Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> I have noticed that games on the xbox seem to have more prettiness than the 
> same games on the PS3.  Even looking at youtube videos of gameplay you can 
> tell whether it was recorded off an xbox or a ps3.

> Is that just because the games I happened to look at were more polished on 
> the xbox, or does the xbox have actual noticably better support for 
> sophisticated shaders and such?

  Looking at the hardware specifications of both consoles, they seem pretty
similar: Same amount of total RAM and similar GPUs (both based on the same
generation competing GPUs of ATI and NVidia respectively). The Xbox 360 GPU
might have a slight edge in that it seems to have some 10MB specialized
internal fast framebuffer that offers 4-sample antialiasing, alpha compositing
and Z/stencil buffering practically for free.

  On the PS3 the RAM is divided half-and-half between the GPU and the CPU,
with the GPU having 256 MB of dedicated RAM plus access to up to 224 MB of
the main RAM (whatever that means). I suppose that means that the CPU has
only up to 256 MB of RAM to play with (unlike the Xbox 360 where the CPU
can use all of the 512 MB). I don't know if this makes a difference, but
it might.

  The CPU architectures are completely different, with the one on the PS3
being extremely exotic. The PS3 suffered a lot in its initial years because
of that (no existing game engines could be easily ported to it so that they
would take full advantage of the CPU design). In fact, AFAIK it's still
suffering from it to some extent to this day. I don't know how much of an
impact this has on game visual quality and performance.

> (I also noticed that the PS3 games seem to have huge wide-open spaces that I 
> don't see on any xbox games, but I suspect that's just my selection of 
> games. Altho it would make sense, having a bluray drive and probably more RAM.)

  There are many Xbox 360 games that have huge sceneries, such as the
Assassin's Creed series, Red Dead Redemption, Oblivion, etc.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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