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Want Your PS3 Games to Run Faster? Buy an SSD

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The Xbox 360 and Wii are, if you want to stay under warranty, locked entities. You can't upgrade them at all. The PS3, though, lets you swap out a hard drive, and with the coming of the age of solid state drives (SSD), this can result in big performance gains.

Running a series of tests across games using a standard PS3 hard drive, a hybrid drive (half regular drive, half SSD) and a Samsung SSD, tech specialists Digital Foundry have found that, depending on the game, there are some major improvements to be had in both a PS3 game's loading times and associated stuff.

RAGE, for example, looked way better, with much of its annoying texture pop-in resolved. Skyrim gets a big boost too, including a noticeable reduction in the "lag" that's been affecting PS3 owners of the game.

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It's not a magic fix for all games, though. An SSD didn't do squat for Battlefield 3, nor Kingdoms of Amalur, and only made a slight difference to a range of other titles.

You can see the full run-down, including handy comparison vids, below.

Can SSD Upgrades Boost PS3 Performance? [Eurogamer]