The PS3 is still a pretty chill music player, with its support for MP3, AAC and ATRAC3 audio formats, and it’s XMB interface. A nice feature was its ability to import compact disc audio tracks for storage on its internal HDD or a USB connected drive. As part of the import process, the PS3 would automatically obtain song titles from its Gracenote database which would obtain the artist, album and song information, along with any album art if this was available.
At some point this functionality had stopped working, meaning the PS3 can no longer automatically obtain the required information.
A solution to this was to manually type in the required information before you import the CD, which can be very laborious when using the Dualshock controller since you must rely on the onscreen keyboard. Even if you were to attach a USB (or Bluetooth) keyboard, the process of typing in the song and album information can take a while for large albums.
Whilst software exists that can automatically acquire information for MP3 or AAC audio, few or none currently exist for ATRAC3 encoded files.
Why use ATRAC3? Well its supposedly more efficient compared to MP3, although its debatable how much better it is compared to WMA or AAC. It is a format unique to Sony, so it feels right to use it on their own hardware.
A solution is to use a more up-do-date media player that supports ATRAC and that can retrieve audio information from the Internet. This is where Music Center for PC comes in, originally designed to sync and transfer songs to Sony’s modern Walkman players, and is the successor to Media Go for the PSP, or SonicStage for Sony’s earlier digital Walkman’s.
Here we can scan and analyze the tracks using a Windows PC with the Sony Music Center software. This will involve copying the album from the PS3 console onto an external USB drive which can be done from the XMB.
Connect the USB drive to your PC, and when Windows detects and mounts the drive you will need to instruct Music Center to scan/import the files to its database. The PS3 by default will copy music files to the MUSIC directory on the drive, which is where we need to point Music Center to.
Once Music Center has added the correct tracks, we can acquire the missing information, Right click on the song or album, and then select ‘Acquire unknown properties’. Music center should then start processing and update the song information. This will then update the file itself, so the PS3 should be able to read this information.
As useful as this utility is, it does get things wrong. Here this Third Eye Blind had a few of the track titles mixed up. My guess is any album that had a different track listing for certain regions might fall victim to this.
Album art also does to appear to transfer over, but that’s not much of a loss.
Hopefully this will be useful to those who would like to use their PS3 for music purposes, and wish to take advantage of the ATRAC format. There is probably better software that can achieve this, which might be something to look into.
PowerVR graphics processers aren’t very common in the desktop PC space, you’re most likely to encounter them in mobile devices, having been used on the original iPhone, all the way to the iPhone 6S, various early Android devices like the original Samsung Galaxy, Galaxy S4 and the Google Nexus player. In the console space, the Sega Dreamcast and the PlayStation Vita have both used PowerVR for their graphics processors. On PC though, they did release a few early 3D accelerators during the late 90s, known as the Kyro Midas3/PCX and later Kyro series of 3D processors. They were mostly satisfactory for their time, but nothing remarkable over its competitors like Nvidia or 3DFX. They did make use of their own API (SGL) before adopting DirectX.
Still Intel had their own line of integrated graphics chipsets, so why license the PowerVR?
Well its mostly due to die size and power consumption, with PowerVR chipsets being focused on the mobile marker, which Intel was desperate to get into. They even produced mobile phones that featured x86 processors running Android. In this case, we have a thin client (A 10Zig 58xx) that comes with an Intel Atom D2550 that has the PowerVR embedded, running at 640Mhz according to its Wikipedia article. Although I suspect it will throttle based on heat.
The SGX545 is based on Imagination’s tile-based deferred rendering (TBDR) architecture, a hallmark of PowerVR GPUs and is often brought up in Dreamcast Vs PS2 Comparisions across various message boards. This approach splits the display into tiles and performs rendering only after determining which surfaces are visible, reducing memory bandwidth usage and improving efficiency, a nice feature to have when the GPU shares memory bandwidth with the system.
I would have liked to show the Intel Graphics Utility but the utility refuses to start, crashing instead. This could be because Windows Thin PC is missing something the utility requires (.NET Framework 3.5). Oh well, not like those Intel Control Panels did much anyway…
Apparently this chip a complete fail with Windows 10, meaning its best to use it with Windows 7. Considering I’m running this on a thin client, I opted to use Windows Thin PC which is geared for such devices plus it has a lot of auxiliary stuff removed, ideal since we only have a 16GB DOM.
The system memory appears to be a single 2GB module ruinning at 1066MHZ, no idea of much that memory bandwidth affects gameplay. Now ther is an option within the BIOS, or Efi to change the amount of reserved RAM. By default it was set to 8MB, with the option to go all the way up to 48MB. I’m not sure what impact this could have on performance, since Windows reports the same amount of VRAM regardless of what option is set, although the reserved memory amount does change in the System Performance Monitor.
Games
Lets see what the typical experience for running game would be, despite this hardware being made anything but playing games. The GPU is supposed to have full DirectX 9 compliance, however given the power limitations I figure its best to test titles from the early 2000s era with a few 90s games to see how the drivers fare with older titles.
GTA III: Nearly what I consider to be playable, and the driver does not crash unlike the GMA950, but there are some weird seeming issues (white dots in between textures) that is visible on the roads. Also the headlights have this weird trail that shows even when pointer trails are turned off in the game settings. Still, in terms of framerate we hover around 17fps.
Driver: This one failed spectacularly, here we have missing or clipping textures on the road and on the environment. The car wheels have completely disappeared and parts of the road popping in randomly. Despite changing the graphics details and resolutions settings, I cannot seem to fix these issues
South Park Rally: This runs almost perfectly and has an average of 32fps, but some character models are missing details. This also affects Ms Crabtree’s bus in the first level.
Need For Speed Underground: At 640×480 we mostly hovering around 24fps, with most of the settings turned down low, low.
Unreal Tournament 2003: Shadows a glitchy/fickly, especially when you die, or when you se the flax cannon. But we do get good framerates with medium to low resolution t 800×600.
Halo Combat Evolved: This gives a more stable framerate compare ot the SiS Mirage, but we get a few missing graphics effects. But at 640×480 the game is playable when we disable decals, shadows and set the particles to low. Typically we get a steady 30fps when walking around. We get some dips to 17fps when entering a new area, or when there are a few enemies on scree.
Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter: Apparently this game detects there are hardware shaders during the install, but has issues detecting the video card memory. Trying to run the game gives us a whole mess of polygons, and if we try to enable any graphics effects, the game will just crash. Unfortunately this was unplayable.
The Sims 2 Open For Business: We get a bit of flickering on the title screen after the intro, which then continues into gameplay, mostly affecting the HUD elements. The default graphics settings gives us low performance, but by lowering these down to their lowest settings (with the exception of texture quality) we can playable performance. 800×600 has us an average of 22fps, whilst 1024×768 gives us an average of 16fps on a graphical busy lot like the Pleasant’s.
True Crime – Streets Of LA: Running at 640×480 at low graphics settings, we are treated to glitchy graphics. After 1 minute of the introduction sequence, the screen went black while the audio was still playing, I was unable to restore the game and had to open Task manager.
Reopening the game resulted in a BSOD, the first I have received on this system. The error appears to be due to the igdkmd32.sys file.
After a quick reboot, I was able to get back into the game, cutscenes mostly play at around 26fps, but in game whilst running around the city nets us a high of 7fps. I managed to play for another 10 minutes before the game crashed again, taking the graphics driver with it.
Revolt: After installing the latest patch, we got a ’Can’t flip display buffers’ error whilst the game is trying to load the main menu. Installing RVGL gives us a Shader compilation error instead. As it stands, the game refuses to run.
Conclusion
So it’s a bit of a disaster with many of the games experiencing either poor performance or just completely broken graphics. Its clear why Intel decided to abandon this arrangement as I suspect the drivers are core to the issue. Intel would later focus on scaling down their own graphics hardware to be more efficient for mobile devices, to the point where the Intel Compute Stick was possible.
The Graphics Media Accelerator 950, or GMA950 for short—kinda like the trusty steed for budget PCs and laptops back in the day.
This GMA series is all about keeping it simple. It can handle DirectX 9, Pixel Shader 2.0 and all—but it’s missing hardware Transform and Lighting, so it’s still reliant on partial software rendering. Not much of an issue if you have a decent CPU and are playing games that are geometry heavy. Were not going to be able to run modern games, or even the latest games when this graphics chip was released, but is ideal for older titles—think early 2000s stuff—or just watching DVDs, because it’s got MPEG-2 hardware acceleration to keep the picture smooth.
A look at GPU-Z, the clockspped may vary depending on the OEM implementation. Like all onboard graphics, it shares some part of the system memory. The main CPU being used here is the Intel Pentium Dual Core T2300, with the memory being clocked at 666Mhz.
The Intel GMA graphics utilty, which lets you adjust aspect ratio scaling options, useful if you wish to preserve the aspect ratio without stretching the display. You can also adjust the rotation of the screen and change the gamma settings. 3D settings are limited to forcing settings such as VSync, S3TC texture compression, triple buffering and anisotrophic filtering which can be forced in games. Unlike the Nvidia control panel there is no way to specify the settings for each individual game itself, instead you can only enable it globally.
Games
A look at the performance and general experience of a select few games, whilst the GPU would have fared portly with modern game, or even games form when it was released (2005), we can see how well some of the older early 2000 titles would have fared, along with a few retro titles. We are using Windows Vista Home Basic, 32bit which is what this laptop would have shipped with. Windows XP (and 2000) are alternative versions that could work easily also. There is no support for Windows ME or 98, Intel deprecated driver support for those system in 2004. This does put us in an awkward position for games that have issues running on the NT line of operating systems, but with the correct patches, many will work well.
Driver: Works exceptionally well, even with some of the transparent textures that were problematic on the SiS Mirage 3. On the highest graphic setting with 1024×768 resolution, we get a locked 50fps with 32bit colour. You can set a target FPS within the game options, but the highest is always 50.
Half Life: The original Half Life relase, Using the DirectX render. Here we are running the game at 1024×768. Thoughtout opening sequence we got a high of 72fps, dipping to around mid 40fps during some of the open sections.
GTA III: Running at 1280×768 (the notebooks default screen resolution) at medium draw distance, we Geta smooth 30fps at the start of the opening sequence, but drops to around 15 during the rain effects onscreen, likely due to the shared memory bandwidth. During gameplay I got a display driver stopped working notification, and the screen would keep going dark/blank for a few seconds before going back to normal. Also parts the desktop keep appearing during gameplay.
I might try this one agin with an updated driver, unfortunately Intel dropped all of their old drivers on their support page, and this one was the latest I got forms he Toshiba support page. Update: Installing the latest drivers from Windows Update fixed the freeezing and driver notifications.
Turok: This initial failed to start, returning an sgl.dll error which is a PowerVR driver. I also received another error “ Driver failed, application terminating “ To get the game to start I had to navigate to its install directory and delete three dll files (glide/PowerVR and 3DRAGE) leaving only the Direct3D dll file. This then allowed the game to start. For whatever reason it assumed my GPU was a PowerVR one… We are able to run the game at decent average of 37 fps at 800×600 resolution with all of the effects (fog, mipmapping, bilinear filtering) turned on. Compromising to 640×480 does give us a boost to around 38fps average, but not much.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2: No major issues with this one, we can crank the resolution upto 1024×768 with ‘Normal’ rendering quality, which we seem to be unable to change. Expect to get a locked 30fps all throughout.
NHL 2001: Runs fine at 1024×768, although we are unable to fine tune the graphics in this game, its more or less equal with the PS2 counterpart.
Rallisport Challenge: We get a message informing that we need a video card that supports hardware transform and lighting, and as such we are unable to run this game from 2002. T&l became a mandatory requirement for many AA/AAA games from 2002 onwards, however its disappointing a 2005 graphics chip is unable to run a game from 2002.
Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2: A racing game that does work regardless if your graphics card has hardware T&l or not, here we are running at the full resolution of 1280×800 and we get a high of around 44fps. Settings the car, worked details and the special effects settings to the lowest helps get us to around 55fps,
Knight Rider: The Game: Running at either 800×600 or 1024×768 gets us an average of 26fps during the training mission on medium detail. However there is some rendering issues with the textures flickering on certain buildings.
Unreal: Runs mostly smooth, during the opening sequence we can almost hit 60fps, averaging to around 54fps an high details, at 1280×800 resolution.
UT3 is primarily focused on online multiplayer action, continuing the fast-paced, competitive tradition of its predecessors. It offers eight game modes, including classics like Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, alongside newer additions such as Duel, Warfare, Betrayal, and Greed. The game emphasizes close-quarters combat and projectile-based weaponry, with increased gravity and the removal of dodge-jumping (though dodging, double jumps, and wall-dodging remain) to create a more grounded and intense experience compared to earlier entries.
The single-player campaign diverges from the traditional tournament ladder format of previous games. Instead, it follows a five-act storyline centred on James “Reaper” Hawkins, a mercenary seeking revenge for his clan’s slaughter by the Necris forces. The campaign integrates cinematic elements and cooperative play options, pitting players against AI-controlled bots in a narrative-driven conflict.
The story kicks off in the Unreal universe, post-Unreal Championship 2, with humanity locked in a messy war against the Necris—a race of pale, nanotech-enhanced freaks who’ve been a thorn in everyone’s side since the original Unreal. You play as James “Reaper” Hawkins, a grizzled soldier in the Ronin squad, a tight-knit crew of mercenaries working for the Izanagi Corporation. The campaign’s set against a backdrop of corporate warfare and alien invasion, with planets getting trashed and colonies caught in the crossfire. It’s dark, it’s chaotic, and it’s got that Unreal edge—think industrial wastelands, glowing tech, and a whole lotta bloodshed. Malcom and Lauren make a return, but Brock seems to be missing.
One thing that stands out is the characters design, taking cues for the Gears of War series with the make characters sporting powerlifter physique, yet they are still quite nimble in game. This does contrast with UT’s gameplay style, as it has always promoted fast and twitch area movements, whilst Gears is a lot more slowed paced where characters go into cover more often and make use of melee (or chainsaw-lancer) attacks. It does feel these character designs were Gears rejects as they were a departure from the previous games.
Comparison to previous titles in the series
UT99 set the gold standard—fast, brutal, and pure. It was all about twitch reflexes, with tight maps like DM-Deck and weapons that felt like extensions of your soul. UT2003 cranked up the pace, added dodge-jumping, and leaned into a floatier vibe, though it stumbled with a weaker weapon lineup and less memorable maps. UT2004 fixed that, doubling down with Onslaught mode, vehicles, and a massive content drop—peak variety, peak chaos. Enter UT3: it dials back the floatiness with higher gravity, cuts dodge-jumping, and refocuses on close-quarters intensity. It’s snappier than UT2003/2004 but doesn’t hit UT99’s raw simplicity. New modes like Warfare (Onslaught’s evolution) and Greed add flavor, but they don’t land as hard as UT2004’s sprawl. UT3 feels like a compromise—tight and polished, but missing some of that unhinged freedom.
UT99’s arsenal—Shock Rifle combos, Flak Cannon gibs—was untouchable, perfectly balanced chaos. UT2003 tweaked it, nerfed some classics (Lightning Gun), and felt off. UT2004 brought back the hits, added the Avril, and kept the sandbox wild. UT3? It sticks close to the classics—Rocket Launcher, Flak, Shock Rifle all feel beefy—but tweaks like slower projectiles and a beefier Impact Hammer shift the rhythm. PhysX on PC adds flair (explosions kick up debris), but it’s cosmetic, not game-changing. It’s solid, but UT99’s purity and UT2004’s variety edge it out slightly.
UT99’s multiplayer was a juggernaut—LAN parties, Facing Worlds sniping, pure bliss. UT2003 stumbled with matchmaking woes but had potential. UT2004 was the king—huge servers, modded chaos, and Assault’s return. UT3? It launched strong with crisp netcode and PhysX flair, but the community split over its grounded shift, and Epic’s focus waned fast following the success of Gears of War. The official master server died in 2023, while UT99 and UT2004 still have diehards running custom games. UT3’s Titan Pack tried to juice it up, but it couldn’t match the staying power of previous titles in the series.
Other 2007 shooters, like Halo 3 (released September 25) and Team Fortress 2 (October 10), fell somewhere in between. Halo 3 blended arena-style combat with slower pacing and a focus on teamwork, while Team Fortress 2 leaned into class-based chaos with a lighter tone.
Versions
Microsoft Windows: The best way to play the game, although it has since been delisted by Epic and is no longer sold on Steam. There was a retail version of the game, but even those copies are limited to offline bot matches unless you modify the games ini files to use a custom master server. Still this version will run well on most modern PC’s and Epic even takes advantage of Nvidia PhysX technology if you have a supported graphics card, and the PhysX pack that adds a few exclusive maps to take advantage of the technology.
Nvidia did remove 32bit PhysX support recently with the latest version of their drivers (for the RTX5000 series), so it might be useful to keep an old Nvidia rig going for the older PhysX game, or simply dual boot with a version of Windows that has the older Nvidia drivers installed.
With PhysX enabled, the game turned into a playground of dynamic eye candy with debris flying everywhere, glass shattering into a million jagged pieces, and explosions. Performance-wise, though? It was a mixed bag. If you had a high-end Nvidia card—like a GeForce 8800 GTX or better—you were golden, soaking in 60 FPS with all that PhysX goodness cranked up. But if your GPU was Mid—tier, you would see performance impact. PhysX was a resource hog, and without a dedicated card or a beefy GPU, you’d see frame drops during the crazier moments. Epic patched it over time—by version 1.2 or so, it ran smoother—but early adopters definitely felt the growing pains. Back then it was recommended to have a second Nvidia card dedicated for the PhysX processing, something like the GT8600 series was advised.
Was it game-changing? Not really—UT3 was still about skill and speed, not physics gimmicks. But it was a hell of a flex for its time, a taste of what next-gen destruction could be. By 2025, it’s a cool footnote—modern engines like Unreal 5 do this stuff natively—but back then, PhysX in UT3 was like strapping a jet engine to an already wild ride.
PlayStation 3: A very interesting console adaptation, this version is a very well designed port that takes advantage if the S3’s hardware, but is still a bit too early to take advantage of the Cell processor, so expect a few frame-drops during a lot of action.
What is really interesting is how Epic tried to bring as much of the PC as possible to the console version of the game. Keyboard and Mouse controls are supported by plugging them into the USB ports of your PS3, and you can possibly even use Blueooth keyboard and mouse, althroug I’ve not tested the BT keyboard since I don’t have one to hand. This makes the game play very close to the PC versions since you benefit formt he accuray that mouse aiming provides, but you are segregated from controller only players. When setting up a game server, you are givern the option to allow both or just either controller or KB/M players.
Where Epic went beyond was with its mod support, you can install third party maps and skins for the game the have been compiled specifically for the PS3 version of the game. There are some limits however, Trophies are disabled when anything custom is loaded, possibly to prevent trophy exploits. Ways of installing mods were through the ingame browser, or importing it through a USB drive that awas FAT32 formatted.
Lastly you can also install this version of the game to the HDD, which is optional but useful to speed up loading times and to reduce wear and tear off the Bluray drive.
Xbox 360: This version feels like an after throught since it lacks the titan pack that both the PS3 and PC versions received, due to Microsoft’s policies regarding free DLC. However this prison is still playable online, and is compatible with the Xbox One and Series Console. In fact you can still purchase this version of the game digitally for use on the Xbox One and Series consoles.
Conclusion
In 2007, UT3 represented the pinnacle of the arena shooter—a genre rooted in the ‘90s with Quake and Unreal Tournament ’99. It was a love letter to veterans who craved speed and skill, but its timing was unfortunate. The industry was shifting toward narrative-driven and progression-based shooters, a trend Call of Duty 4 epitomized. CoD4’s influence reshaped multiplayer gaming, spawning countless imitators, while UT3 struggled to maintain relevance, with its online scene dwindling over time.
That said, UT3 wasn’t without impact. Its engine technology powered countless games, and its modding community kept it alive on PC.
Tecmo has brought Xbox gamers Dead or Alive 3, and if you’re a fighting fan, this is, simply put, a prime reason to own the system. As advanced as the sequel was, DoA3 trumps it in every way. Visually, the game is mind-blowing, the 16 characters are fantastic looking and the arenas even more impressive. Advancing on the play elements from the second game, DoA3 offers up a fine helping of both one-on-one and tag-team action. It sports the usual array of game modes — story, survival, team battle, single and tag-team matches, and even watch. Dead or Alive 3 proves to be the best fighting game in years not simply because of graphic panache and cool options, but largely thanks to its incredible playability and refined fighting action.
The counterattack and throwing system has advanced to become more versatile and playable. Novice gamers can learn to play easily, while advanced brawlers can do things like counter throws and even foil the other player’s counterattack moves. Most of the 16 characters have distinct martial arts styles. Although some of the characters (such as Leon and Bayman) are a bit too similar, gamers are sure to find a fighter that suits them. The three new characters add a lot of flair for fans of the game, adding two new lithe and stylish female fighters and a humorously laid-back drunken-style Kung Fu expert. Another noticeable improvement is in controls of the two wrestling characters, Bass and Tina, who are far more usable and entertaining this time around, complete with some incredible combination wrestling throws. From the Bruce Lee-like Jann Lee, to a full compliment of ninjas, soldiers, assassins, and, of course, teenage girl Kung Fu experts.
The arenas actually have almost as much personality as the fighters themselves. Some of these exotic locales are multileveled maps where you can kick your opponents off the edge, then watch them plummet down to the next level at a pace so breakneck, it’s almost vertigo inducing. You can fight on cliff tops, in gritty urban streets, in a stunning ice cavern, on a beautiful beach, or in a truly incredible-looking forest, among other locales.
Being exclusive to the original Xbox console, DOA3 is able to pull off effects that are difficult for the PS2 to do, your characters will leave trails in the snow on a wintry landscape, crash through neon billboards, or just break through stone or ice pillars whilst achieving a good level of texture detail. The fighting arenas in Dead or Alive 3 are, by far, more interactive than in any other fighting game out there. To sweeten things up even more, a fighter’s moves actually change depending upon where they are in the arena. For instance, if you throw opponents near a wall or obstacle, they’ll often use the wall in some way — usually by slamming the other character right into it.
The audio work is terrific, especially when using the Dolby Digital 5.1 capabilities of the Xbox. Aside from the opening and end credit tunes by Aerosmith, the soundtrack in general is excellent. Fighting effects sound great, and the Japanese dialog is well done, even if some of the English subtitles suggest that Tecmo could really use a real writer for the story.
The story mode is the weakest link in the game. Dead or Alive 3, like virtually all these fighters, alludes to a deep, complex story and background for its characters. Unfortunately, aside from slight interludes and fantastic-looking, if generally pointless, prerendered end movies, any actual meaningful bits of plot are almost nonexistent for most of the characters. While this is a fairly slight complaint, a little more effort put into the characters’ individual sagas within the game would have been nice. This is something Tekken 4 does better with its narrated cutscenes.
A moderately larger complaint is that the end boss is ludicrously cheap. He can’t be thrown, has magical distance attacks (something none of the other characters have), and hurts you when he falls. But worse than that, the game switches to an almost behind-the-character viewpoint when fighting him. While he has plenty of weak points, this new bad guy is often incredibly frustrating to take on depending upon the character you choose. The end boss should have been done much better and brings the game down.
Just the same, the story mode is fairly inconsequential compared to the sheer magnitude of the rest of the game. In multiplayer, with two to four players battling it out, Dead or Alive 3 is a good addition to the Xbox and one of the few true exclusives for the console. Stunning graphics, great sound, and topnotch gameplay all add up to an incredible debut for the series on the Xbox.
Booster Disc
The North American version had a limited amount of costumes compared to the European and Japanese versions. Tecmo did release a Booster pack to add additional costumes to the game. This was provided by some of the OXM (Xbox Magazine) discs, and was also included with Dead Or Alive 2 Ultimate. Alternatively a copy can be obtained here.
Installing the Booster pack is a simple as inserting and running the disc, and then installing the costumes. For this booster disc, it featured as a demo for Dead Or Alive 3. I’m unsure if there is a way to install this on the 360 console since it uses an emulator that runs off a whitelist.
Custom Costumes
You can also use this to add additional costumes to the game. To install you will need a modded Xbox, or an ability to write files to the Xbox’s E partition where the game data is saved. If you have a soft modded Xbox, you can just FTP the files across. There are limits to the amount of costumes you can have, but a lot of the ones I downloaded had worked fine.
Modern Xbox’s
Tecmo have since release it on the XBox one and Series consoles as a backwards compatible title, running in a much higher resolution on the One X and Series X models.
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