PlayStation 3 vs Xbox 360

• Introduction
• Under the Hood: PlayStation 3
• Under the Hood: Xbox 360
• The Software Line-Up
• Seeing in High-Definition
• The Movie Format War
• Conclusion

Under the Hood: Xbox 360

Already out on the market, the Xbox 360 will have a full year on the PlayStation 3 by the time Sony's system launches. In the video game world, that's ages, but time does not always signal a winner. After all, the Sega Dreamcast had a year on the PlayStation 2, yet it failed to fend off Sony's system.

From a hardware perspective, the Xbox 360 is slightly weaker than the PlayStation 3, but not by much. It sports a similarly powered processor (the PowerPC CPU used in the Xbox 360 was developed by IBM, as was the CELL processor used in the PlayStation 3), and can push a comparable number of polygons. Based on the demonstrations at E3, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are neck and neck in terms of visuals.

Controller Core System

Where the Xbox 360 lags is in storage space for games. Getting a year's head start on Sony meant using the standard DVD format for games, which limits software developers to around 9GB of space. In comparison, the PlayStation 3's Blu-ray format can support around 50GB. On paper that sounds like a huge disadvantage, but in reality the difference is minimal.

The biggest part of any game is typically the movies and the art used for the visuals. While PlayStation 3 developers will no doubt fill their discs with high definition cinema scenes, those same images can still be squeezed onto a standard DVD in a lower resolution. After all, most of a game is spent playing and not watching cutscenes (usually!). With similar system specs, picking a winner is going to come down to the games.