I was in awe with all the rest when Sony first presented its new console's specs at E3 2005. Sure looked good, all the numbers were higher than the 360's, and the PS3 seemed set to blow the 360 out of the water graphically.
What a difference two and a half years make.
If the proof is in the pudding, then it's undeniable that the 360 is not nearly as outclassed by the PS3 as Sony would have had us believe. Sony hasn't come close to delivering what they promised, such as 120fps, two 1080p screens running simultaneously, making the 360 seem like nothing more than an "xbox 1.5"...none of that has happened - at best they have just barely managed to catch up to 360's visuals after a year of being on the market.
Jay Allard (Microsoft executive) said way back when the PS3 was being hyped, that if you look at what Sony has promised vs what Sony has actually delivered, you will see a huge gap. He was right.
Let's get technical and actually look at the specs here:
Xbox 360
Xenon CPU - 3 core powerPC clocked at 3.2GHz each
Xenos GPU - 500 MHz unified shader chip
Sys. Mem. - 512MB shared memory
PS3
Cell CPU - 3.2GHz w/ 7 SPEs
RSX GPU - 550 MHz chip
Sys. Mem. - 256/256 MB split
Memory:
John Carmack (head engineer at id software) recently revealed that system memory on the two systems isn't actualy an equal 512MBs, but that the 360 actually has more available memory since its OS uses less memory than the PS3's. 360's OS uses about 32MB while the PS3's uses 96MB, meaning "you always run out of memory on the PS3 first," as he put it.
GPU:
Almost every gamer knows this by now, but the Xenos has revealed itself to be superior to the RSX when it comes to actual performance. Largely this is thanks to its unified shader architecture, where shader pipelines can be used for pixel or vertex shader effects, depending on what the developer wants to use them for, while the RSX has fixed shaders and is therefore more bottlenecked. ATI said (not a neutral source, but still...) that it would be nice if they also ran at 550MHz like the RSX, but that their architecture more than made up for it.
CPU:
The cpu comparison seemed simple enough at first. The 360's had 3 "things" that ran at 3.2GHz, while the PS3 had 7 "things" that ran at 3.2GHz, so the Cell must be more powerful than the Xenon. Now there are developers revealing that juggling between 7 SPEs on a one core Cell chip is much more difficult than to manage 3 separate processing cores in a Xenon chip. What this means is the Xenon is not as bottlenecked as the Cell, and can more easily be fully utilized in real world cases, even if its theoretical processing power is less than the Cell.
So there you have it, the PS3 isn't all it's cracked up to be. I haven't included any links to the information here because it is all very well known and published information, which can easily be looked up. In short, the PS3 sounds good on paper because Sony makes all those theoretical numbers add up in a way that dwarfs the 360, but in practice, the system is too bottlenecked to truly reach these supposed levels of greatness. The graphics in today's games only further back up this fact, as the 360 consistently outperforms the PS3.
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