IGN

An interesting nugget of news has come out of last night'sBattlefield 3 preview event in San Francisco held by EA and DICE. While speaking with GamerZines, DICE's Patrick Liu revealed that the game would allow players to install content from one disc that would let the game stream higher resolution textures.

"There's a voluntary install on the 360," Liu said to GamerZines. "I think Rage did it as well, where you can install content to stream higher res textures. We're pushing that technology to the limit, and compared to our competitors, I would argue that we're the best looking game." 

IGN reached out to EA for a statement or confirmation on this additional feature, and they responded: 

"Battlefield 3 for Xbox 360 ships on two disks with endless hours of spectacular high-definition gameplay; disk one features the stunning multiplayer, co-op levels and HD installation content, and disk two features the superb single-player campaign." 

Additionally, we asked EA whether or not the game would offer the same feature for PS3 owners, and fortunately this seems to be the case. "The PS3 version requires the same install but it's all on the one blu-ray disk," a spokesperson for the company confirmed. 

So, it appears that the game will offer support for HD installations across both platforms, resulting in better looking graphics in exchange for some HDD real estate

http://ie.xbox360.ign.com/articles/119/1198976p1.html

thats so f*cking wierd... who thinks about a design decision like this?? and also.. I'm guessing the fugly Beta is the low res stuff??

Wow this is really cool and a very unusual thing on consoles right? I hope this paves the way for more options tweaking on consoles in the future.

I bet it won't help the graphics' that much

This is very common among first party Sony games. Naughty Dog has talked about using the HDD to improve textures since Uncharted 1.

im confused, how do all the Uncharted games get away with no installs or load screens (same goes for Killzone and God of War)

those games are the best looking of this generation, would they look even better with an install and load screens?

It all has to do with background streaming during cinimatics, an HDD in every PS3, and .pak + defraging content to make it as quick as possible to access.

http://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog-GDC08-UNCHARTED-Tech.pdf

This is a doc that they showed at GDC 2008 that very lightly describes how they did it. I will look around more to try and find a more in depth explanation. 

Crysis PC and console are best looking this generation

im not going to get into this but, i was clearly talking about console games.

bringing in PC games is stupid

I wish all FPS's would just burst into flames and disappear. Except Bioshock. That one gets me all hot and bothered. xD