Xbox 360 and PS3, my thoughts

If you haven't already seen it, here's my coverage of Sony's Playstation 3 announcement today. I wrote the story while sitting in Sony's press conference, so it was a bit rushed but I wanted to post some of my additional thoughts that didn't make it into the first article.

Let me start first with the design; to me, the Xbox 360 is very Apple-like while the PS3 is very clearly a Sony product. Personally I prefer the looks of the Xbox 360, but the PS3 doesn't look bad at all in real life.

Although I've yet to use it, the PS3's controller scares me. I'm going to try my hands at it this week, but I really have no idea where that design came from.

The demos on the PS3 were absolutely *amazing*. I wouldn't call them "movie-quality" yet, but the things I saw came very close. Words really can't describe, the demos just looked amazing.

Virtually all of the games/demos on the PS3 had some degree of aliasing, some were unacceptably bad for a console with this sort of power. Don't get me wrong, about 95% of the games looked great, but those that had aliasing looked great...with jaggies. I'm not talking PS2 level of aliasing, but far too much aliasing for this level of hardware.

Without a doubt, ATI and NVIDIA are on very diverging paths with these two consoles. ATI went with a strictly unified memory architecture while NVIDIA used a combination of local graphics memory and GPU addressable system memory. ATI is backing their unified shader architecture, while NVIDIA doesn't appear to have embraced that on the hardware side. I will know more about ATI's GPU later this week, so stay tuned.

The dual HD output feature of the PS3 is very interesting; I'm not sure how many folks will take advantage of the 32:9 aspect ratio mode. I'm wondering whether this feature was put in to support sending different content to separate TVs (e.g. stream video to one display while gaming in another). Then again, I'm not sure how many people have that many HDTVs within close proximity of each other.

Sony clearly wants the PS3 to be much more of a media center style device. The demos weren't only about games, they were about decoding HD streams, navigating through video and picture content, they were about the entire picture. With built in blu-ray, I think the PS3 will have a huge advantage over the Xbox 360 as it should be able to act as a HD-DVD video player as well as a game console.

The 1080p output of the PS3 isn't that big of a deal for me. Given that basically the entire installed base of HDTVs right now only support 1080i, I seriously doubt we'll see a push to 1080p only all that quickly. That being said, I don't doubt that there will be an obvious difference between 1080p and 720p games. Given that it is essentially a resolution change, I see no reason for all developers to offer both 1080p and 720p options in PS3 games unless there are frame rate limitations. I did notice that some demos played much smoother than others, but I think it is far too early to make any calls on performance a full year before the console's release.

I'd say that Sony has the more powerful CPU on paper, but I'm curious to see how much of that gets taken advantage of in the real world. Difficulty of programming aside, the fact of the matter is that console development houses are very much of the write once, compile many mindset. Given the similarity of the Xbox 360's cores to the PS3's PPE, I'm afraid that the array of SPEs may go relatively untapped on the PS3.

From the very start I felt that Sony couldn't possibly bring the Cell to market in the PS3 as a 90nm chip. Disabling one SPE is a particularly interesting move, but one that makes a lot of sense. And the loss of a single SPE isn't a huge deal as I don't foresee the PS3 really being bound by the number of threads its SPE array can execute.

Overall, the PS3 looks to me to be the more complete package. The hardware is a bit more complete than Xbox 360, but at the same time given that it won't launch for another 6+ months after the 360 launches I'm not too surprised. Sony didn't really play up a competitor to Xbox Live, although it is very clear that the PS3 will be a net-enabled box. I have a feeling that Microsoft may bring to the table a much more complete on-line play package, while Sony brings a more powerful, more complete console.

Sony's strength with the PS2 has always been its game library, which I think will continue to be a strength with the PS3 (especially with full backwards compatibility all the way back to PS1). It's just that this time around, Microsoft appears to have a much stronger game library than with the original Xbox - and it's that key difference that will make the 360 and the PS3 worthy competitors.

I will be reporting from the show all week, but for now it's time to enjoy 24 a full 3 hours later than I normally would - how do you west coast folks do it? :)

Take care.