PS3 is Not More Powerful than Xbox 360, says Ex-Harmonix DevOctober 26, 2007 | By: James Brightman| More Sony has said that the PlayStation 3 has more power than Microsoft's Xbox 360, but that it requires a bit of patience and legwork to leverage that power. Jason Booth, a former developer from Harmonix, just doesn't see it happening. He thinks game designers are trying to match PS3 games to 360 games at best.
Jason Booth, a former Turbine and Harmonix developer who has worked on both Guitar Hero games and Rock Band, has posted some interesting comments on his blog regarding "PS3 misconceptions and spin."
"I read various game forums from time to time, and often see gamers complaining about 'lazy ports' to the PS3. 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... ports to the PS3 will never be as good as their 360 counter parts, and ...most PS3 exclusives will likely continue to suck," he says.
First and foremost, Booth doesn't think PS3 really has a graphical advantage. Why? "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," he says. "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."
He also suggests that Blu-ray is not really an advantage: "[It's] great for watching movies, but not so great for games. Getting data off the Blu-ray drive takes about twice as long as it does to get the same data off the 360's DVD drive. That translates into longer load times, or god forbid if you're streaming from disk, tighter constraints on the amount of data you can stream."
He acknowledges that with the greater storage space of Blu-ray "there is the potential to use that to do something cool," but he argues that "most developers who use the entire Blu-ray drive are doing it to work around other problems with the PS3 such as its slow loading."
He adds, "For instance, in Resistance: Fall of Man, every art asset is stored on disk once for every level that uses it. So rather than storing one copy of a texture, you're storing it 12 times. If you took that entire game and removed all the duplicate data, it would likely fit on a DVD without any problem."
Ultimately, Booth says "the performance centric research into the PS3 has been around making it easier for developers to get the same level of performance you get out of the 360 naturally... developers must spend significantly more time and resources getting the PS3 to do what the 360 can already do easily and with a lot less code... On top of this, there is shrinking incentive to do this work; the PS3 isn't selling."
Whether these comments can be taken at face value is up to you; Booth adds at the end of his post that his remarks "might come across as a lot of Sony bashing, but it's just the reality from the trenches." It's an interesting perspective nonetheless.
