PC Substance

[Dark Jaguar]

Yeesh, with install sizes like that, think of how long it takes just to install it. Console game designers have had to deal with the limitations of the lack of a hard drive for a long time, and as we can see from the current gen games it hasn't reduced game quality at all. Since area size is limited by RAM anyway, no matter how large a hard drive one may have (that just increases spool speed, like in Halo when you reach an area not in RAM and it quick dumps it into RAM, pausing the game for 2 seconds) it won't help the speed. They really need to just learn how to optimize disk load speeds. The best way may be a nice standardized disk reading method for various speeds among disk drive developers (this is assuming of course the standard isn't already in place and developers really aren't being lazy) so developers can optimize disk reading regardless of the drive on the machine. One thing I've noticed is that minimum disk drive requirements are STILL at 4x CD-ROM. That REALLY shows the lack of any cares for disk speed optimizing in my mind. They should optimize based on some minimal speed, which should likely be around 32x, or higher, and if needed REQUIRE that. Anyone with a computer with all the latest hardware everywhere else should have no problem getting a cheap high speed CD-ROM / DVD-ROM drive. I don't except them to tap into the full power of any piece of hardware here, PCs being machines that tend to have vastly different hardware setups. I just except them to tap into ENOUGH of the high speed abilities of current CD/DVD drives that they can just spool most data from the disk to the RAM with little to no noticable load time. If they can't do that for all the data, again, that's what virtual memory is for!