GTA 5 has arrived but don’t install the “play” disc to your Xbox 360

Written by Brandon Hofer on September 16, 2013

GTA 5 News: Rockstar has advised that you don’t install the “play” disc to your Xbox 360 citing potential performance issues.

Grand Theft Auto 5 is here and will consume the lives of millions of people over the course of the next few weeks, months and years. It will be one of the best selling titles of 2013 (with perhaps only Call of Duty beating it) and early indication is that it will live up to the hype. GTA 5 is set to arrive on Xbox 360 and PS3 with next gen versions being heavily rumored. Speaking specifically about the Xbox 360 version, GTA 5 comes on two discs. The first disc is essentially an “install” disc where you need to do a mandatory install of the disc’s contents on to your system (around 8GB in size). The second disc is the disc the game is on and the one you will have in your Xbox 360 as you play GTA 5. If you are the type of person who normally installs his games to his system though you might want to think again.

The installation of the first disc is mandatory and you don’t have a choice. Rockstar has advised against installing that second disc however. On Rockstar’s support page they state the following,

“For optimal performance, we recommend only installing the Install Disc, and not also installing the Play Disc to the Xbox 360 Hard Drive or USB drive via Xbox Home (dashboard). You will be prompted to install the Install Disc the first time you boot the game.”

Apparently what is going on here is that to try and get every ounce of power out of the Xbox 360 and PS3, Rockstar coded the game in such a way where optimal streaming is achieved by using all of the bandwidth on the Xbox 360, not just one resource. What that basically means is that instead of installing everything to the hard drive, the game will run better if it can utilize both the hard drive and the dvd drive. As you might or might not know, when you install a game to the Xbox 360 hard drive you don’t really use the optical drive except for the initial spin up of the disc. By not installing the game to your Xbox 360 hard drive, Rockstar claims this will allow GTA 5 to use everything the system has to offer (dvd drive, hard drive, etc.) instead of putting all of your eggs in one basket by installing everything to the hard drive.

It should be noted that you can still install everything to the hard drive and play the game, you must might suffer some performance hiccups. Eurogamer and Digital Foundry have posted two videos (shown below) showcasing this problem and also showing a rather interesting solution. The first video compares GTA 5 running on an Xbox 360 disc compared to GTA 5 being installed to the hard drive. The second video shows off a potential fix to the performance issue problem. Apparently, if you install GTA 5 to a USB flash drive you won’t have the same performance problems that you would have if you installed it to the hard drive.

Check out the videos below and tell us what you think. What is the first thing you plan to do once you are in Los Santos?

Xbox 360 Disc vs. Xbox 360 HDD Install

Xbox 360 Disc vs. Xbox 360 USB Install

Source: Eurogamer and Digital Foundry