The belief that the PlayStation 3 is a better, more powerful and more accomplished games console than the Xbox 360 has been labelled a myth.
Games developer Jason Booth says that Xbox 360 graphics will always be better and that PS3-exclusive titles will "continue to suck". The former Guitar Hero and Rock Band dev made the interesting comments on his blog.
"I read various game forums from time to time, and often see gamers complaining about 'lazy ports' to the PS3," he says. "They often mention how the PS3 is the most powerful game console and blame developers working on the console for doing a bad job.
"Sony has all of these people duped by impressive marketing spin, and I'm often amazed at how potent this type of rhetoric proves to be. For those unaware, I'm going to break it down simply and explain exactly why ports to the PS3 will never be as good as their 360 counter parts, and why most PS3 exclusives will likely continue to suck."
PS3 games suck?
Booth says that the fill rate and shader processing on the Xbox is superior to that of the PlayStation 3.
"Fill rate is one of the primary ways to measure graphics performance - in essence, it's a number describing how many pixel operations you can perform. The fill rate on the PS3 is significantly slower than on the 360, meaning that games either have to run at lower resolution or use simpler shader effects to achieve the same performance.
"Additionally, the shader processing on the PS3 is significantly slower than on the 360, which means that a normal map takes more fill rate to draw on the PS3 than it does on the 360. And I'm not talking about small differences here, we're talking roughly half the pixel pushing power."
Xbox 360 more powerful?
He also said that even though the Cell processor inside the PS3 is super-powerful, usually that power cannot be harnessed.
"Game code simply doesn't split well across multiple processors. You can probably find a way to split a few things off fairly easily - put the audio on one processor, animation on another; but generally the break-up is always going to leave several of the SPUs idle or underutilised. On top of that, it's usually not CPU speed that restricts the visuals in games - it's fill rate."
