Rabu, 17 Desember 2008

Xbox 360 vs Playstation 3

The PlayStation 3 platform is now two years old, and the Xbox 360 has just passed the three-year mark. That means several second-generation games have appeared on both systems since our last graphics comparison feature. We're still seeing the occasional first "next-gen" development effort, such as Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, but many development studios are now releasing their second projects for the current-generation consoles. Bethesda, for example, has followed up on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with Fallout 3. All of the additional experience developers have had with both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 means that the window for blaming performance issues and graphical shortcomings on platform growing pains is coming to a close.

The Xbox 360 had an advantage over the PlayStation 3 in early multiplatform games in our first graphics comparison feature because Microsoft had a one-year head start on Sony, but we saw the PlayStation 3 catch up to the Xbox 360 in subsequent graphics comparison features. We're at the point where games look and play nearly the same on both systems--any differences tend to focus on texture resolutions and antialiasing nitpicks that most people wouldn't notice unless they were playing the games side by side and pausing every few seconds to compare the two. Fortunately, we've done all of that for you.

We captured all of our images over HDMI with games running at 720p resolution, and we enabled full HDMI range on the PS3. Each game has four sets of rollover images. The first image is a full screenshot set resized to fit the width of the page, followed by a zoomed-in image set that we created by cropping the original screen grabs to show you how the games look at a 1:1 pixel ratio. The third and fourth image sets follow the same pattern. Just mouse over the captions to swap the images back and forth. Keep in mind that these are large screenshots, so viewers with slow Internet connections should expect to wait a while for images to load.

Fallout 3

The Washington DC metro area in Fallout 3 is filled with the browns and grays of concrete and the red of rusted metal. The game makes great use of lighting to change how the world looks as the sun passes overhead. We made sure to match the in-game time for our comparison shots to keep the lighting consistent, but even then the Xbox 360 seemed to have better shadowed rocks. We also noticed that the PS3 didn't have the bridge pillar water reflection that's visible on the Xbox 360. The Super-Duper building in the background of the first image set also has more jaggies in the PS3 version. Fallout 3 hides draw distance well by showing major landmarks in the distance while leaving out smaller details that pop into view as you get closer. Pop-in was more noticeable on the PS3--you can see a small stand to the left of the bus in the Xbox 360 shot that isn't visible in the PS3 image.


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