http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-348-1.htm
Being a video game developer (I develop for both, Playstation 3
and XBOX 360) people ask me almost daily which platform I think is better. These are my personal feelings, in no way does this reflect my employer.
Short answer: XBOX 360.
Long answer: Price, performance, visual quality, game selection and online support. I think the XBOX 360 wins in every category.
Price: This is obvious; the XBOX 360 core is only $299. The PS3 is around $499 for the 20GB version. It comes with a hard drive, but you don’t need a hard drive to enjoy a lot of great games on the 360 so I think it’s fair to compare both core systems.
Performance: On paper, the PS3 is more powerful. In reality, it’s quite inferior to the 360. Without getting into too many details, the three general-purpose CPU’s the xbox360 has are currently FAR easier to take advantage of than the SPU’s on the PS3. I suspect a few years down the road some high budget, first party PS3 exclusive titles will come out that really take advantage of the SPU’s and do things the XBOX 360 can’t, but I don’t think the console is worth buying based on this speculation (for some it will be though, we'll have to wait and see how these games turn out).
Graphics: The XBOX 360 is a clear winner. The GPU is more powerful. It has more powerful fillrate, and far more pixel and vertex processing horsepower. Part of the reason is their choice of memory, and architecture of pixel and vertex procesing. I can’t get into details but the same vertex shader will run much slower on the PS3 than the XBOX 360. The 360 also has a clever new way rendering high definition anti aliased back buffers. To accomplish the same effect on PS3 is prohibitively expensive. For this reason I think many games will have no choice but to run in non-HD resolutions on the PS3 version, use a lower quality anti aliasing technique, or do back buffer upscaling. The end result in all cases is going to be noticeably worse image quality.
Game Selection: The XBOX 360 has a huge head start here. 1 year is an eternity in gaming. Almost all multi-platform developers have made the XBOX 360 their primary platform due to timing of release-to-market, this means the games will look and perform better on the 360. The PS3 versions will be ports of the 360 versions. (The opposite was true for XBOX 1 vs. PS2). The XBOX 360 is also far faster to develop for due to better development tools (massively popular Visual Studio .NET vs. proprietary, buggy PS3 compiler and debugger), better documentation, and easier architecture (3 general purpose CPU’s vs. 8 specialized processors that require DMA). Timing has also caused all next-gen middleware developers to make XBOX 360 their primary platform, and they will ‘add ps3 support’ as needed. This support will probably be inferior to the XBOX 360’s due to manpower and more importantly, demand. It’s this catch-22 now that will continue to drive the 360 forward and hold PS3 back.
The other obvious point here is that right now the Xbox360 already has a very impressive line-up of titles on store shelves; the ps3 just launched, and has virtually nothing of interest. Also, many 360 games are already discounted. PS3 games are all full price since it just launched.
Live: Microsoft’s online support with XBOX1 was phenomenal. They built in-house experience, user base, facilities, $$ commitment from executive level (since it proved successful), and most importantly, feedback from 100,000s of XBOX Live subscribers. Playstation 2’s online support sucked. They are now playing catch-up, trying to emulate Xbox’s model. But they had their hands tied just trying to make the PS3 work, it was incredibly ambitious (blu-ray etc.). I haven’t seen it yet, but I seriously doubt the quality will be anywhere to the level of XBOX 360.
HD Content: The PS3 comes with one built in (blu-ray). The XBOX 360 offers HD-DVD as an add-on for $200. You probably don’t care about HD-DVD right now. But you will soon (The quality between DVD and HD is comparable to VHS vs DVD, if you have the right TV) so I suggest paying attention to the war that’s begun. There are two formats: HD-DVD and BLU-RAY. Basically if you rent a BLU-RAY DVD from Bockbuster, it won’t play in your XBOX 360 HD-DVD, and vice versa with the PS3. The implications of this format war would require another article on its own. But as far as the consoles are concerned, the XBOX 360 wins because the DVD player is a separate unit. Playing movies is very taxing on the DVD reader, and let’s face it. In 3 years when your PS3 DVD drive goes out due to playing lots of movies (PS2 was notoriously bad about this) you will have to go buy another PS3. With the 360, you’ll just chuck your HD-DVD player, and go buy another one at the store. In 3 years standalone units wlil probably only cost about $99-150. Another point for the XBOX 360, is that I don’t know who will win the format-war, so I would rather wait with purchase of a HD player. The PS3 doesn’t give you this option.
PS3 controversy: Shootings, Wallmart fights, $15,000 Ebay sales etc. My advice is ignore it. It will pass soon.
Performance
If you pay attention to actual game developers, and not the angry fanboys, you will learn that no, the Playstation 3 doesn’t have “more graphics power” than the 360. The fact is, XBOX 360’s Xenos GPU itself has far more computing power than the RSX GPU
that resides in the PS3. Does this mean the 360 has “better graphics”? I don’t know, that is a subjective matter, beyond the scope of this objective
comparison, and entirely up to you to decide. If you like what you see
on the PS3, then to you, it has “better graphics”. If you like what you see on
the 360, then there you go. That is all subjective, and not the goal of this
article. The CPU power is another story however; on paper the Cell has a lot more potential than the triple-core Xeon that resides in the 360. Last year, I wrote,
…I fully expect the PS3 to win this category - eventually. To what extent, I’m not sure (very likely it’s only going to be the blockbuster first-party titles that take full advantage of Cell), and when this will occur, I’m not sure either. Obviously, one full year wasn’t enough.
One year certainly wasn’t enough, but were two? That’s a subjective matter,
and up to you to decide. For my money, not many games look better than MGS4 on
PS3, and Killzone 2 is looking really good. However, “Blockbuster” exclusives will almost always look
really good, and comparing one to the other is pretty much pointless.
If Killzone 2 is any indication, it looks like PS3’s Cell architecture is finally beginning to flex its muscle. It is possible that the 360 has already met its full potential, and the PS3 is still getting there, at least for AAA exclusives
are concerned. That is purely conjecture though, and that’s not what this article is about.
XBOX 360 had a huge advantage in most third-party games in 2007. We wrote that first of all, games aren’t really “Full HD” at this point. Games run in much lower resolutions in order to keep the overall quality and effects high. Make no mistake; you need a PC to play games with high detail, full HD graphics; both consoles lag far behind a well equipped PC. But I digress; when it comes to third-party titles throughout its first year, PS3 games were often late and featured noticeably lower quality graphics when compared to the same games on 360. Is that the case now? Sort of, but it’s not nearly as bad. Let’s take a look at some familiar multi-platform games of 2008:
- Fallout 3 - looks essentially the same on both, but PS3 version lacks antialiasing. The PS3 version initially had bugs, but they have since been patched.
- Bioshock - Despite coming out a year later, the PS3 version of Bioshock was pretty much a mess at first. Some of the textures are noticeably lower, and the framerate stutters often. A patch improved things, but the framerate is still lower.
- Dead Space - The developers have been quoted that working with Sony is “challenging” so the old mantra of the Sony and Playstation being tough to work with hold true to this day. Thankfully, they were able to manage a good experience on both consoles, and both versions play about the same.
- Soul Calibur IV - The 360 version runs in a 960p frame buffer, but Namco-Bandai decided to downsample the 360’s resolution down to 720p to smooth the image rather that utilize AA. However, the difference is not significant, so both versions look pretty close to the same (the 360 does have some extra lighting effects). Since you can download both Darth Vader and Yoda on either version, even that has become a moot point.
- Devil May Cry 4 - Remember this one? It came out in 2008 as well. Unlike most games, this isn’t a port from one console to another. Rather, Capcom develops their games on a tri-platform engine (Framework MT), then compile them for PC, PS3, and XBOX 360. Antialiasing is present on the 360 version, since it is essentially ‘free’. To keep it running at 720p with a decent framerate on the PS3, Capcom utilized a pseudo-AA effect by shifting frames and creating a blur effect. It does smooth things out, but during fast moving scenes it tends to stand out.
In the end, I think we can say that multiplatform gaming is getting closer to parity, but it’s not quite there yet. The 360’s superior graphics power is especially applicable to multi-platform games
that do not get a lot of development time to make full use of Cell architecture,
and the XBOX 360’s GPU allows it to run at higher resolutions while eliminating jaggies with “Free” Antialiasing.
Furthermore, Playstation 3 titles tend to ship with bugs that get patched at a later time. This is nothing new to PC gamers of course, but definitely quite new to console gamers (and not exclusive to PS3 either - plenty of XBOX 360 games get patched as well).
You should also consider that many games require a mandatory installation on the Playstation 3, and in many cases load times are still about the same as a DVD would be. With the XBOX 360, you have the choice of installing a game to the hard drive, and when you do you will instantly notice faster load times and quieter operation. Comparing DMC4 load times
on an installed PS3 version to an installed XBOX 360 version is quite significant.
