LAY!!!  <--- Laugh At You (I just made that up)

How the f*ck do you have the balls to say that the PS3 isn't hard to program for when you have developed ZERO freaking games for the PS3???

Could someone post the average scores of games XBox 360 V's PS3 comparison on same games. That would show which console has the better ports. I believe overall XBox 360 ports would be marginally better than PS3 ports say a couple of percentage points. Not much difference between the two consoles.
Now how about sales of the same games on PS3 and XBox 360? I believe the XBox 360 would be selling more software due to the larger install base. Does it mean either console is better than the other. No. Gebx you have proven that Mike B does not know what he is talking about. Unless you have developed a game for PS3, you would know f#@! all about developing games and how hard it is to program PS3 games and the amount of time and effort that is needed. PS3 has very high development costs for every game. We have seen many PS3 delays in games and heard about how developers have struggled to meet deadlines for games.

I don't mind that the PS3 has graphically inferior ports, but I do mind the frame rate issues cropping up in a lot of games. This isn't one of those issues that all devs are going to magically solve -- there will likely continue to be inferior ps3 ports to one extent or another throughout the PS3's lifetime. But they should become less common as time goes on and the installed base justifies additional effort on the PS3 version.

Yet, it's not enough for me to choose the 360 over the PS3, considering the HUGE hardware quality gap between the two consoles in favor of the PS3.

As far as the whole "PS3 vs PS2" difficulty is concerned, MikeB doesn't know what he's talking about and he's just saying things.  I don't know if you can directly compare the PS3 and PS2, but one of the big issues with the PS2 was its memory architecture.  There weren't any large, fast caches to work with like you typically have with computers (and even consoles) so the big challange was getting the most performance out of the memory you had. 

The PS3 issue is different: you're working with an under powered general purpose CPU and trying to augment it by making the best possible use of its SPEs.  The SPEs don't necessarily lend themselves to all situations, but you can try to design around them.  This makes porting from another platform difficult.  The original PS3 design called for a cell with 2 CPU cores instead of 1 and that would've been a lot easier to get Xbox 360-like CPU performance out of.  That said, CPU performance is not always the limiting factor and there are many 360 games that don't use multiple cores extensively.

At the most this is a *very* simple comparison looking at the top of the problems.  Any programmer worth his salt will tell you that the devil is in the details, not at the most abstract layer.  Don't take this as any sort of serious analysis into the PS2 and PS3, but for those unwashed masses this will give you a very generic idea of the biggest issue with the PS2 and the biggest issue with the PS3 in terms of programming difficulty.

The porting issue comes from the set of assumptions one makes when designing a game.  If you design a game under the assumptions that you'll have lots of fast general purpose CPU time, or that you'll have large memory caches to work with, you'll make certain decisions.  And as you create the engine, you'll make it in a certain way.  If you decide to port this game to another platform that doesn't offer one of these things, you'll find yourself trying to compensate for the assumptions you made which are no longer true, or you'll find yourself undoing almost all of the work you did since the assumptions you made were the basis for the top-to-bottom design.

More games are being designed with the PS3 in mind or as PS3-first developments.  Because it is the PS3 that has the constraints, it makes sense to develop PS3-first and then port to the 360 since your assumptions about the amount of power with the PS3 won't be a problem for the 360.

You've been here a while.  You should be used to MikeB by now. 

This because the SPUs require you to design your code efficiently and well structured, the CPUs aren't that different with regard to running well optimed code. Once you have a PS3 with the YDL6 installed do some coding. It's not hard, but you will be able to spot inefficiencies easily and this is crucial for the SPUs.

Some quotes from developers:

Insomiac Games:

"Conclusions

* It's not that complicated.
* Good data and good design works well on the SPUs (and will work well anywhere)‏
- Sometimes you can get away with bad design and bad data on other platforms
-...for now. Bad design will not survive this generation.
*Lots of opportunities for optimization."

http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/articles/0208/files/insomniac_spu_programming_gdc08.ppt

Article being discussed here at Beyond3D:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=47057

A PC/360 games dev responded:

"Regardless of managed memory or cached memory, the concepts and methods Mike has presented is highly portable. In the case of cached memory, that method results in optimized cache locality and cache utilization (something extremely important when multiple threads are sharing L1 on a single core, and multiple cores are sharing L2), and a predictable way to optimally prefetch. Good data locality, minimal sync points, branch elimination, and vectorization are all required to be able to extract great performance out of the 360 as well.""

Sony finally made a statement with regard to this as well, something I have been saying for a long time:

"Third party publishers and developers are moving away from using Xbox 360 as their primary development platform. They understand that developing on PlayStation 3 first makes more sense and, in fact, will make the Xbox 360 version look better."

Nostromo (Ninja Theory) developer at NeoGAF:

"Using PS3 as a 'lead platform' is the right thing to do if you are going to make a game that has to run on 360 and PS3. The reason is very simple: on PS3 designing your data structure in the proper way is paramount to achieve decent performance (and to scale up..), while your PS3 friendly data will be also 360 friendly data in the vast majority of cases.
This is a big win cause you will definitely be able to get the most from BOTH platforms."

Another multi-platform games developer posting at Beyond3D (admitted their initial games were just "quick & dirty ports from 360, still doing a game on 360 first but should change in the future):

"We all agree given the time we'd like to architect for the SPU's first then work back... giving us cache-friendly algorithms by design "

Note SPU friendly code is cache friendly on the PC/360.

Some quotes from a dev working on Tomb Raider Underworld (from E-mpire forums):

"asset-wise 360 was around first, so we made stuff keeping the 360 in mind first."

"Well, that all depends on your definition. Writing code optimized for the PS3 and using threading policies that are suited the SPUs is a given, because not doing so would not be acceptable at all. All our multithreading is done on PS3 first without exception, and other platforms emulate SPURS."

"Secondly, the matters of multithreading policies, the whole job queue architecture, encapsulation of jobs and their corresponding data packets, etc. that work on the PS3 are indeed more than applicable of the 360/PC. And as I've mentioned before, they work better than anything and everything that Microsoft recommends (so far without exception for us). The problems lie in the fact that that work is an absolute necessity on the PS3, whereas they're not entirely necessary on any other platform."

Do you understand now?

Whether you are a Sony fanboy or neutral. The XBox 360 has the best graphics card despite the XBox 360 with its well known hardware problems. The graphics card for the XBox 360 is 512 MB, thats is as good as most PC graphic cards.

Yeah I understand Mike B's argument design from lead PS3 will result in better port on XBox 360. Easier to scale up than it is to scale down.

gebx: Does your 360 like...give you handjobs or something at night or is your blind fanboyish pomposity just something that comes natural to you?

As for an actual contribution to the conversation: A lot of people have decided to chime in on a few areas that 1) are fucking no brainers and 2) just something they can use to keep/start a flame war going or whatever.

1) "The 360 has a more robust and diverse library!" - Well, no shit. When you've allowed developers to pump out an entire years worth of software before you competition I imagine that you'll have -more games- than your competitors. People who use this argument are awesome at the obvious.

2) "The 360 is way easier to develop for." - Well, again, no shit. I guess that since the 360 falls within the catagory of "older and more familiar" tech that it SHOULD be easier to develop for. However, thats the only real argument anyone can use when comparing the two.

3) "The PS3 has harder architecture to deal with!" - No, it just uses a type of architecture that developers don't like messing with. It's not that the devs dont know how to program using PBP it's just that they don't want to take the extra time to optimize. You can spin this however you want, but the fact of the matter is that PBP (Parallel Board Programming) is a more open ended and optimal choice than the 360's tired old ways but until developers are willing to sit down and practice their perfection (instead of shoveling out game after game of perpetual suck every 3 months) then your going to see crappy ports on the PS3. The gaming industry has to be the only ind. that actually makes excuses for developers when they complain and say "waah....my jobs too hard".

4) "360 games have way higher metacritic scores!" - Laa-dee-frickin-daa? I can't count how many times anymore how often I've seen or read reviews about certain titles only to 1) have them either suck out loud or 2) have them be absolutely awesome when everyone else said the opposite. I think that gamers today have put too much of their money in the hands of the reviewers who may or may not hold some type of agenda towards a certain console. Too be honest? Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has a more unbiased reviewing record than all of the gaming websites combined, but I guess all those Bioshock and Halo 3 worshippers would disagree with that.

Oh, I'll take this moment to bring up a good example of biased reviewers: Lair. Yeah, it was a technical mess and it rubbed a lot of gamers the wrong way. However, when a largely respectable site such as say....oh I dont know...IGN puts a guy on the game to review it who spent most of his blog either pre-bashing the product or going on anti-SCE rants what did you expect right?

5) Your all freakin idiots. - That last quote was by me because I have quite frankly had it with the console wars and all of the constant bitching that goes back and forth. It's a giant pissing contest that I am, gladly, stepping out of now. I've said my peace and I'm sticking to my opinions and views and you can even rebuttal this to your very hearts content....not going to reply. However, if you feel the need to continue making an ass of yourself them by all means.

This is how far I had to read before I was able to determine you had no clue what you were talking about.  That's efficient, right?

It's not about "well structured" code, it's about what the SPEs can and cannot do.  They're not general purpose computing resources. 

The PS3 has 512 MB as well, the GPU can access both XDR and GDDR3 RAM simultaneously, this increasing bandwidth as well. The 360 RAM is shared by the CPU and GPU, only one can access at a time, limiting bandwidth. Apart from the bandwitdh advantage, the PS3 has the advantage for having a harddrive by default, look at this as potential virtual memory like on a PC. Also the RSX can peform more shader ops per second, the 360 has no GPU advantage if both setups are tapped towards potential dealing with 720p or 1080p graphics.

In addition the much more powerful Cell processor inside the PS3 is able to handle tasks usually done by GPUs, doing some things more efficiently and freeing up resources on the GPU to do other stuff.