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Adinnieken on 07 July 2012
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Aielyn said:
SvennoJ said:
If the WiiU becomes too popular it might become the lead platform and then the ps4 and Xbox3 will be stuck with the ports. 

History has shown that, so long as they're within reasonable range of each other, the weaker system is always the lead platform. But then, history has also always shown that the weakest system is always the winner, so that may be the reason for the general correlation (with the exception, the Wii, being due to the huge difference). I suppose that it's theoretically possible that the Xbox 3 or PS4 is within range of the Wii U, and outperforms it, and thus one of them becomes the lead platform.

Anyway, the thing to notice is that, most of the time, the Xbox 360 is the lead platform for 360/PS3 titles. It's because it's the weaker system - if they make a game that can run on the 360, they can be comfortably sure that it'll also run on the PS3.

The Xbox 360 has not been the weaker of the two systems.  If anything it is on par with the PS3 in terms of performance.  The PS3 does have the better CPU, but that CPU is hurt by the memory architecture and GPU.  Contrast that with the Xbox 360, which offers a better GPU and unified memory and its tri-core processor with six hardware threads compares rather favorably to the PS3. 

The reason the Xbox 360 is the lead platform for most third-party games is because it is the easiest of the two to program for.  Getting a game to work on the Xbox 360 is meaningless when porting it to the PS3 because in order to get the game to work on the PS3 you need to build the game so it takes advantage of the SPEs, that requires significant management of processing and resources. 

Some early 3rd-party games in the PS3 life-cycle were direct ports of the Xbox 360 version and they were horrible.  Instead of taking advantage of the SPEs, the games used the sole PowerPC core (PPE) for all the work.  The Cell isn't like a Intel processor with 8 cores or the Xbox 360s Xenon with 3 cores.  They would be symmetrical processors.  No, the Cell is a parallel processor that uses the PPE to manage the code running in the SPEs.  There is a lot more work involved in getting code to run on the PS3, which is why some games are led with the PS3 rather than the Xbox 360.