Is the 360 holding the PS3 back?

When games like Uncharted 2: Among Thieves come along, you have to question why so few games push the boundaries of the PlayStation 3 so far. With 360 versions of multi-format titles regularly inching out their PS3 counterparts, are developers justified in blaming Sony’s tools for their troubles, or is it just a symptom of curtailing coding to work on the 360’s older architecture?

Look at the screenshots of Uncharted 2 we’ve taken. Look at the amount of detail in each. Look at how sharp the textures are, and how good the lighting is. Amazing, isn’t it? And there’s a lot more that these screenshots can’t show, like the animation and Uncharted 2’s physics – which are both excellent. It is the best showcase of what the PS3 hardware can do, when given the chance. And While Naughty Dog must be given a lot of the credit for this, it’s also hard not to look at Uncharted 2 as proof that the 360 is now holding the PS3 back.

Look at the recent multiformat releases and compare them to Uncharted 2 – big difference, right? This isn’t surprising. The PS3 has a hard drive and it has a Blu-ray drive, two things the 360 doesn’t have as standard. The hardware itself is also more recent. As Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells confirmed in a recent interview, these things were instrumental in making Uncharted 2 the game it is:

"We’re fortunate that we get to work on a system that has a hard drive and uses Blu-ray for storage. Without these things, Uncharted 2 would have been a very different game. What we were able to do with the Cell processor allowed us to achieve a density of polygons and a fidelity to our effects that would simply not be possible without it.”"

Wells adds that had Naughty Dog not had the talented staff it does “we wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of the hardware and achieve the results that we did”. But the hardware issue can’t be ignored, and leads you to wonder how many multiplatform titles have suffered because of the 360’s spec. Modern Warfare 2 is a good example. Would we now be looking forward to a MW2 that renders in 1280x720 or even 1920x1080 now – and not 1200x600 – if the 360 was better equipped? Infinity Ward is one of the world’s leading developers, so it’s not a question of ability. Therefore, you have to look at the hardware involved.

This theory is supported by some recent 360 exclusives. ODST is a reminder that Bungie has been unable to make a 360 game engine that can do respectable levels of detail and ‘proper’ HD visuals. And then there’s Forza 3:

"Yeah, it’s pretty special. When you see it running for the first time, the detail and smoothness of it all is quite something. It’s such a step up from previous 360 racers. You just can’t believe that Turn 10’s been able to drag that kind of performance out of a four-year-old console.” "

This is what a journalist who has reviewed the game for a UK 360 magazine told us. And he’s right in the sense that it does things with the 360 hardware that should be impossible. And perhaps they are. Disappearing roads and other glitches are an example of this. And the extra content disc is proof that the DVDs used by the 360 are no longer up to the job.

But because the 360 is every bit as popular as the PS3, third party developers are still required to ensure their multiformat games work just as well on an Arcade spec 360 as they do the PS3. This means that although the PS3 has Blu-ray and a hard drive as standard, most multiformat games released for it will struggle to take advantage of the additional storage and hard drive caching these features offer – especially when the 360 version has been the lead version.

This won’t stop such games being good games. But whenever a developer like Naughty Dog gives you a glimpse of what the PS3 is truly capable of, you can’t help by wonder how much better third party games could be, were it not for the 360.

Article extracted from www.gameswire.net

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