PlayStation®3 Support

[Ziggurat-06]

Is it better to have a game installed in the hard drive rather than running it directly from a disk? In the case of the Unreal Tournament III I was able to test this and the loading times were the same for both cases (the game says it should improve though). What does this mean?

I noticed also that the more downloadable content I add to that game in particular makes the game slower, just in the loading parts not the game itself.

Installed or not installed, the game takes now 65 seconds to return to main menu now that I have a lot of downloaded packs. Not to mention that every new pack I download takes more time to unpack into the PS3 than the last one no matter its size. Nowadays it takes me 15 minutes to install a new map or whatever even if it is only 1.2MB. Why is that? Is it because of the RAM?

Also I heard someone say that it's better to have the game not installed when having many mods so the system will read from the disk and the hard drive insted of reading all of it fron the hard drive. Is this true?

If anyone knowledgeable about this could help me out here I will really apreciate it!

[gkpama00]

It doesn't matter.  The PS3 isn't an XBox.  PS3 games generally don't give you any choice about whether to install the game on the hard disk.  When the game disk runs for the first time, it will install whatever files it is programmed to in the Game Data Utility.  That is all that you can copy to the hard disk drive.  The only way to install the entire game on the hard disk is to download it from the Playstation Store, if it is available for purchase there.  If you download the game, then it can only be installed entirely on the hard disk drive. DLC is always installed entirely in the Game Data Utility.  You have no choice about where it goes.  Adding more DLC will make the game take longer to start up.  There are more components to load.  I doubt that the longer install time has anything to do with RAM.  There is something about the installation process of the game that gets more complicated when more DLC is already installed.  It isn't true of all games.

[Ziggurat-06]

I know that I have no choice where to run the game from. I was refering actually to what you just said about some games available in the PlayStation Store, those games won't start with a disk but directly from the HD. So let me rephrase: Let's say Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. If you bought thtat game (like me) you'll have the phisical disk, but now you can also download it from the PlayStation Store. So in which case will it run better?

Now, about the DLC, why does the game takes longer to start up? I mean surely there's more data (let's say maps), but that data is not being used yet, why can't it just BE there and not mess with the loading times? If I have 15 more maps they ahouldn't be loaded untill I start a match with each right?

If the DLC is making too big the file in "game data utility" then which is better: to have the game entirely in the hard drive or to have the actual disk so the data would be loaded from the disk and the HD instead of just the HD? Either way, if it's not the RAM what causes the delay (in loading or installing times), then is it the PS3's processor?

Also, I figured that I could have many mods if I have more than one file in game data utility but that is not possible, all users share the same file (bummer!!) and I'm not allowed to copy it in order to have different version of the same file which would contain different parts of the DLC. Is there a way around this?

Thank you kindly!

[gkpama00]

There is no question that the access time and the data transfer rate of the PS3 hard disk drive is much faster than the optical disk drive, so the downloadable version of the game will never be slower to load than the disk version.  Usually it will be somewhat faster.  However, many PS3 games load textures and other data in the background while they are waiting for you to use the controller, so the difference isn't as large as the difference in raw device performance would suggest.  The downloaded games will generally have less loading time, but often not dramatically less. Blu-ray PS3 games are optimized to run from optical disk.  The performance on the hard disk will never be worse, so it is left to take care of itself.

When a game starts up it has to check all of its DLC so that it knows what to put in the menus.  It doesn't actually load the maps or optional content, but it has to read through it all to see what was installed.  Games don't necessarily have a catalog or registry that they update each time that an add-on is installed, in order to keep track of what is there.  When Modern Warfare was designed, Infinity Ward  probably didn't expect the game to have as much DLC as it ended up having.  It's probably less of an issue with MW3, which was expected to have a lot of DLC when it was designed.