I just got home and am now downloading the game, but...if I boot this up tomorrow morning and it's got those same draw issues as outlined in a fully installed 360 game...I don't know how I'll react to that. I'm no graphics snob but I'd like to think if I'm buying a game digitally I'm buying the full potential of said game. This would be a major blow for digital distribution if the PSN version is nerfed in any way by being a default full install.

I'd like to not believe it but the pre-load thread is getting more and more populated with comments in the affirmative.

Um, i just started playing the download version and there is noticable chugging in cutscene bits.

That said the plant in front of the lifegaurd house higligthed in the comparison video seemed to load in right away... But the early cutscenes does chug noticably..

On the reddit thread about the issue someone link to this potential fix.

http://community.us.playstation.com/t5/PlayStation-Home-Support/Restoring-your-PS3-File-System-amp-Database-Helps-to-Maintain/td-p/37322987

I went through the procedure and immediately felt the PS3 as a whole was faster in the XMB and while loading trophy data. I just started playing the game and didn't see any of the texture pop-in shown on the fully installed 360 version of the game. So far it's very smooth and no major noticeable texture pop-in.

This is on a first gen slim model with the 120GB HDD. It didn't take very long either. The "rebuild database" warns it may take several hours but it didn't take more than 2-3 minutes with about 70 GB of data on the HDD.

I did option 3 but not option 4 and the PSN version definitely had the same issues as the Digital Foundry video. This is disappointing.