Heya Retro, if you want a tech demo I recommend you download the demos for DiRT and Ace Combat 6, they're both gorgeous, and a lot of fun.
okay Gav, you asked for it!
@Abev, as I said early, Sony is extremely good at hyping their products beyond the truth. There's another word for that . . .
"Photorealistic graphics! Natural Animation, a complex architecture that will improve with experience" They said the exact same thing about the PS2 emotion engine, almost word for word. You know how that ended? It all turned out hogwash, the Xbox 1 was technically it's superior in every way. (including girth
)
This generation things are a bit different, but not that different. Overall, between the two machines the games are going to be "similar orders of magnitude" but their strengths are different.
Graphics
Okay quicky here - 360 gets an early lead. The 360 Xenos is based on the same architecture as the ATI HD2900, a very new architecture, but designed for a console with some very funky additions like special memory for things like anti aliasing and HDR, which is why, in a lot of multiplatform reviews you'll see the 360 has less "jaggies" and better light rendering.
The RSX is actually a straight 7800GT which is a two year old part, although not a bad one, it lacks real console optimization hence the aforementioned post processing issues. So far, all evidence points to it not being able to keep up with the Xenos, as the numbers suggest. Eg, the latest Madden runs at 60fps on the 360, but 30fps on the PS3.
CPU
There's a lot of noise about the cell, and there's no denying it's a great number cruncher, but that's what IBM designed it for: computation. It's only got one general processor which has to run the games and the OS AND the SPU's The SPU's are designed for maths, so it'll excel at things like geometry or physics, but tank in things like game logic, AI or post processing. In theory it could be used to supplement the RSX, but that's where the "So hard to program for comes in".
The 360 CPU in comparison seems a little modest, but don't underestimate it. The reason Microsoft chose it was because, well they didn't. They asked game developers what they wanted and that's what they got. Which is the overall moral of the 360 - it's much easier to get what you want out of it. Which is why most game dev leads on 360 and PC. (GTA, CoD, AC, Darkness, Fatal Inertia, UT, etc)
That's not getting into OS load or anything btw.
Memory
PS3 takes a pretty serious kick in the teeth when it comes to RAM i'm afraid. It's graphics and main memory are two separate banks of 256Mb, with and overall OS load of around 90Mb on the Main RAM and 40Mb on the graphics. By comparison the 360 has one continuous bank of 512Mb RAM with a total OS load of 32MB. so basically the 360 has about 400Mb to store textures and graphics stuff as oppossed to the PS3's available 200Mb. The argument is to stream everything on the PS3, but once again that's not easy to do.
Okay enough propellorheadisms
Summary:
The PS3 will possibly one day offer better physics and such than the 360, but unless something absolutely magic happens, the 360 has the advantage in the graphics and AI department. The big issue is development - the 360 architecture is similar in principle to a PC with excellent tools whereas the PS3 is a very odd beast with less than stellar development tools.
I imagine the PS3 will end up to a very similar situation to the Gamecube in the last round. The gamecube was more powerful than the PS2, but too different. Inevitably what happened was that most 3rd party games suffered on it, with only first party titles like Zelda, and the occasional 3rd part push like RE4 that actually utilized it to it's full potential.
