Optical Drive Speeds for RTS games

Hi,

I was just wondering how much optical dirve speeds affect game playability.

In particular, Battle for Middle Earth II requires an 8x speed drive-according to system requirements lab (it says 16x on the official site though). My laptop has an 8x super multi DVD-+R/RW drive with dual layer support.

Thanks

 

Im assuming that game is on a CD and not a DVD. Your DVD speed is 8x, and so is mine. But my CD speed is 48x I believe, and yours should be something close to that if its a new computer. So you really dont have to worry about it, you've definitly got the CD speed covered in an 8x DVD drive.

 

Almost all DVD drives sold these days read at 8x for DVD and 24x for CD, so you should have no problem playing it.

 

For games needing the CD to play, the best thing to do IMO is to make an image of it, and use Nero/Daemons/etc. to read the image. Not only does it read faster, the OD won't be in use(good thing if its loud/noisy and makes alot of movement)

 

But the game may not be able to run (Yay, copy protection)
Still, it's definitely worth a try.

And I don't think anyone for the last 10 years have had to worry about their optical drives being fast enough. Games usually "require" 8x CD-ROM drives. You'll be hard pressed to find a drive that is less than 48x. And even the slowest DVD drive would be fast enough as well. 8x on DVD is a lot faster than 8x CD

 

A DVD at 1x is 1352.54KB/s. A CD at 1x is 150KB/s. I'll leave the multiplication comparisons up to the reader

 

Thanks for the help guys!