It is often difficult to choose between two well-known brand gaming consoles. This article compares some of the features of the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
There is a lot of confusion over whether Sony playstation 3 is better than Microsoft Xbox 360 or vice versa. Both consoles offer good indy support with games like Braid on XBLA games and PixelJunk on PSN. Both are available with big titles like Street Fighter HD and Mega Man. So, what are the differences between the two consoles?
The Xbox 360 CPU has vector processing power and point product instructions. The console also has three general purpose CPU cores and each core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread with a shared 1MB L2 cache and point product instructions. The Sony Playstation 3 CPU enables an environment where 87.5% of the work is DSP computation and 12.5% of the work is general purpose computing.
Xbox 360 GPU is more powerful than Sony playstation 3. GPU Xbox 360 has a larger number of transistors and the number of programmable GFLOPs is almost the same. To add additional fraction point options for graphics rendering, the PS3 has an additional seven DSPs on the Cell. On the other hand a three core general purpose Xbox 360 with point product instructions and a D3D custom tailored for true graphics related calculations.
Multithreading and balanced design is another feature of the Xbox360 GPU. Automatic shader load balancing, full rate texture fetching in vertex shaders, programmable triangle tesselator, memory export feature, programmable vertex fetching are other features of the Xbox 360 that contribute to the gadget’s rendering performance.
For a total system bandwidth of 48 GB / s, the Playstation 3 has an RDRAM bandwidth of 25.6 GB / s and a bandwidth of 22.4 GB / s GDDR3. On the other hand, for a total system bandwidth of 278.4 GB / s, the Xbox 360 has an EDRAM bandwidth of 256 GB / s and a bandwidth of 22.4 GB / s GDDR3. The PS3 tries to compensate for the lack of memory by using Z and color compression.
When it comes to multimedia, the PS3’s main advantage is that it can stream media and also allows users to store media on it. In the case of the Xbox 360 it is like a media extender and does not allow you to store your AVI files on the hard drive. Again, the PS3 is, to date, the only Blu-Ray video game console playing. It has high video quality, responsive controls and also supports all the latest features.
In case of backwards compatibility the Xbox 360 is superior to the PS3. PS3 does not support PS2 libraries because it lacks PS2 functionality. Alternatively, you can buy a used 20GB or 60GB if you want a backwards compatible PS2. This can be considered one of the PS3’s drawbacks. However, Microsoft has allowed backwards compatibility for the Xbox 360 and online libraries if the console adds original XBOX games regularly.
Open Source Operating System:
Playstation3 is the only game console that allows users to install Linux, it doesn’t allow for playing games while operating on Linux though. Microsoft plans to upgrade the Xbox 360 and work on a Linux version that can be installed on the console.
The PS3 simplifies the options for importing gamers and is a completely region free gaming console. The Xbox 360 has superior graphics power and its GPU allows it to perform at high resolutions. With the Playstation 3, some games require a mandatory installation to the hard drive, whereas with the Xbox 360, you have the option of installation.
Both video game consoles have their strengths and weaknesses, and both have been very successful.
