The Mega Texture Behemoths: Rage and Brink
#Ps3 hdd reader ofw ps3#
Now, let's see what these drives can do with some actual PS3 gameplay. The hybrid stores the most frequently accessed drive sectors onto solid state memory and our thinking was that the drive may well identify that partition and attempt to make use of it. Secondly, the PS3 also uses the HDD as a cache for developers to use as they will. Firstly, we wanted to factor in a 7200rpm drive (which should see seek times drop considerably). We added the Seagate hybrid to the mix for a couple of reasons. We based our comparisons across three different drives: the standard 60GB HDD that shipped with the launch PS3, a hybrid SSD/7200rpm Seagate Momentus XT, and finally a Samsung PM800 SSD: hardly a state-of-the-art model, but it shouldn't really matter - seek time is king here, and some might argue that 500MB/s throughput is sort of irrelevant when your host system only has 512MB of RAM in total. So can an SSD actually improve in-game performance? We decided to put it to the test across a number of titles. Games such as id software's Rage demonstrate how developers are coming to rely on the hard drive extensively, while a plausible theory behind the Skyrim lag issue is that the developers relied on the hard drive to cache data in order to make up for the PS3's RAM issues - a school of thought borne out by our dealings with the company in addressing Rimlag: all of our communications with Bethesda seemed to be about the drive we were using and the state it was in.
Developers are reaching the limits of the machine's performance, and faced with RAM shortages, game makers are turning to the hard drive to stream in content behind the scenes. The bottom line is that the PlayStation 3's life cycle is maturing.
#Ps3 hdd reader ofw upgrade#
So perhaps now is the time to reconsider the merits of an SSD upgrade - or at least to consider the merits of a faster drive. So can faster HDDs improve game performance?" "Developers are reaching the limits of the console performance, and faced with RAM shortages, game makers are turning to the hard drive to stream in content behind the scenes. The HDD has a head that scans across the platter for the right part of the disk from which to read in data, while the SSD has no moving parts, meaning virtually instant access to any file, anywhere. Loading times are improved on many titles such as Gran Turismo 5, and you can shave seconds or even minutes off lengthy mandatory installs, but there's little evidence that in-game performance is affected at all.ĭespite our findings, SSD performance videos proliferate on YouTube and a majority of them seem to be suggesting that there are tangible improvements in making the upgrade.Ī hard drive on the left, an SSD on the right.
Previous research has suggested that the advantages of running an SSD in a PS3 are slight to say the least - indeed, Digital Foundry's PS3 hard drive upgrade guide struggled to find many advantages. Everything is written to flash RAM, and every file is accessed with ultra-low latencies - file access is typically in the region of 0.1ms. Normal HDDs work by moving a head across the disk platter, seeking out the file the host unit is asking for, then reading it in. SSDs are an enormous upgrade over conventional mechanical drives because they have no moving parts. While this is true for virtually every games console out there, PlayStation 3 is unique in that you can upgrade the stock hard drive with any kind of replacement you like - and that includes state-of-the-art SSD (solid state disk) technology. It's impossible to upgrade the in-game performance on your console, right? Every unit is the same, so the gameplay experience should be identical on every machine out there.