PS3 vs. Xbox 360

The Guardian Gamesblog has a point by point breakdown of the Xbox 360 and PS3 spec sheets, comparing and contrasting the two consoles based on what we know about them so far. In the end, they come to the rational conclusion that for gamers what will end up deciding the battle is the gameplay. From the article: "We've pretty well reached the point of complexity with dual analogue sticks, analogue triggers and four face buttons, so while you can expect to see more content in terms of things happening, not much originality was on display. Gameplay advances will come from peripherals and Sony really showed that off with their kooky EyeToy games. Nothing wrong with controlling two bondage-clad Japanese spy chicks via videoconfering in my mind :)"

Comments

Well , before we compare videos read this:

[AzraelKans]

I just caught this on a forum in gamespot, so take it as you like:

---
Mark Rein Reveals That Most PS3 Demos Are Not Realtime!
2005-05-17 16:10:06: Written by SD6

Mark Rein of Epic Games revealed to VE3D that only a select few of the games and demos shown during Sony's press conference were realtime.

In addition to the Sony demos being shown by Phil Harrison, the Epic and EA presentations were the only third party portions actually running on the PS3 in real-time. But most of those movies, which I probably watched 3 or 4 during rehearsals for the event, look very achievable and some were probably rendered on the actual box but in non-real-time. When a system is year away, heck even with a system is 6 months away, it is reasonable to expect the power of the dev kits would still only be a fraction of the power of the final system.
--

Anyone else saw that coming a mile away?

Anyway, yes ps3 presentation was a lot more spectacular than xbox but if you check the actual specs you will realize they are pretty similar they both have free internet access, wifi capabilties, and although sony tried to hide this similar physic and graphic capabilities (Actually unreal 3 runs on xbox 360 too so the demo shown by sony most probably runs on xbox360 too).

Actually if you check the new Sega game trailer, well thats actual footage from the ps3 and as you can see is basically identical to the 360 footage shown.

And no, contrary to popular belief, "not realtime" or "prerrendered" does not mean "the machine can still do that, and therefore is powerful enough to do it so we shouldnt judge it down" it actually means any machine even your grandpa 486 can pull a video like that if you give it enough time to render it.(and the needed ram and disk space) if its not realtime its a fake and can not be used to judge the machine, period.

7 controllers on the PS3?

[vistic]

From TFA:

"For some reason, Sony will support the odd number of seven controllers on its PS3. A theory going around my house is that they suddenly realised they had more Bluetooth-width than expected and bumped up the number of possible controllers to seven. An alternative view is that they oversubscribed with eight and are now having to make the best of the limitations."

The reason for this was actually already answered on Slashdot.

Heavy hitters only?

[the-stringbean]

Hmm... not the best written comparison on the web at the moment, quite shocking when you realise it is on the Guardian web site!

They have a number of glaring mistakes including:

Microsoft's will be 8 times larger than PS2's current 8 MB card, but Sony's will support their SD memory sticks.

Err... no Sony has nothing to do with SD memory cards and shun them where ever possible in favour of their own "Memory Sticks".

They also mention that the large number of cores will make it difficult for developers to start coding on the PS3 - I doubt that this will be too much of an issue as all of the new games are going to be multithreaded anyway. It's a case of 8 cores on the PS3 vs 3 cores on the XBOX 360 which in turn run 6 threads. The main issue for coding on the PS3 is going to be the development environment which is most likely to be an extension of the PS2 environment which is in turn an extension of the archaic PS1 environment.

But the one area I really want to know about is reliability ie will the PS3 actually offer any? The fact that one of the 8 SPEs is disabled for reliability/stability issues is triggering alarm bells for me.

And finally they completely discredit Nintendo as not focusing on high-tech:

Editorial note: the Nintendo Revolution is its own entity; the company is focussing on content rather than high-tech so the below only deals with heavy-hitters Microsoft and Sony.

So WiFi, downloadable content and one of the smallest home consoles ever doesn't count as high-tech now? Yes the Big-N has so far released no specs but to discredit it like this is a tad unfair.

Re:How many cells?

[mwvdlee]

According to Sony's press conference, there'll be 8 cells, 7 of which will be actively used and 1 remains as "backup". I haven't heard any details about why/what/how this 1 cell is kept aside.

Side by side a repost from before w/ updates

[Pao|o]

I took the time out to compare and contrast between the Xbox 360 & PS3 and I came to to this conclusion.
Xbox 360 has a CPU FPS of 115.2 GFlops
PS3 has a CPU FPS of 218 GFlops
Xbox 360 has a GPU FPS of around 884.8 GFlops*
PS3 has a GPU FPS of 1.8TFlops
Xbox 360 has a combined FPS of 1TFlops
PS3 has a combined FPS of 2.18TFlops
Xbox 360 has a DVD-ROM
PS3 has a BD-ROM
Xbox 360 is WiFi ready
PS3 is WiFi built-in
Xbox 360 has 3 x USB 2.0 ports
PS3 has 6 x USB 2.0 ports
Xbox 360 has support for 4 wireless controllers
PS3 has support for 7 wireless (Bluetooth) controllers
Xbox 360 uses Memory Units
PS3 uses MS Standard/Duo/Pro, SD standard/mini & Compact Flash Type I/II
Xbox 360 has support for select Xbox1 games
PS3 has support for PS1 & PS2 games
Xbox 360 has support for 1 720p & 1080i display
PS3 has support for 2 480p, 720p, 1080i & 1080p displays
Note:
* Derived from subtracting published Overall System Floating-Point Performance of 1TFlops with reported CPU GFlops
Source:
Wikipedia's PS3 Tech Specs
Official Xbox 360 Fact Sheet
Xbox 360's reported CPU GFlops