| mrstickball said: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6194093/index.html?tag=top_stories;title;1 One of the not-so-cosmetic changes in the fall update will be the ability to let you play your games directly from the hard disk. The new feature will let users install all of the game content directly onto the hard drive to improve game load times. Microsoft reports that it has seen a 30 percent improvement in load times in internal testing. As an interesting data point, Microsoft went out of its way to tell a group of reporters that the full Devil May Cry 4 hard disk installation took roughly 10 minutes on the Xbox 360. The installation took twice as long when we conducted our own installation tests on the PlayStation 3. Another side benefit of having games installed on the hard disk is reduced noise, since the optical disc no longer needs to spin up. However, you will still need to have the game disc in your optical drive while you're playing it, presumably as a piracy check.
Wow. Half the time it takes for the DMC4 installation on PS3, the entire thing is copied in full.
Beyond good news. That means that installing a multi-disc game isn't going to take very long. If this comes to pass, talking about whooping the PS3 in every imaginable way concerning installations & load times. This would certainly make the Xbox 360 gaming experience on certain multi-platform games the far more robust, and better experience, no?
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To be fair to the PS3, the Devil May Cry 4 install is clearly suboptimal.
The game installs 4800 MB in 22 odd minutes (the full game on PS3 is 7600 mb btw - I'm assuming the Xbox game is similar in size)
Meanwhile, MSG4 installs 4500 MB in ~8 minutes (which makes sense, considering 2x Blu-ray is 72Mbit or 9 MB/sec). GTA IV manages similar speeds. In fact, DMC 4 is the single slowest install on PS3, hands down.
There is no doubt the Xbox 360 will be faster in installing (after all, its drive is faster) but taking the worst case PS3 example as par for the course does sound like cherry picking to me.
(For reference, if all games install at MSG4/GTAIV speeds -i.e. optimal speed-, 7600MB would take 844 seconds, or ~14 minutes. Still significantly longer than the Xbox install of DMC4, but also much better than the 22 minutes it takes on the PS3)
