And then you hit us with the "standard" fanboy response.

If you want us to take you even half-seriously, try putting together a semi-credible post. Link to some sources, SHOW US where (non-Sony exclusive) developers say that the PS3 is better.

Better yet - show us a game running on the PS3 that looks considerably better than a 360 title.

We'll be waiting...

Ok. About the "locked power", and i am not saying, that it wouldn't have it, but first thing that came into my mind was that issue is about CELL, and how it can be used. As far as i know, CELL has 8 SPE:s, from which one is a spare part, one is used for the system process, and one is reserved for the system to take control at ANY time. So, if the (theoretical, as Sony said) specs what has been announced considering the CELL are accurate, and we think that the SPE:s power is what matters, then, from its full power, there's almost 40% power potential! Only problem is that it can't be used in any circumstances. And still someone keeps talking about the magical ten years. If it sells enough, it can have ten years in the market, just like PS2, but if it doesn't sell, it has 4 years, just like Xbox. And this "ten years" doesn't mean that Sony wouldn't release the PS4 in 2011, even if it would be market leader.

If we want to discuss the technicalities of the PS3 vrs 360, I think it should be done in another thread (I think there are several for this already).

But I agree with what you say (above) - Sony seems to reserve more hardware resources (a lot of memory is also used/reserved by the OS) than MS do on the 360.

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The whole ease of development (for PS3 vrs 360 at least) for me comes down to this (and it has been addressed previously) - symmetric vrs non-symmeteric CPUs.

360 - you simply write the entire application in C/C++, as you would on a PC. Isolate slow sections, convert them to assembler, optimise for drivers/APIs, etc. Then to make use of the multiple cores (3 dual-core chips, so can in theory run 6 things at once) you start adding threading support to the code. Its (relatively) easy to make stand-alone sections threadable (i.e. a particle engine), and a lot harder to make a terrain renderer use multiple threads (note that this is a very simplified explanation).

PS3 - much, much harder. The SPU's cannot run the same code as the main CPU - I presume they can run C/C++, but since they are designed to run solely from their internal (fast) memory space (which is a really small amount of memory) this is a silly way to do it. Instead you basically code up in assembler specialised code to do each task - a terrain rendered, a skeletal model renderer, a particle engine (etc..). The main CPU schedules each of the SPUs to run, and sends them "bite sized" data packets which they can process efficiently.

Its a very different approach, and requires a lot more expertise and knowledge to get right. Its also very different from PC development (remember that most development is still done directly on a PC), so its harder to get an efficient process running, tools built that work properly, harder to debug, etc.

If there is one thing that MS are masters of - its setting up an awesome and efficient development environment.

(I remember a game I worked on, on the PS2 back in 2003... that took about 40 minutes to LINK. We needed to buy/setup a special build machine that had 2Gig of RAM, to make it possible to do anything during the day...).

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Anyway - I'm no expert - I haven't developed on either the PS3 or the 360 (and in a lot of ways the PS3 is more attractive to me personally as a developer - as I love my assembler code), but I have no doubt that making a PS3 game from scratch would require a heap more work, time, effort and money than a 360 version. Regardless of the game. 

Let me tell you a story of a powerful console, one who had many processors and could do amazing things competitors could not. Unfortunatly, it was a very complex console that was hard to develop for. Because of this, the true power of the console was never fully tapped, except in some cancelled late life projects. Meanwhile, a less powerful competitor was far easier to develop for, and saw hundreds more titles - games that would go down as some of the greatest in history. This little console was easier to develop for, and this accounted for its success, not power. This little console was the Playstation, and its slightly more powerful competitor was the Saturn.

I agree with you here, You will not find a PS3 game that will have problems running just as well on the 360. Why? While sony boast that theyre system is (undoubtably) more powerful than the 360, it doesnt matter at this point in the race. Developers are still getting to grips with both technologies, and they will not get the full potential out of the consoles until near their death. This has happened with every other console ever basically, and someones post earlier made a fair comparison with comparing RE4 with GC launch titles. 

 A developer could spend millions and millions of dollars tapping further and further into the PS3's architecture, but no one would. This is because in a year or two, itll be easier to make better games on the PS3, the same as with the PS2 when it was released, as well as the fact that a developer could get similar results more easily on a 360. This is because the 360 has been out for longer, and therefore more developers have gotten to grips with the technolog. Im not saying the 360 is better, ofc not, but because its been out for longer it means that more developers have gotten to grips with the system and can make games for it easier with better results. Its just the way it is, and i doubt that the PS3 will surpass the 360 for a while. We have probably only seen a maximum of 40% of each consoles potential, which leaves a huge amount of power to be unlocked over the coming 4 years.

 You are missing two major points:

First, the situation of the PS-2:

When it was released there were no easier plattforms available, so they had to work with the material at hand. When the competitors arrived, the PS-2 had simply such a big user base, that the development costs didn't matter anymore. 

Second, the complexity of systems and programs:

Yes, the newer plattforms have more power, but this would mean more code and even more complexity. To keep the development costs under control you try to control the complexity with the help of libraries and other methods, although such methods throw away significant parts of the power.  If you would be really interested in power you would still write in assembler, but in reality their development time and development costs would be insane, and the features very restricted. Even in the PS-2 nobody really harnessed the complete power. Yes in a way it is easier to write for the PS-3 than for the PS-2 but the code complexity and system demand have grown considerably. You would need more developers, more time and much more money. But the demand of games can't be realised in the two ways the cell is designed for (Cluster, pipeline). Yes, you have huge calculating power in the SPEs, but with a special demand for it's code and its structure, which contradicts methods, that hide the complexity. In every parallel system it is no longer the problem to have power, but to use it efficiently.

It is no longer so important to have power, instead it is more important to use the power in an intelligent manner, but how shall developers find better. more intelligent ways, when have to fight with the system?

There is even an additional factor. The 360 uses a simple multi-core processor. This technology is also used in most modern PCs. On the other hand the technology behind the cell was optimised for cluster computing and pipelines. For such implementations there are methods to handle the power of the cell in an efficient manner, but the code of games does not fit into these two problems. You simply try to use a powerful chip in a way, for which it was not designed for. The problem : the first plans for the PS-3 had a totally different use for the SPEs in mind. The idea was to use no GPU, instead its functions would be done by the SPEs. Only at a later stage they realized that this speed was not sufficient to compete with a GPU, so they bought a GPU, but no one wanted to stand up and declare: "Ok, we don't need the Cell anymore." after they put so much money into its design.

Good grief.  We can't have ONE positive thread about Sony and the PS3 without being bombarded.  The fact is that developers are alraedy unlocking the power and we'll see that at the end of the year.  It is not easy to see the difference in multi-platform games (especially so far) because, like others have stated, developers cater to the lower 360 core.  That sucks for even 360 users that actually have a hard drive. 

According to the latest EGM podcast, Rockstar is going to make a hard drive required for play.  That really sucks for Core users that have to lay down $180 for a 120GB hard drive, but I'm glad that there will be no loading when going inside and outside of buildings because the data will be streamed.  Good for them.

The processing power will be unlocked by those that just focus on the PS3, and we'll see the results in MGS4 and FF13 next year as well as other games between then and now like Uncharted and Rachet and Clank.  Until then, Madden, GTA, and others will likely look about the same on both platforms.

 Not quite. Sure, they will try to use small parts of the available power, but there is no easy way to really use it efficiently and in a general way. The SPEs must work more synchronized with each other, because there is no global cache that can be used efficiently. While there are ways to read value from the local memory of other SPEs and the PPE this works via messaging and is significantly slowerthan a local memory access. And due to the inability to handle special kinds of code, they have to be better synchroniced with the PPE.

This means that many optimization have to be overworked after bigger changes in other parts of the program.

This can't really be described as an unlocking of the power, which would basically mean: You have a new method, and with this method you can use the power without additional problems. As an example: multi core cpus take care of the load balancing, on the cell this is under the responsibility of the developer. This is easy when there are free SPEs, otherwise it becomes tricky.