Bungie addresses Halo 3 NXE install performance
by Richard Mitchell 
on Nov 19th 2008 3:45PM
You may recall that a recent Eurogamer article profiled the performance of several popular Xbox 360 when installing them to the hard drive (one of the new features of the
NXE). While some games received improved performance and shorter load times and others saw little to no improvement, it turned out that
Halo 3 actually
fared worse when installed to the hard drive. Apparently Eurogamer wasn't the only outlet to notice the difference, as Bungie has officially
commented on the issue and explained why the load times are actually longer when
Halo 3 is installed.
The answer lies in how
Halo 3 loads map data. Each map is cached onto a certain part of the HDD that is reserved for game use. Once the game is installed on the HDD, it has to read the data on one part of the drive and write it to the reserved section. While data can be read from the DVD at the same time the HDD is writing data, the HDD can't read and write at the same time. As such, loading from the HDD takes significantly longer. Bungie advises gamers not to install the game, especially if you play online, as all other players will have to wait the extra time it takes to load and cache each map.
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