@andorski said:
@grixxel said:
I welcome our digital future with open arms.
Since the issue with GTA on 360 is its inability to stream from the HDD quickly, how does a full download onto the HDD be any better?
The issue is not that it can't stream from the HDD quickly, it's that the 360 version was designed to both pull data from the HDD and DVD simultaneously, same as with the PS3 BD version. Because they made the mandatory install only one of the discs (presumably to keep the install size down for folks with smaller 20GB HDDs), installing both would mean separate game data for both discs in separate areas on the hard drive. As certain assets get priority, there would be fighting back and forth on the same HDD or certain things that would be otherwise coming in off the DVD would have to wait, or vice-versa. Which is probably what's causing the delay on some of the higher level of detail stuff appearing in these scenes and no other real performance issues being reported thus far.
Most 360 games are just one disc and often load quite a bit faster when installed to the HDD, there's only been a couple exceptions where issues cropped up in the past, usually due to developers packaging data on the DVD in specific areas to load the more requested data more efficiently. I think GTA4 was one of them, and one (or more?) of the Halo games.
If the entire game was designed to be installed and packaged efficiently on the HDD, it probably wouldn't have these problems. Just look at any downloadable PC / 360 / PS3 game that's only running off a single hard drive, GTA4 PC was all on a hard drive and didn't have any of the pop-in of the 360 version, although that could be because of the increased amount of RAM. GTA4 360 was released before the 360 even had the manual HDD install option, was designed entirely for disc loading and had the most pop-in issues, both before and after the addition of the manual install to the Xbox 360. And GTA4 PS3 had an install and still pulled data from the blu-ray, like GTA5 is doing on both consoles. With considerably less lod pop-in than the 360 GTA4.
I guess we'll know for sure when some people start reporting whether or not the PS3 digital download version of GTAV has the same pop-in issues as when both DVDs are installed on the 360's hard drive.
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