How To Increase MW2 Visuals & Overall Performance!

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Got this from another forum im on and tried it last night and it works...360 obviously since the april update. dont forget to put your map packs on there too.

Im Using a Corsair 32GB GTR Tests reads around 35Mb Read.

This is not new information. Everyone should know this. However now it can be FAR more taken advantage of due to letting us use USB keys as storage space! =D
Ok! As we all *should* know. MW2 performs some "texture trickery" to increase the visual quality of the game textures.
A visual representation of this is found in the second game I recorded for the girls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVRMZy4BorU&feature=player_embedded

Background:
While not new to PC, previous console games load one quality texture & use that all the time. Unfortunately there is only so much memory to hold textures in! Consoles are very strapped in memory amounts so they just can't keep *all* the textures loaded with high quality textures. The penalty for not keeping them loaded is long access times to go find the texture & get rid of textures you may be using currently!

MW2 is different in that ALL textures are HOOOOORIBLE quality! This is to save space! Then as the game thinks you have higher quality textures in your view, it loads higher quality textures.
Have you ever noticed how poorly things looked @ the start of a match? Have you ever noticed when viewing a lot of different visuals on a map that the quality is very low, rather "mushy" or "blurry"; only to have things sharpen up slightly later??? That's the low/high texture swapping going on!
The time to load textures from:
A PS3's disk up to 8 seconds!?!?!?!?
A 360's disk up to 4 seconds!?!?!?!?
A 360's hard drive (INSTALL THE GAME TO YOUR HARD DRIVE) is up to 1 second!?!?!?!?
As you can see... If you are playing MW2 you HAVE GOT to put it on your 360's laptop hard drive!
Access times are very, very long on optical disks! Hard drives fare much better, but random accesses are still EXTREMELY laggy vs the rate your CPU and GPU *need* access to the information it wants...

With the new dashboard update, now there is a manly man's option! Install the game to a USB flash drive! The bandwidth throughput is not as much VS either a hard drive or optical disk, but the access time is as instant as you can get away with! Random access times in particular no longer have a penalty!
Menu's in COD load instantly. It's |-| close navigating menus to what it is playing on a PC where the entire game can be loaded into ram. Playing the game... ALL textures at the start of matches are loaded before the game counter hits 8. Some maps (with short LOS off the spawns) load by 9 on the clock! Try THAT on your disk or the PITIFUL $20 laptop hard drives microsoft attaches to the 360s! LoL!
For example. 100% movement speed class + marathon + LW. You can NOT see low quality textures running around favela. Even bouncing from rooftop to rooftop as fast as possible. WASTELAND is much improved! Hello sniper! No more ghillie suite hiding you! (Not because the suites work, but because your texture hasn't loaded yet LoL!) Underpass, Rundown, Invasion, Estate, Derail & Afghan all have notorious spots for texture loading = SOLVED.

MW2 VS cod4 or W@W... While they all run the same 50-55fps average on 360, hit detection, minor loading times player movement rates. All feel rather nerfed. MW2 has just never had the fluidity the previous games had. Installing to a USB key goes a LONG way into making the game more fluid!
Most 360 games come in around 6.7-7.2gb. MW2 specifically runs 6.8gb. Youll want a USB flash drive larger than 6.8gb. The higher the bandwidth the better!
 
I call shenanigans to be quite frank. Also:

A PS3's disk up to 8 seconds!?!?!?!?
A 360's disk up to 4 seconds!?!?!?!?
A 360's hard drive (INSTALL THE GAME TO YOUR HARD DRIVE) is up to 1 second!?!?!?!?

Where did this come from?
 
just passing the info on as stated in my OP. But it works and i see a noticeable difference in load times and how quickly the "Quality" texture appear. Some people even seem to think hit detection is better but im not 100% on that one myself yet.
 
just passing the info on as stated in my OP. But it works and i see a noticeable difference in load times and how quickly the "Quality" texture appear. Some people even seem to think hit detection is better but im not 100% on that one myself yet.

Well, I'm no computer buff but I would think access times on a HDD are faster than a memory stick?

Also the original post states how a 360's HDD is double the speed of a PS3's? Colour me sceptical but...... I'm sceptical :p To me it just sounds like some guy has decided to try load a game onto a stick and when it worked fine thought he would make it sound super leet so he can get virtual back slapping points on the net!
 
makes perfect sense mate flashdrives use memory which is like sub 0.5 ms access time hard drives are often above 10ms.

If your talking about the speed of hard drives then yes what you and i would buy for a PC would now get somewhere around 120Mbps out of say a F3,7200.12 or black but microsoft are mass producing a games console where the speed isnt really needed and use a cheap slow 2.5 drive.

The only game i know of this improving is MW2 so far due to the way it swaps the textures but a 16GB 35mbps flash costs next to nothing now and most people have them lying around so give it a go.

but first go into an online game and dont move but look at the detail of everything and you will see it swap over to the "Quality" textures.

As for the PS3 Vs Xbox HDD times i have no idea if its correct as it all depends who's tried to skkimp on quality the most.
 
Well, I'm no computer buff but I would think access times on a HDD are faster than a memory stick?

Also the original post states how a 360's HDD is double the speed of a PS3's? Colour me sceptical but...... I'm sceptical :p To me it just sounds like some guy has decided to try load a game onto a stick and when it worked fine thought he would make it sound super leet so he can get virtual back slapping points on the net!

It makes sense to me. A HDD is still in essence a read & write disc which is relatively (in fact, very) antiquated and slower when placed against flash and solid state storage. Secondly, I would also think that propriety designs would tend to fare much better than generic designs that work across a broad spectrum of devices as opposed to being built just for one platform.
 
Really speaking this has nothing to do with mw2 itself rther anygame on the 360

Still for the best result you need a memory stick no bigger than 8gb
I always though twice the size is twice the access time for usb sticks

But i may be wrong
 
size of the drive has little to no effect on access time and it doesn't help with all games its just the way MW2 uses texture swapping that the access time improves performance. Every game will benefit but you will not notice it like you do with MW2.

Also you want a 16GB as MW2 is 6.8GB plus 0.4GB for stimulus and 0.4GB Resurgence which will be 7.6gB ish but dont forget there will more than likely be more map packs due soon and you dont wanna spend out more when you could have done it right the first time round :)
 
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just passing the info on as stated in my OP. But it works and i see a noticeable difference in load times and how quickly the "Quality" texture appear. Some people even seem to think hit detection is better but im not 100% on that one myself yet.

Lol, no chance. That's the placebo effect in full swing.
 
There is no reason why it wouldn't work. Define faster though? In terms of bandwidth they are a LOT slower, but in terms of random access time they're substantially quicker. In this case access time seems to be more important for texture loading.
 
If your memory stick has quicker access times than your xbox hard drive then I'm guessing that yes, you will load into games slightly quicker.
 
so if ive installed it to the xbox 360 HD it can reduce my load time by 1 second ??

rather not bother buying a flash drive especially for this to save 1 second. This is the real world after all, not the PC benchmarking world, as 1 second is nothing.
 
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