First-generation Xbox 360 games actually had access to a lower percentage of system power than the PC or the Playstation 3, even though the Xbox 360 is considered much easier to develop for than the Playstation 3. The reason for this is because the PC has been around forever; the developers are very familiar with it, and the PS3 has only one CPU with two threads on it, while the Xbox 360 has three CPUs, each with two threads. However, the first-generation development kits for the Xbox 360 were rushed to game developers; they only allowed programmers to use ONE thread on ONE CPU!!! This meant that developers only had access to one-sixth of the General Purpose CPU power of the Xbox 360! General Purpose CPU power is one of the most important power advantages that the Xbox 360 has over the Playstation 3. Microsoft wanted to launch the Xbox 360 worldwide one year before the PS3, which meant that the development kits that game programmers use were not honed in the best way possible. Only in the summer of 2006 has Microsoft released what can be considered a complete development kit that would theoretically allow an expert programmer to take advantage of 100% of the Xbox 360's power. Improvements to the development kit will still continue to be made over the life of the Xbox 360. We will not truly see what the Xbox 360 is capable of in terms of maximum performance until we see THIRD-generation software! If Prey would have had access to a larger percentage of the Xbox 360 General Purpose CPU power, then it would have easily run at 60 Frames-Per-Second with lighting and texture quality superior to the VERY high end PC version that costs much more than an Xbox 360. Games developed from the ground up for the Xbox 360 like Forza Motorsport 2 run at 60 Frames Per Second; the interviews with the developers have proven this. I am looking forward to Forza Motorsport 2 a LOT!!! But as long as a game meets Microsofts minimum requirement of 30 Frames Per Second then it will look great if the developers make sure that anti aliasing and V-sync are used properly. Setting your Xbox 360 resolution to 1280x720p looks amazing, but when you see it on an HDTV that upconverts that signal to 1920x1080p, it looks noticeably better than the PC versions maximum 1600 lines of resolution, because the pixel count of the Xbox 360 version is higher.

The Xbox 360 does a really nice job of getting better all the time. Original Xbox games previously were not capable of using Xbox 360 Dashboard features such as listening to music from the hard drive in the same way that it can on Xbox 360 games. But, the improvement that Microsoft released on June 6 makes it so all Xbox games were improved, and all of them can now use Dashboard features such as listening to music from the hard drive or an MP3 Player or an iPod via the USB cables. In other words, the Spring 2006 update from Microsoft made it so all 250 backward compatible games were greatly improved; their were 125 improvments with that Spring update. We will start to see a lot more games becoming backwards compatible now that this high quality foundation has been put in place by Microsoft.