Remember when Sony unlocked the clock speed on its PSP half way through the handheld’s life? Well, the company has found a way to increase the performance of its PS3 console, opening up 70 MB of additional RAM for game developers. This was done by reducing the footprint of the system firmware from 120MB to 50MB during recent updates. Since the operating system now requires less RAM to well, operate, that leaves more for greedy games to use for textures, graphics and other effects. Considering that the PS3 has 512 MB of total RAM, the increase could correspond to a 13% boost in memory performance.

Sony spokesperson Patrick Seybold explained the news to Joystiq:

“Since the launch of the PS3, we have been continuously making efforts to reinforce our support system to game developers, allowing them to express their creativity freely on the PS3. As part of this support for game development, the size of the PS3 OS memory footprint has been reduced through network update for the game developers.”

The impact is likely to be felt mainly when it comes to graphic textures and effects. While multi-platform games in the past have tended to look slightly better on the Xbox 360, we can expect to see much closer performance in the future between the two consoles thanks to this additional memory. It might also make PS3 exclusives like Heavy Rain look even more incredible than they already do.