Why need to install games on HD?

Probably a dumb question...but why do you need to install PC games to the HD to play them? Why can't you just pop them in and start playing like on consoles? I assume it's probably something to do with CD reader, but why don't they have that the same type of technology on the PC?

 

Microsoft introduced the Tray n Play technology with Halo 2 for Vista but it didn't go down well with the consumers. The reason why installation of a game in the HDD is much superior is:
-you have to install one time only
-faster and much consistent frame rates
-increases the longevity of the game media by reducing the chance of scratches.

 

because it waste energy to keep the game going in the disc tray and some games are more then one disc, we don't want it to be like a xbox 360 jrpg

 

yes, this is a dumb question.

HDDs are a LOT faster than CDs/DVDs.

It'd suck big time if the CD/DVD drive needs to keep
spinning at the HIGHEST speed possible for all the time
I play games (noisy and less-longevity).
this also keeps your CD/DVD drive free (to use for other purposes).

 

Generally games are so big nowadays that it's hard to fit everything onto a DVD. Imagine loading hundreds of megs from a DVD drive every time you wanted to play-- hard drives do things much faster (xfer speeds upwards of 50MB/s (perhaps 3-6x faster than a dvd), and seek times well under 20ms) and loading times are cut down drastically after copying over expanded files to the hard drive.
Uses less power, too.

 

Actually a 20x DVD reader will read at 27MB/s maximum, and hard drives will only do about 30MB/s for small files. I don't know what the transfer rates in practice are though.

I'll add one other thing, it's much more convenient to intall to hard drive since you don't need to fiddle around with disks every time you want to play. This has admittedly been less apparent for the last few years as CD checks were the primary method of copy-protection but now that quite a few publishers are switching to more transparent forms of copy-protection we should start to see this advantage again.

 

Ok, thanks for the answers dudes.

 

that's the MAXIMUM.
try a drive reading test with any software..you'll see that
the minimum speed starts from 1x or 2x.
speed builds up over time (as the head moves outward)
and the max speed is reached ONLY at the very end.

on an average, a 20X dvd drive gives only ~12X performance.

 

scratch your dvd and see what happens when you try to read it.

 

I think it's more historical than anything...

The arguments made for the pros of installing games to the HDD could be made for a 360 these days...it has HDD storage capacity, and its optical drive is louder than the fan...

Back in the days of the Commodore 64 and Atari 800, you could use cartridges or 5 1/4" disks...by the end of their lifecycle, due to cartridge constraints (fast but limited storage), games were almost exclusively multiple floppies...

Gaming consoles stuck with cartridges and computers moved to 3 1/2" floppies to deliver media...floppies were incredibly slow compared to the nascent HDDs so developers had the end user install to the HDD...

As computers transitioned from floppies to optical media (well before Playstation and Dreamcast), you still had the option to install configuration files only due to limited HDD space...you wrote your hardware/software configuration file to the HDD...and used the CD to run the game...(and config files were a necessary evil for computers since hardware specs could be drastically different, and DirectX hadn't 'fixed' standardization yet for PCs)...

As HDDs got bigger, software developers maintained the status quo and you have the benefits listed above...and as end-users, as mentioned before, we've been a fairly resistant crowd to change...we like to put things on our HDDs and put our optical media away since space is really no longer an issue...

The 360 is following suit with their downloadable arcade games...they run off the HDD...

And digital distribution (Steam is the most prevalent right now) may eventually do away with optical media and retail boxes altogether...

And a decade later, consoles will do the same thing...they're always a few years behind computer gaming...

 

my opinion is that if you installing the games on HD it will work faster

 

Becouse HDDs is much faster then CD/DvD rom. Im happy it not is like you said. Don't want an Xbox schemes

 

why use mp3 over cd players?

we install everything else on the computer already. the personal computer operating system is intricate and very large, and we don't have optical drives to run every program. we multitask very well on computers; we don't on gaming consoles. if you limit applications to CD only usage, we eliminate much of the modern multitasking, computing world.

 

.........wow......hard drives are faster then that

 

PCs are no longer the ultimate multi-taskers...

My wife's iPhone plays music and videos, takes pictures with no external attachments, allows her to e-mail, voice chat and text, browse the internet, track her calories, make a grocery list (and tell her which aisles), view a location on a map and then see it through a camera AND play games...

All that at near WiFi speeds, it fits in your pocket, easy enough for our six-year old to use and costs much less than even a netbook...

And you would be surprised what a 360 with enough local storage and a fast enough connection can do...you're right...you'll probably never do an Excel spreadsheet or book report or learn assembly language on the iPhone or 360, but pretty close to everything else...

Which is my biggest heartache with modern computers...once upon a time (prior to 1998), we (the end-user) actually had control of a small and easy-to-understand operating system...now, Windows is a behemoth of an operating system, and I don't understand what half the processes in the background do...hmmm...maybe it's easier to set up a network...though, I don't remember struggling too much with IPX or NetBEUI...

 

I think Bioshock on the PC had a run directly off the DVD feature. Let me look into it.

 

dude, just install the games and stop asking questions...

 

i lawled.

please ask your wife's iPhone to play a FLAC music,
a H264 HD movie, run a torrent, run MSN/Yahoo messenger,
a download manager, an IRC, firefox, burn a DVD...
ALL THE SAME TIME... now THAT's multitasking!

 

lol i can barely get my computer to play flac, look at a picture at the same time without slowdown

 

no, they are not. The poster said for small files.

my HDD (the fastest for laptops) reads 4KB files at 32MB/s.

say 128Kb files it reads 3 times faster though

however, DVDs can do max speeds only at the end of the disk (the outer edge), so at the beginning they are slower. Not to mension the random access times that are ridiculously slower than those on HDDs

 

DVD drives are definitely slower for small files. I copied about 3,500 files from a DVD that were a few KB each - not a good idea. It took a very long time and was extremely noisy. Compared to the quiet, quick transfer of 700 MB files. It may well have been quicker to transfer the 3.5 MB of small files from 3 floppy disks, and it certainly would have been quieter.

The files may well have been spread all over the disk, but nevertheless it was horrible performance relative to a hard drive. Whenever a floppy disk is competitive, you know it's bad.

(I actually did this thrice, with three different disks - it wasn't just one low-quality disk. Could've been three low-quality disks, though. All were DVD-RW)

 

Cup holder