GTAIV & Fallout 3 from ext HDD

I've read varying opinions about gaming from external HDD's.

Some say gaming performance is the same, some say it drops a bit.

Anyone has a specific comment about these?:

- GTA IV
- Fallout 3
- FEAR SDK
- Any other 2009 game which takes large HDD space I might get this year.

I am getting a Buffalo 320 GB external HDD next week, and I might reinstall those games to it.

Thanks in advance.

PS.: don't care about loading times, but I don't want to lose performance (fps).

 

I haven't run a game off an external hard drive, but I would worry about stuttering and loss of smoothness during gameplay.

When I first built my PC, I didn't buy an optical drive for it and instead used an old external USB DVD drive in a pinch and installed GTA4 from it. When I ran the game from it, there would be stuttering literally every step of my character and made the game unplayable despite my desktop having fast components. When I replaced it with an internal DVD drive, the problem completely went away. I was using an older external DVD drive from a few years ago so that could have been a reason.

Since your using a modern external hard drive, the performance wouldn't nearly be as bad as I experienced.

 

You should be fine if the external HDD is connected to your computer via eSATA connection and not USB 2.0. Bandwidth could be the culprit for studdering issues. Mostly newer games beyond 2006 you would probly have those issues if using USB connection.

Edit: the "turboUSB" found on newer buffalo external hard drives is a gimmick (USB 2.0 is still limited to USB 2.0 speeds).

 

I run Crysis, Crysis Warhead, C&C3 off of my External HDD connected via USB, and I don't see any performance loss, or studdering.

 

i ran many games from external hdd actualy gaming perf is the same the only thing you will see is longer load time

 

Depends on what the games are like for texture loading, Fallout 3 if its anything like Oblivion won't like it too much if its a USB drive. If its E-Sata fire away though, as that'll pretty much be standard desktop speeds

 

You will get maybe a little bit longer loading times but you have said at first post that you acctualy not care, so I don't think it will be a problem....

 

It depends on the game. Fallout 3 and GTAIV use a streaming system for textures. Since they're open world games with huge maps, locations that are far away from the player aren't loaded into the RAM until the player gets close enough. This will be affected by the USB 2.0 bottleneck on the HDD and might cause lagging during gameplay.

Games like FEAR are standard "load during level change" games where all necessary textures are loaded in between levels. This means that you'll experience a longer load time, but it won't affect gameplay at all.

 

Interesting... I never thought it like that before..

I wanted to install those on the HDD since they are the most space-consuming, but I might be better off leaving those on laptop HDD, and moving others to the external HDD.

Only that would mean the need to plug the HDD to play most of my games...