How it works and why it should be better.
Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo 5 is probably the biggest, most content-rich racing game ever made for console. How the PS3 was going to handle this phenomenal amount of gameplay was always going to be an issue. Last week’s revelation of a 40-minute, 6.5GB install, swiftly followed by an official statement from Sony adding context and explanation to the raw numbers, is only really the tip of the iceberg.
Let’s talk installation timings. Polyphony Digital warns you on selecting the install that it can take around 50 minutes to complete. Last week’s unofficial source says that his timing was 10 minutes faster than that, so we decided to put it to the test using our main retail PS3 – a 60GB launch NTSC model still sporting its original HDD, running a final PAL copy of the game. Bearing in mind the generational leap in hard drive speeds in the four years since this SKU launched, we can safely assume that this probably a worst-case scenario for the test. Update: a very well-respected PS3 developer just contacted us to say that this is not necessarily the case, citing streaming issues they experienced with later “fat” PS3s that shipped with slower HDDs than the original launch model…
Thanks to the wonder of time-lapse video, you can check out our overall timing here. Why the video? Well, note the way that the progress bar works – its reading is in no way indicative of how much longer you’ll actually be waiting at any given point. The chances are it is tied into the number of files it is processing as opposed to the time taken in transferring them, hence the uneven timing. This video covers the 1.01 patch install, which adds an approximate time to completion – the accuracy of which is somewhat amusing.