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I'm playing Grand Theft Auto 5 a lot and am wondering if I'll get a performance improvement (loading speed/ rendering) if I bought the digital version off PSN.

I'm using a reconditioned PS3 Slimline 160gig model with a 250gig Samsung 840 Series MZ-7TD250 Solid State Drive.

The idea of running the entire game seemed like a no-brainer. But a bit of Googling turned up the following link comparing Blu-ray to standard hard drive performance:

A bit more Googling shows loading comparisons (but not rendering) between Blu-ray and solid state:

which shows the solid state loading significantly faster.

Long story short the more I searched on Google the more unsure I am if it is a good idea. I already own the game so spending another $100+ (I'm in New Zealand) on the digital version is a bit of an investment.

Does anyone have direct comparisons between the performance (loading/ rendering) of Grand Theft Auto 5 on the PS3 Blu-ray disc vs PSN install on solid state drive?

Would the PSN version on a solid state drive be a worthwhile upgrade?

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    Rendering and loading are independent from one another. The issue you see on the first video you posted is not a rendering issue, but a streaming (loading) one. In other words: The GPU is waiting for higher-resolution textures to load, and is forced to use lower ones (or none at all) as long as those aren't loaded yet. The reason why the disc version loads faster than the DL version is because the game installs part of its content onto the main storage, then loads the required contents from both Bluray and main storage in parallel.
    – Nolonar
    Nov 9, 2013 at 19:35
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    I don't know about GTA5, but in general SSD would be faster than a normal HDD + BluRay. PS3 uses SATA1, which provides a bandwidth of maximum 150 MB/s. HDD used in PS3 slim reads at 65 MB/s and BluRay at around 9 MB/s. That sums up to 74 MB/s read speed, which is almost a half of SATA1. If you run solely from an SSD you will achieve these 150 MB/s, which is twice as fast as HDD + Bluray. As you noticed in second video, the load speed of SSD is more than twice as fast as HDD+Bluray(41 sec vs. 102 sec). Character switching is also +-twice as fast(8 sec vs. 16 sec). Got no info about rendering
    – Novarg
    Nov 9, 2013 at 21:32
  • @Nolonar - you're right, I was using the wrong technical term. As you've explained what I'm talking about is still loading/streaming.
    – BaronGrivet
    Nov 10, 2013 at 19:22
  • @Novarg - thank you for the technical explanation, that was very helpful. If you want to post an answer I'd happily accept.
    – BaronGrivet
    Nov 10, 2013 at 19:23

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I'll repeat myself again(as in the comments).

I don't know about GTA5, but in general SSD would be faster than a normal HDD + BluRay. PS3 uses SATA1, which provides a bandwidth of maximum 150 MB/s(SATA2 allows 300 MB/s and more modern SATA3 provides 600 MB/s bantwidth).

HDD used in PS3 slim reads at 65 MB/s and BluRay at around 9 MB/s(all PS3 models use 2x speed BluRay drives). That sums up to 74 MB/s read speed, which is almost a half of SATA1. If you run solely from an SSD you will achieve these 150 MB/s, which is twice as fast as HDD + Bluray.

And I say that running from an SSD will grant you 150 MB/s because of SATA1 limitations, despite the fact that modern SSDs do have both read and write speed of over 500 MB/s.

As you noticed in second video, both load speed and character switching of SSD is (more than) twice as fast as HDD+Bluray(41 sec vs. 102 sec and 8 sec vs. 16 sec respectively).

And I totally agree with Nolonar's comment.

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