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Sirius87 on 20 March 2013
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DanneSandin said:
JEMC said:
DanneSandin said:
is vgleaks a part of THIS community? VGleaks - VGchartz...

Anyways, do you HAVE to instal the game to the HDD? or is that optional?

If the rumor is true you'll HAVE to install them in order to play because, as they say, "Play from the optical disc will not be supported".

That's not necessarily bad as it will mean no disc spinning during gameplay so less noise.

For me the disturbing rumors are the other rumors, forced Kinect, always online, no used games, etc.

Yeah, I think that forcing you to install a game is their way of not allowing used games. Maybe you can pay to unlock it once you installed it or something.

If all of these rumors are true, I definitely see the 720 failing. BUT, I wouldn't have thought people were willing to pay for online game when there were free options either, so, who knows...

I'm pretty sure also the PS4 will force game installs. At least for a large fraction of games. Even the 6x Bluray-Drive is way to slow to fill the GDDR5 in adequate time. There's a reason why load times on the Wii U are often so long*. And that console only has 1GB of RAM usable by games.

Let's just calculate a bit: Assume that 6000MB of GDDR5 can be used by games. Then assume that each level/game load completly refills this ~6GB (that's of course are worst case scenario) and then finally assume that the Bluray-Drive can deliver the full maximum speed of 27MB/s the entire time (that's a best case scenario): 6000MB : 27MB/s =  222s = 3min 42s

In my opinion that load time is too long. Even if it's only for the startup of the game (and I know that the last state of the game can be saved in the GDDR5 but sometimes you want to switch games etc.).

Compare this to the same situation with a pretty standard ~100MB/s-5400rpm-HDD: 6000MB : 100MB/s = 60s = 1min. Still not ultra fast, but much more acceptable in my opinion. And then the access times of a HDD are also much lower even when compared to an 6x BR-drive.

I have no idea how important streaming of data during gameplay will be in the next gen (8GB of RAM may be large enough to store a large fraction of the necessary game data for one level in the RAM), but if it's still used a lot the limits of a BR-Drive will be even more noticeable.

Can this install-feature be used to block used games? Yes of course! Is that the main reason for enforcing it? Not in my opinion.

 

*Yes I know that even games installed on the flash or a HDD don't load much faster. But the HDD is only connected via USB2 limiting the speed to around 35MB/s. And the flash probably also isn't the fastest just to be on the same level (and to save a few Dollars).