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The biggest game of the year has finally arrived. The latest chapter in the Modern Warfare saga may well be short on revolutionary new concepts and never-seen-before technology, but what Infinity Ward and co-developers Sledgehammer and Raven have delivered is a supremely enjoyable, highly polished package that offers a ton of value across its principle single-player, Spec Ops and multiplayer components.

While the Call of Duty games have enjoyed mammoth levels of success across both console platforms, the game has arguably found its home on Xbox 360. Putting aside DLC exclusive windows and a perceivably higher level of multiplayer performance, the core technology itself just seems to run better on the Microsoft architecture: every metric we've run on COD titles from Modern Warfare onwards has produced a palpably higher performance level on Xbox 360.

The Resolution Game

First up, the good news is that the resolution disparity between the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 that was introduced with Black Ops hasn't been carried forward into the latest iteration of the Infinity Ward engine: the underwhelming PS3 res of 960x540 is no more. Both versions run at the standard COD resolution of 1024x600 with 2x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) applied. This sub-HD reduction from standard 720p has been standard since the first Modern Warfare game, and allows the developers to maximise the 10MB of eDRAM attached to the Xbox 360 GPU, while the reduction in fill-rate frees up precious RSX resources on the PlayStation 3.

Performance Analysis

So with these noticeable - and not so noticeable - tweaks to the PlayStation 3 code, the question of performance needs to be addressed. Call of Duty is a series that defines itself by the intimate connection between the player and the controls: the 60 frames per second target frame-rate is the key to the ultra-responsive controls and the great "feel" of the game. Both Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops were clearly sub-optimal on PlayStation 3 when compared directly with the Xbox 360 releases in this regard, so let's take see if things have improved with the new release.

In order to get the best outlook on overall performance, we have two different tests that regular readers will be familiar with. In this first experiment, we used the extensive engine-driven cut-scenes in the game to judge performance directly, head-to-head. This should give us a very good indication of how well each version of the game copes in dealing with what is essentially the exact same content.

Looking at a series of scenes from the final game, we can confirm that this conclusion holds true, and that the performance level of the E3 demo is very similar indeed to the retail product. Improvements to PlayStation 3 frame-rates were also promised and while it's clear that the Xbox 360 version does command something of an advantage over its counterpart, the gap does appear to have narrowed. At worst we do see the same sort of 10FPS-15FPS advantage that we saw in Modern Warfare 2, but overall, there is the perception that PlayStation 3 frame-rates are improved across the overall run of the video.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-off-modern-warfare-3