Memory Bandwith!!!

[MikeB]

@ Tyrannical

The differences are very minimal. Their focus is selective and mainly judges the porting effort from 360 originals to the PS3. However any gaming expert knows it's the exclusives which normally truly push a system beyond another system's capabilities (you cannot have twice the amount of on screen enemies in one version of the game than another version of the same game, etc, as this would result into an entirely different game).

Some early games had noteworthy issues like Madden 07, but technically when reviewers state Madden 08 is so much better and entirely equal on both platforms. That alone should be an eye opener for less knowledgeable users.

For example with regard to DiRT they failed to focus on audio, to quote the devs:

"Overall Ambisonics complements other aspects of nextGen PS3 game audio, like good quality sample-rate-conversion - rather than the noisy LERPs still sadly common on PCs - plus modern psychoacoustically-modelled decompression, and phase-coherent 512 band filtering on each voice. There’s so much CPU power on PS3 that all this, and multiple reverbs, can run on a single SPU (Synergistic Processing Element, an eighth of the PS3’s Cell processor array) with time to spare.

There are six independent reverb units running in the PS3 version, versus two stereo ones on Xbox360."

Yet they make a big deal of GTA IV's movies running at 24 FPS per second (just like Hollywood movies) vs slightly higher on the 360. Those movies aren't exactly fast paced and look smooth in terms of animation on the PS3 (overall most agree the game actually looks better on the PS3).

Addressing all the games would require writing a bookwork, but really overall they are creating storms in a glass of water. Port quality is now more than acceptable on the PS3, sometimes the 360 has a very slight edge and sometimes the PS3 like with Tomb Raider Underworld rendering in a better resolution, but in any case it's still a far cry from Uncharted: Drake's Fortune technically. Such games are the ones to judge a platform on.

Who cares if in 2009 about a relatively low profile game running marginally better on the 360 (Yes, I know the answer, 360 fanboys of course), when we will have exclusive games like God of War 3, Killzone 2 and Heavy Rain to judge?