New Xbox 360 games copied to HDD won't load much faster Options

[Xbox-Scene]

New Xbox 360 games copied to HDD won't load much faster Posted by XanTium | September 10 09:38 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From gamersglobal.com: [QUOTE] Xbox Product Manager Germany Boris Schneider-Johne states in a utmost interesting interview with Golem.de that this [quicker load times when playing games from HDD] won't be the case for the majority of 360 games. "We now allow the customer to install games on their hard drive. This is optional, you don't have to do it. But if I do it, these games will load faster because a DVD-drive with seek operation does have load times every now and then. There are prominent examples, for instance: Project Gotham Racing 3, one of the first games for the Xbox 360. There the load times have been very long; those are going to get reduced immensely. Recent games are already optimized; there the gain is relatively small." [/QUOTE] Full Story: gamersglobal.com

[mironicus]

PGR 3 does not have long loading times (played it yesterday).

[bucko]

PGR 3 does not have long loading times (played it yesterday).

I think he means PGR2.

This is kinda obvious I thought, since I guess most 360 user's have a hard drive by now (at least 20GB), most devs for a while have had a system in place if it detects a hard drive it will put cache files on. This just kinda makes the process easier and more permanent I guess.

[bobby0724]

So basically they are telling us that we have a very slow drive on our xbox 5400 rpm or less

[thebez]

5400rpm on a 2.5" isn't too shabby, not sure if any 4200s can be found with the 360 tho?

Hmm - how can it not be faster? At full pelt the 360 drive does 16x = 22MB/sec, down to a lot lower potentially 1x.

The 2.5" drives for the 360 do about 50MB/sec down to <20 depending on where the data is on the platters.

That's with sole usage of the disk though - other processes will be using it for caching, save games etc. so that must drop a lot?

Seek times should be much better than the dvd drive, but then again the disc optimisation probs minimises that.

Buuut this is all talking about original discs remember... burnt media is read much slower on the 360 - especially on the Benqs. So it looks like drive hackers will be happy - unless this update involves the ban hammer

This post has been edited by thebez: Sep 10 2008, 05:01 PM

[StaTiKMaT]

I'm most looking forward to this for Oblivion and Two Worlds. The constant loading times in Two Worlds make the game almost unbearable on 360 at times. It's an excellent RPG, it just needed a bit more polish.

[darkshadow2k8]

5400rpm on a 2.5" isn't too shabby, not sure if any 4200s can be found with the 360 tho?

Hmm - how can it not be faster? At full pelt the 360 drive does 16x = 22MB/sec, down to a lot lower potentially 1x.

The 2.5" drives for the 360 do about 50MB/sec down to <20 depending on where the data is on the platters.

That's with sole usage of the disk though - other processes will be using it for caching, save games etc. so that must drop a lot?

Seek times should be much better than the dvd drive, but then again the disc optimisation probs minimises that.

Buuut this is all talking about original discs remember... burnt media is read much slower on the 360 - especially on the Benqs. So it looks like drive hackers will be happy - unless this update involves the ban hammer

so ok i have a hacked samsung at 8x and of course i use verbatims made in singapore how well would u think my reads will be will read time be cut in half or better?

also this is a start anyway the stock hdd read at 5400rpm if we can get hacked drives with faster rpm and more cache we should have even faster loads but yea exactly may be nice but i have a really good feeling a ban hammer is gonna come knocking on your door from it as well

[irnchriz]

GTA IV will benefit greatly from this as it helps the data streaming. Not that it is bad at the moment but the difference will be noticeable.

This post has been edited by irnchriz: Sep 10 2008, 05:53 PM

[BasicAir]

This is an article that doesn't consider the future.

Developers will be able to take advantage of this HDD install and we'll see games with super-fast load times if installed in the near future. Will that be immediately? No. We're probably talking about games that will come out in mid-to-late 2009. So for now, sure, we won't see much faster times.

But that brings up another point this article doesn't point out: There's more of a benefit than just faster load times. There's the benefit of less noise and less heat coming out of and in your Xbox 360. This means less hardware failures (RROD, anyone?).

This article seems to be written by someone drinking haterade.

[Landlocked]

Hey, if this decreases the chance of a spinning disc getting scratched, then I'm all for it.

[MrFish]

I think he means PGR2.

That was a black-Xbox game, and caches itself off the hard disk.

This is kinda obvious I thought, since I guess most 360 user's have a hard drive by now (at least 20GB), most devs for a while have had a system in place if it detects a hard drive it will put cache files on. This just kinda makes the process easier and more permanent I guess.

No they don't, in fact they're explicitly banned from doing so if they're planning on getting their game signed.

--

The whole statement, in my opinion, is spin: what he's actually saying is that some games don't have loading screens, so there won't be any perceptible speedup. Which is bollocks: even games 'without loading screens' still have an initial boot. Which will speed up. Games that are designed to degrade gracefully whilst the data is absent (GTA4, Test Drive Unlimited) will spend less time degraded. Games with background loading (Halo 3) will do it faster, meaning that people who do get through the menus quick enough to beat the loader will spend less time waiting it.

Certainly, games where they've made an absolute pig's ear out of loading stuff off the disk (Test Drive Unlimited's map screen springs to mind) will show dramatic improvements, mainly because winchesters can seek ten times as fast as DVDs. But even for games that haven't made a hash out of it, the bottom line is that in real world benchmarks the hard disk does on average 43MB/s, while a good real-world average for a modern DVD writer is 12.5MB/s.

Thus, the only games that aren't going to load three times faster are the ones that have no loading delay at all, and the ones that won't let you skip the cutscenes. Provided you're doing something else during the initial load.

[47_M450N_47]

I agree with what MrFish said. He sums it up nicely. There's no reason that GTA:IV shouldn't load significantly faster, which will be great. I'm tired of outrunning the load process and running into objects that aren't even there yet. I guess it's time to buy a bigger hard drive.

[Sonz]

as far as the Noise of the DVD will be gone,i'm all happy.

[SC10-E]

at least they will already have this idea in mind when the next generation rolls around. Then those games will be able to have this before they start utilizing/optimizing the system.

[Shod]

It seems to me as if the HD on the 360 is quite slow anyway - XBLA games seem to take longer to load than I would expect? Obviously I dont have a copy of any of them on disc to compare, but they just seem....slow.

Also when I navigate to the "Games" blade on the dash, when I go into the games menu it seems to take AGES to populate the lists. I dont know if that would be down to the HD, or the dashboard not being quite up to scratch, or maybe its just my 360 starting to pack up? I only have about 15 arcade games and a couple of Xbox Originals, so its not like it has a massive list to search for...

Is the 360 HD (20 gig) prone to fragmentation does anyone know? With the constant downloading and deleting of stuff, it seems to me like it would be - but (as far as I know anyway) there doesnt appear to be any way of de-fragging it, so I guess the guys at MS dont think it is a problem.

I guess what im saying is that in its current state, I dont think the 360 is really up to fast loading of games from the HD.

Are these "issues" that anyone else has seen, or is it just me?

This post has been edited by Shod: Sep 10 2008, 09:20 PM