Slow your roll in GTA V’s Los Santos

Rockstar has reached out to their modest audience for Grand Theft Auto 5 and warned them via Twitter that on the Xbox 360, installing data from both discs to the console hard drive is not recommended. The Xbox 360 version of the game comes with an install disc as well as a play disc. Rockstar advises that only the install disc should actually be copied to the console drive to speed up streaming of data. Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry explained the technical reason for the warning.

Well, optimal streaming is achieved by making use of all the available bandwidth in the system. Why stream just from the hard drive when you can run in data simultaneously from both the disc and the HDD? Based on what we’re seeing on the Xbox 360 version, perhaps running both DVD and HDD assets from just the one source slows down access times, impacting streaming performance.

That PlayStation 3 version of GTA 5 doesn’t require the warning since it ships on only one disc that will require an 8GB install before playing.