Hmm.. can't say i've noticed any performance boosts, but Vice City Stories drains the battery real quick now.. much quicker than LCS?
Didn't pay attention to the battery life before the update.. maybe it is just VCS pushing the system.
I wouldn't say that Sony has bumped up the clock speed though, they won't be doing that for a very long time.

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I thought that the processor speed was clocked by the game itself and not by the firmware

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3.00 works great. I only have the problem when I use the web browser for too long that the internet slows down but other than that everything runs smoothly.

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I've noticed a slight increase in load time with Tales of Eternia. Nothing insanely significant but it is a few seconds faster non the less. I won't say that it has sped up the game play though.

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My psp is sucking down power. Havent noticed any major differences but i'll check on my 2.8 psp and post back. I did notice lots of nice little tweaks to the browser that werent advertised.

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Instead of vague remarks such as "3.00 caused my battery to drain faster" or "3.00 gave faster load times for this game here", we need a benchmark by an inpartial body. Volunteers?

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It is not an increase in clock speeds. The PSP's clock is controlled in software on a real-time basis. It can change many times over the course of gameplay. A simple menu can dial it down to a small fraction of the maximum setting in the dev kit compiler and bring it back up as more processing power is needed. Sony provides tools to developers to let them determine what requirements a given situation requires and set changes accordingly.

It is entirely possible that some frequently accessed firmware functions have been optimized. For instance, if the WiFi support has been made to cause less CPU overhead, this would make more cycles available for the game code at the exact same clock rate. If a game doesn't use specific timing and just lets a chunk of code run at the speed an earlier generation of firmware allowed, then the game can run differently if changes to the firmware alter the execution time of the code. This can be disatrous in some cases, greatly affecting gameplay and not just visual elements like the blink rate of a cursor.

It's pretty similar to what was seen in the early days of PC gaming before it became accepted that allowing system speed to determine timing within a game was a no-no.

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Programmers may be able to throttle down the CPU with the devkit, but clock speed isn't adjustable above 222MHz. What was said when the PSP launched was that Sony had locked it down - and that devs COULD NOT adjust it to full capacity.

I doubt they've bumped CPU speed across the board since Sony themselves claimed that compatibility from game to game might suffer. It probably is just optimizations in UMD and UI firmware code.

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That's funny, because just yesterday (befor reading and therefor independently from this rumours) i noticed something about the performance. Usually (FW < 3.00) when you were writting text with the psp and you held down the X to cycle through the characters it would get stuck or at least lag after 5 to 10 characters. Now with FW 3.00 when i hold down the X it just keeps on running without any lags. Can someone confirm that? Because i for one think that this is a sign for that rumour to be true.

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increase in selecting music tracks and speed in fast faward video or slow backward in video playing. hope it doesn't screw up my pro duo card:)

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I think my music was also playing faster. Not sure if the mistake is mine bu it flet like the songs were playing faster, i'm running firmware 3.1

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Music playing faster??? oO
Guess you just downloaded remixes..

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Since updating my firmware to whichever one came before 3.0, (2.87 or something? Who knows) I've found that joystiq and all the fanboy sites run so slooooooow it's unbearable. I used to browse through them all in bed at night, now I can't bring myself to because it's such a tedious enevour. I'm talking like 3 minutes or so to bring it up. Anyone else having these troubles?

Check for me will ya guys? I have 2 psp's and it's the same with them both since the firmware upgrade.

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I've noticed that since the update before 3.0, my psp takes like three minutes to load up both Joystiq and that fanboy sites. Was kinda hoping 3.0 would fix the problem but no joy to be found.

Anyone else having this problem? I have two psp's in my house and they're both the same since the update. It's to the point now that I don't browse any of the afformentioned sites on my psp anymore. Let's face it, who wants to stare at a loading screen for 3 minutes?

And when the hell for that matter are they going to get around to letting us use the space on our memory sticks as a cache for the browser? It's a pretty overdue tweak that's for sure.

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It's not exactly a test, but since I updated to 3.0 I have noticed having to recharge more frequently. So much so that I was thinking it must be time to buy a new battery. I haven't noticed a change in game performance, but I don't have any games I consider laggy. I have avoided Tomb Raider because of reported lag, so it may be time to give it a try. It may also be time to buy a higher capacity battery.

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Anything that reduces the waste of life that are the loading times is welcome.

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3.0 supposedly caused problems with Jeanne de Arc's loading, so it does sound like 3.0/3.1 did indeed tweak the loading system in some degree. I got a 3.0 and a 2.8 at home that I'll mess around with after I get off work, I'll let you know if I see anything interesting.

-Colin

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For those of you having problems accessing Joystiq, Engadget and this site from your psp browser. It seems like these sites have added something new that the psp browser is not liking. What I did to get around this is to disable flash in the tools menu of the psp browser. Things have gone back to normal after making this change.

Hope this helps

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#8

This is simply not true. There was never anything in the firmware to prevent running at the full 333MHz. The 222MHz limit was in the SDK. The software would simply refuse any higher input. This could be bypassed with some effort but would likely be noticed by Sony in testing. Homebrew software has long offered means to speed up the PSP since it isn't under Sony's control.

As for the time to load this site, have any of you looked into m.joystiq.com or m.pspfanboy.com ?

Great taste, less filling!

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I never said the CPU speed was set in firmware. I said the UI speed increase is likely optimizaions in UMD or UI code set in firmware. I'm not a coder, this is an assumption on my part.

With the devkit, programmers can throttle the CPU back but yes, Sony would likely hold back any candidate submissions if they found them clocked higher than 222MHz. That, as far as anyone knows at this point, is still the case. Obviously, homebrew has been offering 333MHz for quite some time.

I agreed with you, that it's not likely that the PSP has seen a universal CPU clock increase to 333MHz.

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