Over the past year I've read that the PS3 has delivered spotty performance and framerate slowdown relative to the same games running on Xbox 360--Madden (ran at 30fps compared to the 360 at 60fps) and the Orange Box (had multiple instances of slowdown in HL2) come to mind especially.  Has this problem been fixed yet?  I know CoD4 and GTAIV are virtually identical on both systems, but I started to worry when I heard Soul Calibur 4 ran a bit choppy relative to the 360 version (according to IGN's Hands-on). 

So my question to PS3 owners is: have you had any problems of slowdown in recently released games games, or has the problem mostly been taken care of (because dev's are presumably now more acustomed to the PS3's complicated architecture)?

And for those who own the PS3 version of the Orange Box--how bad is the slow down, really?

Bad.

I think the orange box worked slow because it used only the core of the cell and none of the spes. I don't know about madden though.

I guess it all depends on the developer. Call of Duty 4 and GTAIV, as you stated, are two good examples of a game being similar on both platforms.

It would also seem that multiplatform titles are getting more equal between the two systems compared to the piece of crap PS3 ports that were released since the PS3 came out.

most of the recently released(end of 07 and beginning of 08) games are very close.

but 06-07 multiplats do suffer a bit,,some of them were patched and they now work fine.But some still suffer.the reason is that most of those games were developed on 360 and then ported to PS3,,,but some games like burnout paradise look better on PS3 since they were developed on PS3 .

So it all depends on the platform the game was developed on.

I have noticed nothing wrong with the frame rates of the games in my collection

Im sorry

Regarding the Orange box, their are about 5 different locations where there were slowdowns. Depending on how fast you can beat these specific areas the slowdowns will be short.

I don't think a game like F.E.A.R on the PS3 can be fixed with a patch.

Pretty much all games made after about Nov. 07 run the same or slightly better on PS3. The reason a lot of previous games ran so badly is because devs weren't used to the PS3's architecture. Now they are.

Don't go jumping straight to the Cell for answers, the GPU for the PS3 has a big part to play as well, more of the stress will be going on there and in comparison to the 360's it simply doesn't cope as well. If you want equal framerates, for the PS3 sacrifices will have to be made, either in visual quality or resolution.

It's still happening with new games too, I thought the framerate drops for GTA4 on the 360 were bad...

... And THEN I played the PS3 version ...