Rockstar is warning Xbox 360 gamers from installing Grand Theft Auto 5's "play" disc.
The game comes on two discs: a mandatory "install" disc and a "play" disc, each of them contains around 8GB of data. Some Xbox 360 owners prefer to install both discs in order to enhance performance. However, Rockstar warns that this might degrade performance instead of enhancing it.
Digital Foundry experimented with the Xbox 360 version of the game and concluded that Rockstar's recommendation is solid.
"Rockstar recommends that you shouldn't install the GTA5 play disc on Xbox 360 and it's sound advice," confirmed Digital Foundry chief Richard Leadbetter.
"Now, there's absolutely nothing stopping you installing disc two - the 'play' disc - onto the hard drive too, using the Xbox 360's dashboard to do so. It takes up an additional 7.8GB of storage. However, doing so impacts the game's ability to stream texture data, resulting in regular pop-in of in-game objects and textures," he added.
"So what's the story here? Well, optimal streaming is achieved by making us of all the available bandwidth in the system. Why stream just from the hard drive when you can run in data simultaneously from both the disc and the HDD? Based on what we're seeing on the Xbox 360 version, perhaps running both DVD and HDD assets from just the one source slows down access times, impacting streaming performance. It's not game-breaking stuff, but it does take you out of the moment when it does manifest and for that reason we can't recommend installing the play disc."
According to Digital Foundry's experiments, it is still possible to install GTA V play disc on a USB flash drive and play the game smoothly.