Game is probably arriving tomorrow (bloody hope so) so I can do some moving of stuff around if installing the play disc on the HDD and the mandatory 8 gig one on the USB is the best way to go. Or should I just do the mandatory one and go with it?

@jamesjeux007: Finding creative ways around the limitations of an almost 8 year old system is not a "broken feature". They could have communicated it better though.

@tehrevel: Probably the other way around.

Mandatory install on HDD, play disc-content on the usb device.

I installed the game the recommended way and still encountered the draw in problem during the title sequence. I've got the feeling that it was even worse than what the video comparison showed. Will try the USB method and see if that resolves the issue.

I don't have a big enough usb stick to install it on. Looks like I am stuck playing it on disc and my 360 sounding like a jet engine for now.

I played up to 43% completion of GTA V on my dev kit. I had the game running entirely off the HDD and had no issues in the 30 some odd hours I have played.

I don't have a big enough usb stick to install it on. Looks like I am stuck with playing it on disc and my 360 sounding like a jet engine for now.

Maaan they both look like ASS, it's going to hurt so bad to pop on my 360 tomorrow after a long time and put up with those visuals

Nice way to send off the X360, lucky I never pre-ordered, lo.

Thanks for the PSA. Probably would've installed it otherwise. Not since Halo 3 that I've heard this kind of issue.

Sessler says there isn't "a load time in sight" in his review on Rev3.

I'm just gonna play it off the disc and put up with the noise for a few days and see about getting a flash drive later. The last thing I want to be thinking about the first time I play this game is performance issues. I didn't even mind IV's framerate so it's probably all good.

There's an initial load at start-up, "loads" when you switch between characters. The remaining loads are hidden in cutscenes.

@dicksocrates: No I get it. In this setup, you're right. But with a single 16gb all in one download, this won't be an issue.

At least it only seems to be double posts here, in the GTA V review comments there are plenty of quadruple posts. This site has gotten really janky in the past couple of weeks.

Poor 360, I think it's finally time to retire that thing.