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Bungie on NXE, Halo 3's Longer Load Times

Added by Jeff on Nov. 19, 2008 42 comments

These shields! They take forever to load!

With the new Xbox 360 dashboard out around the world today, more people are installing games to their hard drives. And more people are noticing that Halo 3 actually takes longer to load when played from a hard drive than it does when running from the DVD. The Bungie blog updated this morning with a brief technical breakdown of the hows and whys behind Halo 3's performance.

The piece is a Q&A with Bungie's Mat Noguchi, who describes how Halo 3 uses the hard drive under normal circumstances. It seems that it already caches the maps to the hard drive for faster loading, even when you're playing from a disc. When you're running the game from the hard drive, it then has to copy those maps from one spot on the hard drive to the temporary utility partition used for cached data.

In short, reading and writing using the same device takes longer than moving that data from the disc to the hard drive.

Check out the full post for a bit more technical detail. For what it's worth, Bungie says that it will continue to monitor the situation, but says that fixing these new issues require a significant effort on their part and that it "could really be a rather significant change."

Considering how much I'm enjoying the newly quiet 360 when it's running off the disc, I'd probably consider installing Halo 3 anyway, even if the load times are a bit longer. But then, I haven't played Halo 3 is a pretty long time and probably won't pick it back up anytime soon.

Filed under : Halo 3, New Xbox Experience, Bungie Studios

43 Comments

Clockswork
on Nov. 19, 2008

I installed Halo 3 and found that the first load time when you continue a campain, is WAY faster when running on the HDD. Didnt notice any other changes, will keep it sence my Xbox is nice and quiet :)

TheWolf619
on Nov. 19, 2008

A quiet 360>>load times. any day, all day, and twice on Sunday.

Scooper
on Nov. 19, 2008

Yeah, not a massive issue but an issue none-the-less.

LiquidPrince
on Nov. 19, 2008

Makes the option pointless then no?

killdave
on Nov. 19, 2008

I've moved on from halo 3 now; dont bother "fixing" it Bungie.

bekern
on Nov. 19, 2008

ehh this sucks. I read somewhere that this can make starting an online match slower for everyone if you have it downloaded, since you have to wait until everyone has map loaded to start a match. Don't download this people! I hate waiting :(.

burjeffton
on Nov. 19, 2008

Halo is SOOOOO 2007.

pause422
on Nov. 19, 2008

burjeffton said:

"Halo is SOOOOO 2007."

Pretty much. Or more accurately for me, Halo was sooo about 5 days after it launched, and then put away forever.

BinaryDragon
on Nov. 19, 2008

ha! funny.

Driadon
on Nov. 19, 2008

That's a genius idea for Bungie to use the hardware like that, too bad it didn't really help them with this new dashboard. Wouldn't surprise me if they come out with a patch to avoid all that extra coping if you have the game installed.

dagas
on Nov. 19, 2008

NXE is out already? I've lost track of time, didn't realize it was 19th already =P (actually 20th as of a few minutes ago in GMT +1 timezone)

WilliamRLBaker
on Nov. 19, 2008

LiquidPrince said:

"Makes the option pointless then no?"

for halo 3 yes but most other games no, there are more games then halo 3 on 360.

CliffyB123
on Nov. 19, 2008

Good to see Microsoft getting installs RIGHT!

MasterSplinter
on Nov. 19, 2008

pause422 said:

"burjeffton said:
"Halo is SOOOOO 2007."
Pretty much. Or more accurately for me, Halo was sooo about 5 days after it launched, and then put away forever.
"

I still play a little. =(

TheWesman
on Nov. 19, 2008

I'm with pause422. I haven't played Halo 3 since I beat it. A loooong time ago. The hard drive install has made a difference on a few other games though, so it's not perfect, but still very handy.

AndrewB is online
on Nov. 19, 2008

Since installing Gears 2 and playing it in silence, the dvd drive noises have become all the more apparent and annoying to me. I think most people will agree that a whisper quiet console wins over slightly different load times any day.

taco484
on Nov. 19, 2008

guess Ill be saying "LETS MAKE SOME NOISE!!" and playing off the disc

Media_Master
on Nov. 19, 2008

hr mmm

Gorillawhat
on Nov. 19, 2008

The ONE game I was going to install! Gosh Darn Golly Master Chief!

MordeaniisChaos
on Nov. 19, 2008

Big deal. Most games aren't even noticably faster anyway. And its not like load times were super fast to begin with. You'll live. The BIG advantage of Disc free play is the noise. And besides, I assure you any games coming out now, with this in mind, will work much better. Wait to judge the feature till people actually use it. ie, don't judge HD TV's in general on a 32" 720p plasma, you need to check out 1080pand atleast 42"

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