MikeB said:
Of course, the 360 had a one year headstart and a more mature development environment from the beginning (because the PS3 includes much better and newer cutting edge technology and Microsoft re-used tools on the 360 from Windows speeding things up) which resulted in the bulk of multi-platform games being lead on the 360 platform. Despite some very crucial hardware differences it's due to the PS3's bulk power the minor differences between current multi-platform games aren't really that big (basically most games are virtually identical in the eyes of many, some are slightly better on the PS3 and others on the 360) unlike what Eurogamer claims (they usually sound like 360 fanboys lacking technical knowledge). The reason why multiplatform games look identical is that they take the slowest platform and set the graphics level at that system and hey presto you've got an identical looking game. So most definately they are leaving performance on the table. The real specifications differences can be judged based on the exclusives. The PS3 exclusives are technically much more impressive than its multi-platform games, while 360 exclusives are usually of similar quality from a technical perspecitve as its 360 lead multi-platform games. NO! Subjective, subjective, subjective is the word. Its impossible to make a comparison unless the games are identical or of similar genres/art style. There aren't many yet and of those there are the Xbox360 holds its own. Likely the development of future multi-platform games will be lead on the PS3 because the development requirements to get a good performance out of the PS3 are also beneficial to 360/PC versions. It's a better more effort requiring approach, but it will improve the quality of the game engine overall. Likely the differences between multi-platform games will not change dramatically in the PS3's favour in the short term as developers are unlikely to fully tap into the PS3's additional headroom. Like the devs behind Ghostbusters stated thet could have pushed twice as much on screen if the game would have been designed to be a PS3 exclusive. They will not change for the most part. When developers get good at setting a decent graphics level that both systems can perform at, multiplatform differences will disapear. It's the PS3 exclusives where you will see great differentations and I hope this will push multi-platform game designers to tap into the PS3's potential as well, so they aren't left behind in comparison. It was funny, it was actually the PS3 fanboys screaming at the quality differences that caused the games to become similar. So its doubtful that they would risk a similar outcry from the larger Xbox360 userbase. Especially for developers in the U.S. It also pushed the price of Cell coders up and makes PS3 games more expensive to develop currently. IMO it's a similar situation as with the Amiga and Atari ST early on within their lifecycle. There's no doubt the Amiga was far more powerful, but early games were designed around the Atari ST hardware specs (for example using mono sound instead of the Amiga's superior stereo audio specs, for example using 16 colors from a 512 color pallette while later games used 100s of colors onscreen from a 4096 color pallette all Amigas are capable of, some early games used a flipscreen approach as the Atari ST wasn't that good at scrolling while later Amiga games had dozens of parallax scrolling, etc). Some games early Atari ST / Amiga games were identical and sometimes even ran faster on the Atari ST hardware. |
Tease.
