Watch Impress recently ran a great article discussing the finer points of the PS3’s 2.20 Firmware Update. Apparently movie studios are satisfied with BD-Live functions in PS3 and its processing speed and graphics rendering is much faster than dedicated players and the performance gap won’t get any narrower soon. Even among current BD-Java titles, some are doing performance profiling in a loading screen and show richer effects on PS3. Such differentiation by player performance may happen for BD-Live too.
In additional, in-game XMB is one of the features discussed at SCE, but they can’t comment on the date and so on yet. Although some of the XMB functions are already available in-game by an update, not many games support them yet. The web browser runs faster and has better streaming support than before. Though they can’t comment on which particular service they’ll support at this point, it will be improved further.
The main target of mosquito noise reduction is recordings from digital TV. It assumes a use case where a user plays a long MPEG-4 AVC file recorded on a BD. The upconversion in 1.80 was useless for a noisy movie, so noise reduction (not only the specific function of mosquito noise reduction, but also other filters) has been improved in 2.20. Though mosquito noise reduction is high on the processing load, the total load is lower than that of the first version of the PS3 BD player or 1.80. In 1.80, it was almost full load when upconverting a DVD, but not now due to optimisation. Currently it doesn’t reach full load unless it plays back 2 AVC streams in Picture-in-Picture while running high-load BD-Java. Excitingly, the engineers say on the subject of 1080 deinterlacing: “please look forward to [it]”…
