Sorry Mike Bouma, I just realized you asked me to respond in kind to your supplying of personal information underneath your pictures. My name is Alex, i'm 19 and I live in Australia. I attend university at the moment and have two part time jobs, one in a law firm, the other in a nursing home. I have no grounding in computer science whatsoever, but have spent considerable time trying to understand these console's architecture, pros and cons through cutting through the crap from various developers and technicians. The problem I have with your arguments are primarily that you seem to have convinced yourself that the PS3 as a gaming machine is all that, which puts you at odds with much of the other technicians and developers I have seen comments from.

@ starcraft

Yes according to their PR statement, but Killzone 2 will go far beyond Halo 3 with regard to lighting and effects. Maybe UT3, a modified multi-platform orientated game engine will already do the same on the PS3, at least according to Epic the game goes technically beyond Gears of War and already runs better on the PS3 than Gears did on the XBox 360. One of the developers you must be talking about below must have been Epic.



Expert low level hardware designers and low level game engine designers will tell you the PS3 is fundamentally far more powerful. IMO the comments originating from non-specialized high level developers (their perspectives is greatly influenced by the state of the provided middleware, so their comments are mostly relevant with regard to this specifically) and PR spokesman (who usually say, whatever suits the company best => more sales) is of less relevance if talking about the fundamentals.

@ starcraft

Looking at the XBox 360 architecture and issues, the XBox 360 design seems rushed and originally only intended to have half the system memory. More system memory is of course always a benefit.

But IMO it would have been much better to step away from the cheaper shared memory architecture and have both the GPU and CPU connected to dedicated RAM using seperate busses. Also having a HD DVD or Blu-Ray drive internally would have been a far better long term benefit.

It's not like I think the XBox 360 is total crap, ATi's GPU is still interesting with its flexible shader approach although this seems to come at a cost with regard to the amount of total operations that can be performed compared to a dedicated shader model. The on chip EDRAM seems to have been mainly intended to have things like cheap AA (performance wise) but even 1st party games already seem to have advanced beyond its optimal use for such things as Forza 2 and Halo 3 do not offer AA at all.

ckmlb said: Honestly, why do people care about this number? It looks better than almost anything out there and that's a fact 600p or not.

 The technophile segment of the gaming community is just anal Ckmlb. I didn't care about this when there was a big stink about Halo 3 being 640p and I don't care about it now. As long as the game looks good and plays well, it's resolution should be just a footnote.

MikeB wrote:

With regard to the lighting comment I meant to refer games of a similar gerne, so neglecting other impressive games like Uncharted.

@ Darc Requiem

I agree gameplay and enjoyment are most important, but like watching a HD DVD or Blu-Ray movie I expect to see significantly better results than from an ordinary DVD movie, sure I may love the actual movie and all that, but I didn't get that kickass HDTV and audio equipment for nothing.

BenKenobi88 said: Ah who cares. Like it really makes a difference.

1024x600 = 614400

1280x720 = 921600

That's 2/3rds as much data as the lowest HD standard resolution.  For one company seperating itself from the Wii because it is HD and another company seperating itself from its competition by saying that the 360 isn't even full HD, it looks a little hypocritical to see them running their games with 66% as much resolution as the lowest HD spec.

Of course, if you want good graphics you'll be playing it on computer where you can /easily/ render 1080p. 

BenKenobi88 said: Ah who cares. Like it really makes a difference.

 I completely agree.  Who cares.  The game looks great from what I've seen.  I like that someone has to 'discover' the resolution, and then everyone has a problem with it.  Nobody has complained before now, that I've heard of.

MikeB said: MikeB wrote: Yes according to their PR statement, but Killzone 2 will go far beyond Halo 3 with regard to lighting and effects. Maybe UT3, a modified multi-platform orientated game engine will already do the same on the PS3, at least according to Epic the game goes technically beyond Gears of War and already runs better on the PS3 than Gears did on the XBox 360. One of the developers you must be talking about below must have been Epic. With regard to the lighting comment I meant to refer games of a similar gerne, so neglecting other impressive games like Uncharted. @ Darc Requiem I didn't care about this when there was a big stink about Halo 3 being 640p and I don't care about it now. As long as the game looks good and plays well, it's resolution should be just a footnote. I agree gameplay and enjoyment are most important, but like watching a HD DVD or Blu-Ray movie I expect to see significantly better results than from an ordinary DVD movie, sure I may love the actual movie and all that, but I didn't get that kickass HDTV and audio equipment for nothing.

The mistake you are making there is assuming that screen resolution in FMVs are the same as in gaming. In FMVs, of course the number of screen pixels matter. The details are kept in the pixels. In 3D games, the details are in the texels, not the pixels. The textures are high resolution in Halo 3 and CoD 4. The polygon count is still on par with HD games. So is the draw distance.

HD gaming is not dependent on screen reolution as HD movies are, since the details are not kept in the screen resolution, as they are in HD movies. 

@ LordTheNightKnight

Of course the rendering resolution counts significantly as well. 600p is of course still better than 480i/p or 576i/p (PAL) and of course I agree a game like God of War 2 still looks good upscaled on a HDTV, but for God of War 3 I expect a native 1080p resolution.

Developers are making significant sacrifes on the XBox 360 and this affects the PS3 games library as well, I think it's interesting to discuss. Of course graphics artists, musicians and game directors all play an important part in making a game as good as possible, but I'm also interested in the art of programming having followed the demoscene quite extensively, a more advanced game engine provides these artists with more extensive options.

I am sure XBox 360 fans would have made a big deal if the game only ran 600p on the PS3, like we have seen in early porting cases of the past. I think it's quite funny actually when they downplay such issues otherwise.

ckmlb said: Honestly, why do people care about this number? It looks better than almost anything out there and that's a fact 600p or not.

completely agree, i only have an old tv so i couldnt care less