http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-360-vs-ps3-face-off-round-20
Here's a mystery from the files of Arthur C Clarke... just why did Sony Europe end up with timed exclusivity rights to Ghostbusters: The Video Game? Away from any warm and happy feelings I might have for the 25-year-old movie, I can't help but feel that the game itself is distinctly average - almost last-gen in terms of its basic gameplay. And rather embarrassingly, it's the poorest PS3 conversion I've seen for a long, long time - a disappointing reminder of how just how terrible cross-platform development could treat the PS3 back in 2006. Indeed, Ghostbusters: The Video Game is quite remarkable in that it manages to tick off just about all the common failings of PS3 conversion work of the period. Probably the most impactful compromise has been to the resolution of the game. The "no you can't have it yet" Xbox 360 version runs at full 720p and is a reasonably pleasing game to look at. PlayStation 3 on the other hand gets a whopping great drop to 960x540 resolution, and a correspondingly heavy blur as the framebuffer is scaled up to work on your HD display. This is compounded by the quincunx anti-aliasing technique, which blurs the entire texture, as a by-product of its edge-smoothing. quincunx can work acceptably well (see Prototype for an example in this feature) but combined with the lower resolution its negative effects are amplified significantly. Check out the difference in the video here. It's well worth clicking through for the HD version which removes the crop and shows you the full picture with no loss in quality. View this video on EGTV On some titles that upscale like this (Silent Hill: Homecoming springs to mind), there is a corresponding increase in refresh rate as the GPU obviously has less work to do in more complex scenes. However, in the case of Ghostbusters, performance in this area is remarkably similar, with small fluctuations sometimes favouring 360, sometimes PS3. Tellingly though, both versions have issues sustaining a fluid 30FPS when there's a modicum of action on-screen. In the like-for-like video captures there are more torn frames in the PS3 game, but then again, image quality and consistency in both versions can suffer badly in places from the lack of v-sync. Not only is resolution compromised on the PS3 version, so is texture quality. Again it's vintage 2006 as we see visibly more detailed texture work on many graphical elements in the Xbox 360 version of the game. It's not just the odd piece of scenery here and there, or detail you need to walk right up to in order to see the difference (a la Fallout 3). The lower resolution presentation impacts a majority of scenes in the game. PS3 also has the dubious honour of a 3.9GB mandatory installation. In theory this means that the game can stream in more texture detail than the 360 version, in a shorter amount of time, but clearly we don't see that. Indeed, the lower quality video assets actually take much the same time to load as the more complex and memory-intensive 360 data does from the DVD. As it is, having tweeted my dismay about this game two days ago when I was still doing the analysis work for this feature, Joystiq, to its credit, picked up the baton and got this statement from a spokesperson for the developer: "For the record, the PS3 version is softer due to the 'quincunx' anti-aliasing filter and the fact we render at about 75 per cent the resolution of the 360 version. So you cannot directly compare a screenshot of one to the other unless you scale them properly. The PS3 does have less available RAM than the 360 - but we managed to squeeze three out of four textures as full size on the PS3." My response to that is pretty straightforward. First of all, PS3 Ghostbusters is rendering 518,400 pixels per frame. Xbox 360 is managing 921,600, so there's some interesting mathematics going on in that statement. Secondly, if quincunx anti-aliasing is compromising your image quality to this degree, why not try another solution? With regards the RAM situation, it's a well-known limitation that the vast majority of cross-platform developers have (thankfully) managed to overcome. The admission that 25 per cent of the texture work in Ghostbusters is compromised on PS3 is very telling. More than that, the notion that somehow we're not allowed to compare the two versions without downscaling the higher resolution one is frankly astonishing. How many people out there have 540p displays? Perhaps we should we be sitting further away from the screen to make the two games look the same? Terminal Reality's response, rather like the PS3 build itself, simply isn't good enough.
Oh wow owned :)
