Hey there, everyone!

I got the idea "well if games on the Xbox 360 can run fine with the game installed on the disc itself, why should'nt it work with PC games too?".

I then downloaded the Crysis 1 demo and installed it to a DVD. The game starts up, yes, and works and plays.
However whenever it is loading something, like a mesh for LOD-swap, it freezes until it is loaded. Annoyingly that happens often, so the experience becomes near unplayable.

I then wondered: How comes the games on Xbox don't seem to suffer from these 'pauses'? Is it because of software programming, a windows limitation or is the DVD drive too slow?
The disk drive in my PC doesn't sound like it's running full speed, as it's close to silent, where as the Xbox dvd drive certainly sounds like something is going on in there.


so does anyone know why the xbox can play games off the disk without these constant pauses?

I think it all boils down to technology. Consols run stuff of the disc to save hard drive space which makes the reading slower. PC's have the space to have the whole thing on the hard drive which improves loading times

Because PC games are not programmed to run off a disc, plain and simple. Hard drives are so big these days, so developers make use of the faster storage device.

That's not entirely true. All PS3s (which are consoles) do the same thing as PCs. Most PS3 games don't even work without a hard drive installation. So, what's going on there?

No idea. I'm not to at home with console tech so I merely made a logical speculation

In the consoles, the disc never stops to spin. The pause you experience is because the DVD drive in the PC stops to spin when it doesn't need to load anything, so it needs to start spinning first before it can load anything.

Having the game on a hard drive have a lot of benefits. It's not only faster, but the chances of an optical drive breaking down is much higher than a hard drive. It also generate less heat and less noise. I think it's quite nice Microsoft realised this so they made it possible to fully install all games on the 360. Wish Sony would give the PS3 a similiar function.