Recently I was Googling texture pop in and loading times on One-X between internal and external HDD - and discovered a thread (which I can’t find now LOL) on which a gentleman had posted load time for FH4 from the moment the game is launched up to Free Roam. Don’t remember what platform he was on or whether it was on internal or external.
Anyway, I’m sharing this because it might help some of you with faster loading and texture streaming:
According to the gentleman’s post, it takes 2:36 to get from the game launch to free roam. I timed that on the internal and got a time that was exactly that or just under. I moved the game to external and it still registered just under 2:35, but the splash screen that says “press A to continue” - after pressing A it hardly takes 3-4 seconds for the game to continue - whereas on the internal it stays there spinning the bottom-right circle for 30-40 seconds at times.
Why is this important? Because playing FH4 on the One-X’s internal, I could see detail popping in around the scenery as I was driving which was kinda annoying - whether I was playing in quality or performance mode. In Edinburg especially, detail and textures were popping in on the buildings in the distance which I found odd.
I moved the game to the external and texture pop in is hardly noticeable.
External for the win! I think it has better cache loading or something or perhaps it has to do with USB 3.0 interface. In any case, play all your open world and load intensive games on the external guys.
Related: In FM7, even though the time it takes to go from “start race” to “you have arrived at so and so track…” is the same on internal vs external, on the external, it does take me to the main menu slightly faster and there’s less lag in the driver gear and car selection screen while a track is loading.
Related #2: Played FH2 on my external and somebody told me that the game has a rev-hanging bug or something, but I did not encounter it once during free roam. Another win for the external!?
If you’re going external may as well go SSD, any SSD above 240GB will be fine. Less than that and you can only attach as Media drive, not as games drive.
SSD will improve your load time, fast travel time, garage etc. Horizon 4 hammers your HDD, much rather have that on an external device than the internal.
On PC with the game installed on 3.5" WD black internal HDD I’ve started to notice slight hesitation and incorrect images in the garage for a few seconds now I have 750 cars, however xbox S with USB 3.0 SSD has no such issues. Just a shame the XBox graphics are nowhere near the PC.
My discussion was only limited/focused toward internal HDD vs external HDD.
I am aware of what a SSD can do - however, not good value for money. HDD will offer far more space for half the money and last twice as long.
I’ve experienced no hesitation whatsoever in my garage or graphics loading late on the icons but then again, I don’t have that many cars to begin with - maybe under 150 I estimate.
“Just a shame the XBox graphics are nowhere near the PC”
I’d have to disagree - FH4 on my Xbox One-X supersampled on a 1080p screen looks breathtaking, even in the performance setting.
SSD’s are cheap these days, a 240GB drive is plenty big enough for Forza and can now be had for ~£25 for the drive and £10 for a USB 3 caddy. Xbox can have two external games drives attached so you can have and SSD + a bulk store HDD for other games. Considering the cost of a One-X to play the same games with nicer pictures I don’t think an SSD is much of an investment.
As for durability, for the 240GB drive above it’s rated for approx 73GB per day over the 3 years warranty which is enough to copy across a new AAA title every day for 3 years at the huge cost of 3p per day. With more typical usage patterns, e.g. just using for a selection of games that don’t change that often it will likely outlast the drive in the console. With SSD, reads have almost no impact on cell wear so you can read without degradation. With a HDD every action adds mechanical wear and judging by the drive light and speedup of loading Horizon loves to thrash the disk. My oldest SSD has been the system drive in a 24/7 windows server for 5 years and is still working fine.
External HDD’s are typically less reliable as they are crammed into small cases with poor ventilation. Most HDD’s are rated at 15-30C operating temperature, try maintaining that drive temperature in summer or in a centrally heated home with any significant usage. A loud noise is enough to impact the read speed of HDD and those little 2.5 inch drives don’t take much of a nudge to to cause issues while spinning as there is so little mass even a minor knock can impart significant G force. Drives in laptops are more resilient as they are part of at 1.5kg + brick. Try reading the one star reviews on a popular forest based e-tailor site to see just how endemic failures are.
Also I note you don’t say what external drive you’re using, if you’re comparing an internal laptop drive to an external laptop drive of similar capacity why would you expect any difference. The limiting factor in XBox drives i the speed of the drive as it gets full. The outer tracks (start of disk) transfer data >2 times faster than the inner tracks therefore loading a game and pulling data from the drive will perform significantly worse if installed on a full disk than an empty disk. No such issue with an SSD.
As for graphics, I was referring to the One S which is linked to the TV begin significantly worse than my PC which runs Ultra @ 1440p > 60fps on a 8 year old CPU with a 2 year old mid range GPU. I’m sure I can get more FPS but I use the frame limiter as it stops the fans spinning up @ 100% GPU load.
Thank you for the detailed info but I’m afraid it doesn’t really add to the discussion in a meaningful way. It sounds like you are trying to convince Xone-X owners to get an SSD … and for what purpose? To avoid texture pop in? The way the textures pop in and out around the exact same spot in Photo Mode tells me that is how the console will handle them - no matter what your storage hardware.
My HDD is a WD “my passport” 2TB model running at 5400rpm. Almost no vibration at all, super-quiet and barely gets warm while gaming even with the room air conditioner off.
games load faster on the external; the texture pop in seemed to go down a little on FH4 but has remain unchanged in FM7.
This is annoying that’s all. With the One-X’s specs, one would expect zero texture pop in…
Thank you for the detailed info but I’m afraid it doesn’t really add to the discussion in a meaningful way. It sounds like you are trying to convince Xone-X owners to get an SSD … and for what purpose? To avoid texture pop in? The way the textures pop in and out around the exact same spot in Photo Mode tells me that is how the console will handle them - no matter what your storage hardware.
My HDD is a WD “my passport” 2TB model running at 5400rpm. Almost no vibration at all, super-quiet and barely gets warm while gaming even with the room air conditioner off.
games load faster on the external; the texture pop in seemed to go down a little on FH4 but has remain unchanged in FM7.
This is annoying that’s all. With the One-X’s specs, one would expect zero texture pop in…
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5400 rpm says it all. Go for at least a 7200 rpm you savage.
Thank you for the detailed info but I’m afraid it doesn’t really add to the discussion in a meaningful way. It sounds like you are trying to convince Xone-X owners to get an SSD … and for what purpose? To avoid texture pop in? The way the textures pop in and out around the exact same spot in Photo Mode tells me that is how the console will handle them - no matter what your storage hardware.
My HDD is a WD “my passport” 2TB model running at 5400rpm. Almost no vibration at all, super-quiet and barely gets warm while gaming even with the room air conditioner off.
games load faster on the external; the texture pop in seemed to go down a little on FH4 but has remain unchanged in FM7.
This is annoying that’s all. With the One-X’s specs, one would expect zero texture pop in…
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5400 rpm says it all. Go for at least a 7200 rpm you savage.
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Really? MS expects people to buy 7200rpm drives to… avoid texture pop in? That’s just wrong…
BTW, I haven’t noticed pop in any other games on my One-X so far except FM7 and FH4.
If you look closely at decto’s comments, immediately before the comment you quoted, he was talking about a One S. Which I believe is what he was referring to when he says ‘Just a shame the XBox graphics are nowhere near the PC’. The One X graphics quality and performance are much closer to PC graphics capabilities … even comparable to mid- to lower-high-end gaming PCs.
You have to be cautious with external drives and Xbox games, this doesn’t apply to SSD but most external HDD will go into sleep mode if data isn’t read for awhile. This tends to occur if you don’t move around the map and was a common reason for game crashes in the other Forza games or games like fallout 4 where you might be in one area for a long time. Once you would try to leave an area, the HDD would take too long to spin up and the game would crash. Just a heads up for people reading this and thinking about grabbing an external, it’s not a cure by any means unless you are grabbing an SSD. Also tbh, the root cause of pop-in like you described in your first post is typically a GPU memory issue, specifically it not having enough, rather than HDD read times. This is an issue that has become worse for obvious reasons in the aging original Xbox one and S
Didn’t I mention I’m on the One-X? Why am I seeing pop up on a system with 12MB GDDR5 RAM? Faster GPU, faster CPU - and still texture pop up?
I’m noticing pop up in FM7 as I see a car in the distance and close in - bam, more detail pops up. Same goes for distant objects and shadow - it’s very mild and subtle kind of pop in, but noticeable nevertheless. I’ve never noticed pop in while playing FM7 at least when I had an OG X-one.
Maybe I should move FM7 back to the One-X’s internal and see if that makes a difference. Sure, menu to game load times and menu to track times may be slightly longer - but if it means no pop in on a system that’s allegedly “the most powerful console ever”, then i’m willing to move it back to the internal.
Not too happy to see pop in while playing both games on a One-X, to be honest. Somewhat regret making the upgrade.
It’s possible that the game just isn’t optimized well for the X and was made primarily as one edition for all three xbox systems running it. I don’t really have a way of comparing them side by side since I only own the original xbox one, and to be frank the FPS get so low it feels almost unplayable for me. I primarily play on PC and during certain patches of the game, have also experienced some pop-in especially with foliage (1080TI 7700K and 16GB OF 3600 RAM). Maybe I should state that with most games, pop-in is GPU memory related, but with forza, its possible its just poor optimization on all platforms. I just haven’t played enough of this game on console to make a good comparison of how it looks compared to PC.
I’ve just determined that the start up time is internet related. With internet disabled it takes 1 min 11s from the time I click the game icon to when I can start driving.
I’m on a PC though and Horizon 4 is installed on a M.2 SSD.
