Why PS3 games install
The Official Playstation Magazine (August issue) has the reasoning as to why a certain amount of Playstation 3 games require an install. Its because its quicker to read the game data from the hard drive rather than the Blu-Ray disc. This also means shorter loading times during gameplay.
Chief software architect at Eutechnyx, Dr Andrew Perella says:
“The biggest benefit of loading data from hard drive as opposed to Blue-ray is that the seek times are lower. Games that make use of lot of user customisations are hit hard by this as the developer cannot know ahead of time what will need to be loaded”
I bet your now thinking ‘does that mean every game will be installed to the hard drive’, the answer is no. Look at Call of Duty 4 and Uncharted Drake’s Fortune, they didn’t require an install and ran fantastically well.
Game developers are working around this by taking a more pro-active approach to Blu-Ray’s data transfer technology. Some are working with streaming methods that load data while your playing, others are duplicating frequent required data around the disc so it can be located and loaded up faster.
Pete Hines of Bethesda, the vice president of public relations and marketing says:
“we get around it by doing caching to the hard drive behind the scenes. And yes, we do have more than one copy of data on the disc in different locations to make the streaming process faster.”
It is understood that in the future, game installs for the Playstation 3 will be a thing of the past.
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Comments
@Paranoimi:
That is because the kind of loading on the C64 is pre-game or in between missions. The kind they are talking about causes texture popups and lack of texture on buildings etc… Possible framerate drops as well as the game is waiting for texture to load.
To continue off of what ano was saying, a great example of popup problems and missing textures was Gears of War. I once completed a round of the deathmatch and still the textures were missing.
“And yes, we do have more than one copy of data on the disc in different locations to make the streaming process faster.”
Um, they denied ever saying that. It has no benefit on Bluray.
@ ano - True, and it does work. GTA IV for example has less pop-up/pop in on PS3 than 360 purely down to the HDD install.
However, there are also a number of games (Everybody’s Golf World Tour and Devil May Cry 4 to name just two) which install to the HDD purely to decrease load times by a few seconds. These are the installs I personally see as unnecessary.
blu-ray has a really slow read speed in comparison to dvd, thats why it needs to install games. pure an simple.
installing is a pain and it just takes up a stupid amount of hdd space, it shouldn’t be happening. Haze, what did that need to install, is was possibly the biggest piece of crap ever.
i know programming a game is hard work but seriously, when you pay £40-50 per pop you expect the best and it to be done well. you shouldn’t be wandering wether or not you can fit it onto your hdd ( i know you can delete less played games )
Also:
I bet your now thinking ‘does that mean every game will be installed to the hard drive’, the answer is no. Look at Call of Duty 4 and Uncharted Drake’s Fortune, they didn’t require an install and ran fantastically well.
Game developers are working around this by taking a more pro-active approach to Blu-Ray’s data transfer technology. Some are working with streaming methods that load data while your playing, others are duplicating frequent required data around the disc so it can be located and loaded up faster.
this basically just re-worded from magazine, add some of your own research instead of trying to pass this section as your own.
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Showing my age now…
I must admit, load times don’t really bother me. As someone who grew up with a Commodore VIC-20 and later a Commodore 64, I can remember the pre-turbo loader days of tapes, when a simple title like Arcadia took 25 minutes to load - so I don’t see any of today’s load times as particularly long!
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