More proof that the horse-race mentality of the console war is childish and stupid. All three of these machines can coexist with their own markets and nobody loses out.

How is competition "childish" and "stupid"?

Have we forgotten Business 101?

Nothing was said about co-existing, was merely a statement about how the ps3 might start making a profit from August.

that is cool for Sony. I really love my 360 and I don't see that changing anytime soon. But, I must say Sony is getting a bum rap for being to costly and then for it not having any rumble at jump start. So now that there are a few solid titles and have rumble the next step should be to firmware us a better in Game XMB and I can see the PS3 being more appealing to 360 gamers who are used to haveing a very robust across all games buddy list. Good luck Sony. Hope to see some good stuff from you.

That picture of Kaz makes me giggle little bricks out my backside each time I see it.

@Mikazukinoyaiba: Competition gets childish and stupid when the companies start bashing each other over their products. Take for instance the recent GTAIV, Microsoft spouts off that it's gonna have more content and be better.

I say that's bullsheist tactics and money throwing.

Btw... isn't the PS3 gonna have the better graphics for GTAIV than Xbox 360? I wonder if they utilized the PS3's better GPU.

@Plunket: "Or are otherwise heavily invested, whether financially or emotionally, in the business practices of a large multinational corporation."

G-O-L-D Gold! Nice bit of subtle fanboy finger pointing there ;) Love it.

@RTW: That's marketing..

i think he might just be right, ive been tempted to buy a PS3 for awhile now, the metal gear solid bundle is right around the corner and i cant pass up a deal like that. looks like ill have to make due with my wii for now :(

all hail the all might Hideo Kojima

@Katorok: thats the videogame industry =/

@Mikazukinoyaiba: I said the 'console war' was stupid, not the fact that there are multiple systems. When consumers are emotionally invested in the competition between multi-billion dollar corporations, to the point of insulting other people, it's time to re-evaluate the priorities.

@RTW: I doubt the ps3 will have better graphics but i have heard rumors that the ps3 version has more characters on screen due to the cpu.

In the end, It's not aboue graphics. Gameplay will always triumph graphics.

You know what I always say? It doesn't matter if the glass is half empty or half full, it only matters if it's half price.

The thing about the graphics is that the PS3 is supposed to have better anti-aliasing, at least according to IGN. Meaning, significantly less jaggies, so if you DO pay that close attention to detail, then sure, the PS3 version will have better graphics. Add to that more on screen activity due to the CPU and you may have yourself some distinguishing traits between the two version. I do know, however, that the 360 version uses a "warmer color palette" so depending on your take on things, the 360 version may seem like it has better graphics. This is all miniscule and minimal, and only videophiles will be able to tell the difference

As long as I get GTAIV and MGS4, I don't care about Sony making money off PS3.

@AuraHACK: And now I'm not hungry anymore

I'm getting MGS4 PS3

@boilermaker11: That's one thing I have noticed with 360 games, especially Mass Effect and Halo 3, lots of unexpected jaggedness every now and then. It doesn't look too bad on a smallish TV but on a Plasma it stands out a bit much. Other than that there isn't enough difference to bother making comparisions.

@ AuraHACK: You may need to consolt a docter.

@RTW: The PS3's GPU is known throughout the industry as not being the better GPU... this is fact. In fact, the 360's Xenos GPU can run more instructions and do renderings in less passes then the RSX. That's besides the point.

Theirs only one person in the whole press that I heard say of the build he played, he thought the PS3 looked better and that's Hilary Goldstein of IGN. Everyone else in the industry who have either played both versions or only the 360 version stated the PS3 looked as good as the 360 but running at a choppier frame rate or just flat-out didn't look as good as the 360.

The thing is that all these opinions were formed months ago from preview builds. It's my impression that people can't even talk about the final builds they've played because they're all under embargo.

There is a chance that the PS3 can look better and even perform as well if not better then the 360... I'm not counting anything out because it's simply fact that just because one set of tools or better doesn't mean that the tools will be used to their maximum capacity. This holds true for the PS3 and the 360. My guess is that the 360 will look better in the sandbox world primarily because of what I said about the GPU earlier but this hurts the 360 when they are trying to achieve parity between the 360 and the PS3 because they have to make the 360 produce similar effects to the RSX which uses a fixed pipeline. The other reason the 360 may look much better is because it has more memory to hold the whole streaming world. The benefits would mean smoother frame rates but this could also mean the 360 looks better (as in more complex) and suffer from slower frame rates just because it holds more in memory and therefore has to render more. The PS3 can also end up having superior frame rate because of the Cell's ability to animate more things bu the more things the Cell animates, the more memory it has to transfer which could also hurt frame rate if things aren't balanced: balance is a hard issue for the Cell.

It's all speculation on my part as we really haven't seen the GTA engine and we are not sure of what it's strengths are unlike RenderWares old engine and as we are coming to understand with UE3. We just have to wait to get the presses impression and until we try it for ourselves.

LOL, I remember months ago people were claiming the PS3 was already possibly profitable!

I'll get one as bluray player. if game hits bot platforms I would swing to the 360 without fail. Live is well done, I like the controller more and the custom audio track in any game wins me hands down. Little big world may come my way as well so I guess that's a bonus.

@okenny :)...and I just realized that was a lot of words for a reply that had nothing to do with the main topic.... Sorry :(

...

I'd wait till it actually happens to believe that the PS3 is profitable but it's good Sony itself sees light at the end of the tunnel and I'm sure they understand better than anyone that it's even better if their shareholders see this as well. Another price drop eminent? Not likely if they are achieving profitability ;) They wouldn't want to pull a Wii now and sell the product at a lower price then people are willing to pay for. If I was Sony, I'd do all I can to keep Bluray player prices high and tout how the PS3 is the cheapest and best BD player on the market.

@okenny :):

"If I was Sony, I'd do all I can to keep Bluray player prices high and tout how the PS3 is the cheapest and best BD player on the market."

That would be a good strategy, but they can't really control the pricing on other manufactures blu-ray players and I am pretty confident that we'll see new players with profile 1.1 or 2.0 going for like 250 later this year.

@LittleBigPlaneteer: well as a large stakeholder in the BD consortium, I would imagine they have some kinda pull but you are absolutely correct. Their influence may amount to nothing more then a minority vote if they stand alone.. I simply mean if they could control something or push it to their favor, I'm sure they would... The PS3 as a BD player is not just a value proposition but a quality proposition so if they can leverage that, they should.

@Stormrider: Pfft. Bring on an even more competitive horse race mentality! The advances in the consoles hardware, software, and price, haven't been this good in years because for the first time in a very long time, its anybodys game. They have to fight for every sale (unlike the Nintendo/Sony acting like they can take a dump on the gamer eras). :D

I remember about a year ago my coworkers and I were talking about the PS3 versus 360 and how the system was such a disappointment (at the time! Don't hit me!)...there was a customer in there who apparently was a Sony shareholder. He came back in another day and lectured me about badmouthing his company. I told him I was sorry, but I wasn't going to support a system that, at the time, wasn't supporting itself as a system.

Even now there is a very tiny library (where are my RPG's!? Oh, yeah, still on PS2), and while there are some pretty good games now the majority of them are not, unfortunately, exclusive. That having been said, I do still want one, and this is the very first time I have ever bought a game before purchasing the system, which I think is good evidence of some of the very high caliber potential in terms of the PS3 as a gaming system. I hate how all the focus is on the blu-ray. Yes, high-def, blah blah, give me some GAMES! That's what I want, and that's why I'm still kinda frustrated.

I understand there are a lot of good selling points for the PS3, especially now that Format Battle 2008 is over, but...yeah...I still can't justify the price over the library that currently exists. I'll probably own one before the year ends, and hopefully it will live up to my dreams as the successor for the system I currently own the most games for.

Kaz looks like he's saying...

"Yo, wut up? I'm bout dat PSTriple, son! Yadda mean?!? JEEYEAH!!"

@DoubleV: - "In the end, It's not aboue graphics. Gameplay will always triumph graphics."

Try telling that to graphic whores. I agree with you tho, and to me ... gameplay is WAY better than graphics.

@jitty9:

"LOL, I remember months ago people were claiming the PS3 was already possibly profitable!"

You beat me to it. More proof that message board prattle is about as reliable as a first batch Yugo.

That's pretty amazing that they could reach profitability after cutting the price, losing a lawsuit, manufacturing a new controller, continuing support of UMD, and releasing a trickle of titles every month. Some serious voodoo is going on over there in the house of Kaz.

@DARTH_TIGRIS:

I think it's more confusion than anything. Sony's gaming division has become profitable and the PS3 is including in that sector, but the profits are due to games, more than hardware.

I think it's easy to see how someone would confuse that general profit, for this specific one.

@dead_red_eyes: don't you go calling us whores, boy. we prefer enthusiasts. ;)

@okenny :): The RSX is clearly quite close to the 360 in performance since most competently produced games look and play virtually the same.

Also, PS3 titles use the Cell as a preprocessor to the RSX so the picture is not so clearcut. Unlike a traditional graphics model where you write shaders (mini tasks) on the GPU to help process data, e.g. to cull vertices, the Cell itself can have an SPU or two processing the data. So the RSX has less work to do, or can use the free cycles to render more stuff.

That doesn't mean most games will bother. My expectation of any cross-platform game is that they play virtually identically no matter what platform. Games like Call of Duty 4 & Burnout Paradise demonstrate that high quality platform parity it is very achievable.

Who knows about GTA IV... The game is so far up its own arse in hype that it will take days after release to get any idea which is "better" or whether any differences even matter. I don't trust reports that the PS3 had more vehicles since those sort of things will be set in config files - it could easily be a build discrepancy between platforms and nothing more. All the hype is a very good reason to buy neither version until after release. Wait for reviews and make an informed decision.

@okenny :): Do you have a source for the 'Xenos' is generally held as superior to RSX'?

What Kaz is saying:

"Read between the lines."

(look at the picture again)

@DrXym: Well I'll be sure not to buy any version if the PS3 one ends up having slowdowns.
And also because GTA is a stupid, juvenile crime-fest for frat boys.

@obonicus:

Copypasta from [kotaku.com]

" [www.xbox365.com]
[www.ps3forums.com]

Honestly, the 360's Xenos and the PS3's RSX are comparable to each other, but both are considerably underpowered compared to today's highend accelerators. Comparing them to each other is saying a x1950XT is better than a 7800 GTX. If one wants to get pedantic and compare these two _console_ parts when clocked at the same rates as the _above pc parts_, RSX (overclocked GTX) and Xenos (undeclocked XT), they will find overall performance to be incredibly similar.

The one real performance difference? The Xenos has faster anti-aliasing due to the embedded DRAM framebuffer, but this has no reflection on the GPU's ability to render complex scenes."

And for a postpend...
Check this out:
[www.tomshardware.com]

They are on parity for PC performance.
That said, the PS3 has the advantage of bandwidth, while the 360 has the unified memory. Once again the 360's one true advantage is the speed of it's framebuffer for anti-aliasing.

It's a pointless argument, which is better, based on what a studio puts out. Both consoles are capable of good visuals.

@obonicus: Well yeah but I'm not going to go hunting for them to please you... thats hard work man! ;) Here are too good places I read some articles (not forum posts): Beyond3D.com and Gamasutra. Also read some developer opinions on EGM and picked up somethings here and there on podcasts primarily on 1 Up yours and some GDC Podcasts back when they used to do podcasts. I also know people who've worked in the industry but that's surprisingly has been the least fruitful as the development process can be segmented but the opinion is usually the 360 allows for much more complex shaders to be written.

This is information you can also verify yourself. The 360's ability to use all it's shaders for a particular function either for pure rasterization or pure Z-based operations with access to extremely fast memory for for color data or access to the entire system memory for any kind of data using the unified memory architecture, from an architectural stand point, it has many preferable attributes. Developers have made the statement that ultimately the PS3 may be able to tessellate more object (solely do the Cell) but the 360 definately has the ability to do more during rasterization (This is the EGM developer's interview quote and I wish I can tell you wish issue but I don't remember). Don't forget that the RSX has a fixed pipeline and no dedicated frame buffer there are effects that are just much more costly on that architecture.

@DrXym: I agree... I'd even go as far as to say if the Xenos is setup as a Fixed pipline to mimick the RSX that the RSX may have the advantage. This has been a long standing theory of mine of why games like Burnout look better on the PS3 than the 360 and perform slightly better on the PS3 when they are ports of the PS3. The 360 has that ability to be configured to run like an RSX (at least in theory). But when running under it's unique parameters, it truly shines. The thing to remember is that the RSX doesn't have as much freedom to do more work as you put it since it is a fixed pipeline and it houses it's data in separate memory. I think if anything GTA will be made to conform in a way that allows both systems to produce very results and someone may get slighted.

This is all just my raving fanboy opinion at the end of the day so don't put too much weight into it ;)

@Scipher: The problem with those sources is that they're old. I mean, anandtech had a pretty thorough hardware comparison, but it was all based on conjecture, not on actual developer comments and certainly not on finished hardware (because, see, the PS3 has2 HDMI ports and doesn't ship with a built-in HD).

In fact, based on the scarcity of actual dev comments I'd really doubt that there have been any worthwhile comments comparing the two chips. (To be honest, at this point I probably wouldn't consider any opinions that didn't come from Infinity Ward or Epic).

Heck, for plain old PS3 vs. Xbox comparisons (which are a lot more common) we have a lot of 'PS3 programming is HARD' from one side (not worse, mind you) and from the other, we have people like Insomniac touting the advantages of the Cell processor (but they hardly program for 360 now, do they?).

Fanboys then extrapolate from what scrap of actual news they can get and churn it with console-maker trash talk for gems like 'Cell is 1 general purpose processor and 6 DSPs hence Xenon is superior', or, on the opposite side, 'Cell is a supercomputer on a chip'.

@obonicus: Very true, what you're saying. I don't have much time to respond, I'm sorry. My pre-canned response was based on prior comments by intertube fold that used ati vs nvidia part benchmarks. The 360 and PS3 are very different machines - the PS3 has cycles to spare for post processing, as seen in "The Darkness"'s 1080p upscaling, and the 360 has fast framebuffering, evident in PGR4.

The aim of my comments on this topic have been to highlight just how close these two systems are in ultimate capability. It's really moot, when you look at games like the aforementioned COD4 and Burnout Paradise, if a developer had a mind for cross platform perfomance, parity can be achieved.

That said, platform exclusives will always be the most outstanding titles. A game written specificially for a set hardware target, with dedication, and the best intent, will always look better that a multi-platform title. Unless they're fucking ninjas, of course.

To get a true comparison, console warring bastards should be looking at exclusives, but then.... you can't compare an exclusive title, can you?

In my honest opinion - 360==PS3. The differences lye in the network, and they are narrowing. Fun times ahead ;-)

Game console and home electronics theorycrafting on this board puts any WoW theorycrafting..ever..to shame.

Seriously, I love you guys.

Aha, Nikko Citigroup is pegging August while Kaz is saying later or next year probably has to do with an imminent price drop during the Holiday season. I'm thinking Sony wanted to push speculation to a later time so Sony can sneak in a price drop during the busiest consumer times of the season. We're long overdue for a price war.

Something seems to be brewing:
[www.engadget.com]