http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-castlevania-lords-of-shadow-face-off

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow operates at native 720p on both systems, but neither uses any anti-aliasing. This level of parity extends to all aspects of the game's visual make-up: lighting is effectively identical, shadowing is exactly like-for-like right down to the filtering technique used, and the texture quality and filtering are the same.

Developer Mercury Steam appears to have opted for a zero-compromise approach to its work here: it's basically impossible to find fault with either version as they truly are almost completely identical. The fact that the team has managed to achieve this while creating an engine technology that is state of the art in so many ways is even more impressive, and that's something we hope to look at in more depth in the near future.

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It's usually the case that even in the best cross-platform projects there are specific effects, levels or scenarios that favour one console's architecture over the other's. What we find in Castlevania is something different - almost identical frame-rate graph lines, with almost equal variances in the same scenes at the same times. Where the readouts do separate it is without exception in favour of the PS3 version of the game.

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While there is a performance difference between the two games, for the most part they look and play the same. The biggest difference between the two versions is that Mercury Steam couldn't cram Castlevania onto a single Xbox 360 DVD, and without the masses of storage space available that it has on the PS3 Blu-ray, it spread the game across two discs instead.

The question is why? Is there really two discs' worth of game here? To get some answers we took a look at the disc structure of the PS3 version, and found out some pretty interesting information - actual game data accounts for 4.12GB, while there's a big folder called "movies", weighing in at 7.5GB. That's the real reason why the 360 game is spread over two discs: there's a whopper amount of pre-rendered cinematics here and ironically many of them are based on in-game engine visuals.

Now, the good news is that Mercury Steam's strict adherence to platform parity is such that the exact same movie encodes are used on the Xbox 360 version of the game - indeed, they're byte-for-byte identical to the files found on the PS3 Blu-ray, meaning completely identical image quality on the pre-rendered cut-scenes. Neither the developer nor the publisher compromised the product in bringing it to Xbox 360.

The bad news is that Bink video compression has been used - the same codec that cheapened the appearance of Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360. Back in our FFXIII Endgamefeature, we highlighted how more modern compressors can bring about increased visual quality and/or smaller file sizes - obviously something that would be rather handy on the Xbox 360 version of Castlevania.

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In terms of the impact on the gameplay experience, the two-disc setup is a touch intrusive but nothing that is going to overtly affect your enjoyment of Lords of Shadow. The game has 12 chapters in all - five on disc one, seven on disc two - and the change-over point is seamless enough; you swap discs and the game doesn't bother you again. However, part of the game's charm is that the powers you unlock in later sections of the game allow you to access areas of earlier levels, adding a lot to the replay factor. You can even go back whenever you want and continue the main quest at a later date.

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Nevertheless, for console owners with the luxury of choosing between the two SKUs, it's got to be the PlayStation 3 game that gets the nod. Both versions have somewhat variable performance, but on the Sony platform you get a few extra FPS in taxing situations and there is some extra zing to the controls. While the disc-swapping situation on 360 is hardly a massive bother, it's annoying that there is any at all when you have the game fully installed onto HDD, and the fact this is eliminated completely with the extra storage space of the Blu-ray on PS3 can only be a good thing.

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Pretty impressive what Mercury Steam have accomplished here then. My only disappointment is that they use Bing for video compression, when there are other codecs that work so much better!

All the detail is why I love Digital Foundry. You get it all. :D

I never got whats wrong with Bink. I know that I usually play on smaller screens, but is it that obvious on larger monitors/TVs?

what the hell is "extra zing to the controls"

As the framerates are higher on the PS3, the controls are more responsive. That's the "zing".

It's not very good at compressing, so you either have to settle for low quality images to get a decent file size or settle for huge file sizes to allow for better images. In this case, they reduced the FPS to 25 in these cinematics, so they had more bandwidth to preserve image quality with, it would certainly have been better to have the FPS be 30 instead without compromised imagery.

Digital Foundry made an analysis on the subject when FF13 came out that sums up why Bing sucks pretty well, see it here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-final-fantasy-xiii-endgame-article?page=3

Injects Red Bull into your veins every time you get a good combo.

OT: Mercury Steam did a pretty damn good job, especially with their reputation not being that great. It seems like the PS3 edges out with a smoother framerate, better sound and a single disk, differences don't seem to be incredibly noticeable though.

it sounded like they were two seperate unrelated reasons.

See what can be accomplish if developers for once stop with their stupid rushed ps3 ports?

OT: Good results multiplats should be like this all the time.