People have been getting their hands on Microsoft's NXE this week and we're finally starting to get some impressions from actual gamers. The one thing that caught my attention was that saving games to the hard drive shows a graphical improvement over spinning from the disc. Ben Fritz from Variety made a post yesterday detailing his experience.

"Fable 2" looks noticeably better. The graphics are sharper and brighter. So much so that it's like the game, or my graphics processor, has gotten an upgrade. Perhaps someone more familiar with programming can tell me why, but I assume it has to do with the fact that it's easier for the console to access and process all the requisite data, so it has to make fewer compromises to deliver me graphics in real time. -- Variety

I'm pretty sure it would improve the amount of "pop-in" which occurs when the disc has to load textures, but I don't know if it would have an affect on how the graphics actually look. We'll keep you posted after we hear more from Microsoft or try it out for ourselves.