The availability of a hard drive in each and every PS3 means that SOCOM: Confrontation could not have been made for any other system, according to Sony Computer Entertainment America's Seth Luisi.

On Sony's official blog SCEA's director of development says:



For those of us who don't have a degree in computer science, the game dumps data off the Blu-ray disc onto the internal hard disk, which has a streaming rate that's over eight times faster than the Blu-ray disc drive. Loading data from HDD means SOCOM can rapidly transfer and update high resolution elements - for example, textures - into the PS3's memory when they're needed. Relying solely on Blu-ray, or indeed DVD or HD-DVD, games must instead have textures hanging around using valuable memory as a buffer. Being able to have less data in memory means you've got more space for bigger, shinier textures, geometry and other next-genny stuff. Nice.

Bear in mind, of course, that this comes from a Sony employee speaking on a Sony blog, so he was hardly likely to tell us the game would have been possible on Mega Drive cartridges. The fact remains, however, that the definite availability of a hard drive on the PS3 clearly opens up doors for developers.

Below are some screens Luisi released to show just the kind of detail he's talking about.

For more on SOCOM: Confrontation head over to SPOnG's dedicated game page. Share this item on... Comments >>