New Xbox Experience: DVD vs. Hard Disk Face-Off

Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise

Install Size: 5.2GB

The Viva Piñata experience was designed to be as user-friendly as possible to the Xbox 360 newcomer, and was therefore optimised to play as well as possible for Core and Arcade owners, relying little on the hard disk for any boost in performance. In theory then, this game is as good as any for testing DVD versus HDD performance.

Unfortunately, tests turned out to be largely irrelevant. Viva Piñata has a lot of animations and small cut-scenes that cannot be skipped by the user, and the chances are that a lot of the game's interactions with the DVD drive take place there. The look and feel is of a game that happily performs without any real delays - there's only marginal loading moving to the village from your garden, or journeying out into the wild, and in these cases the wait is slight, and barely improved by running from hard disk.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Install Size: 6.7GB

I tried to dispel a lot of the myths surrounding the DVD vs. HDD debate back in the Grand Theft Auto IV bonus round face-off. Logically speaking, the PlayStation 3 version with its mandatory installation should of course have fared better than the 360 code running from DVD. With the amount of game data streaming in at any given time, the game's pop-up (both in terms of geometry and textures) should be much reduced on the PS3 game. However, in my experience, the 360 game held up very well, matching PS3 performance - only crazy, suicidal flying in the helicopter saw any palpable advantage in terms of faster streaming from hard disk.

NXE's hard disk installation also bears out these results. Yes, the interminable wait while the game loads is significantly reduced, and there are clear reductions in load times when it comes to reading in save games, but other than that, once again the main advantage of installing to hard disk is eliminating the noise the DVD-ROM drive makes. Certainly, pop-in issues in general were not improved.

GTA IV spent years in development and as a project, it led on Xbox 360. It's fair to say that the Rockstar team knows the Xbox 360 hardware intimately and the reason we don't see much in the way of a performance increase (compared to PS3 or an NXE install) is because the game is already caching data to the hard disk behind the scenes.

Halo 3

Install Size: 6.3GB

GTA IV gave strong hints that an NXE install offers little advantage for games already optimised with the hardware in mind, and Bungie has already revealed in a recent podcast that running from hard disk wouldn't improve Halo 3's loading times, but I must admit that I wasn't quite prepared to see an actual, tangible impact in performance from copying files to hard disk.

I was curious to try out Halo 3 because its Campaign mode loading runs so slowly that I remember thinking at the time that my DVD drive must be on its way out (or that I had a dodgy copy of the game), but its sloth-like streaming is actually even slower once the data is installed to hard disk, with disc and drive completely removed from the equation.

The Campaign mode appears to be caching a lot of stuff from DVD to hard disk - load one campaign, then the next, then return to the original and you'll find that it'll load much faster than it did the first time. I could only imagine in this case that the hard disk is being read twice over, with less than impressive results. The tests were re-run again to ensure that everything was being loaded in the same order, but nothing changed - the bottom line is that Halo 3 already loads quite slowly from DVD, and it's even slower on hard disk.

Moving away from the Campaign option on the main menu and simply starting off a brand new solo mission didn't help either - loading time was twice as slow. It's clear that there's a hell of a lot of data caching going on in Halo 3, and you can't help but think that a patch could fix this, so I'll be interested to see if Bungie attacks the issue.

Fable II

Install Size: 6.8GB

Fable II is a game so open and expansive, with so many different possibilities that we went back to basics with the measurements - restarting the game from scratch twice over, doing the same things and following the same basic quests to ensure that the measurements in loading times and general performance were like for like.

Boosts in data-streaming speeds moving from one environment to the next were not out of the ordinary as the results below show, but out of all the games tested here, Fable II did actually show some improvement in the game experience - seemingly minor, but very welcome nonetheless. For a game so clearly designed to be as easy and intuitive as possible, the inventory and skills page (brought up by pressing the start button) is surprisingly clunky and slow to respond. Playing from DVD, there does appear to be some lag as it streams data from the disc. For me it stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb in a game that is otherwise so effortlessly joyous to play, but thankfully the 'lag' is very noticeably reduced when the game is running from hard disk.