There's barely any difference between an Xbox 360 and a PS3

An even slimmer PS2? They'd better put a warning on the package about the child choking hazard, then.

Barely any differences?? Do they mean, aside from the standard HDD, the Standard Blu-ray, the standard Wifi, the quieter operation, the reliable operation, the vastly superior CPU, or the slightly better GPU? What about the significantly faster XDR memory in PS3? If you are a idiot, or a lazy programmer, that you might think there is barely any difference, but to any sane person, it's easy to see the PS3 is vastly superior in almost every single way.

don't forget that barely different price though.

Yes, superior in every way aside from having an entirely proprietary thing called "cell" which is about as hard to understand as its its namesakes.

Echoes this post from last year. Far from a lone voice on the subject. http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2006/11/01/ps3-and-xbox-360-about-the-same

I was walking around Wal-Mart (in San Antonio, Texas) the other day with my wife in/near the electronics section, and sure enough, we found a little electronic game that looked very similar to a Wii Remote. It was some kind of cheap crappy football game. I don't know why Wal-Mart employees couldn't figure out the difference between the two though. You'd think that the LCD screen on one and the Wii logo on the other would be a dead giveaway...

@simon. I have a question for you, do you own a PS3 by any chance :) If you was like myself that has all three you would understand this article. I actualy think he is wrong, I think the 360 is better for games. But the diffence is small, and will remain small. If I was you I would get a 360 too then you will know what he means.

Simon, you might need to take a chill pill. Your list of points reads like a feature list from the back of the box. Standard HDD is nice for caching content to HDD, but not all games do this. BD instead of DVD is nice because you don't have to break up your game but multiple disc games do work, annoying though they are. Vastly superior CPU? In many ways yes, and in some ways no. It's a completely different programming model, for many games and game developers the additional two PPC cores in the Xbox are easier to take advantage of than the 6 available (one of the 7 is reserved for OS use) SPEs. The GPU is a more interesting argument as the ATI device and Nvidia device take a very different approach to things with ATI using it's united shader architecture. A lot of rubbish is talked when it comes to the GPUs, people cherry pick the stats they want to quote to make their favored GPU look better. In the end there is not a lot of difference over all. The XDR memory is faster, but there's only 256MB of it. Xbox folks point to the 512MB in the 360 as if it's all available for games, when in fact it's a unified memory architecture. That single memory pool has to provide video memory and memory for the game itself. Sony's design forces developers to limit their video memory use to 256MB, which some see as a bad thing. On the other hand it does mean that the 256MB of XDR is reserved for the game code and OS. So PS3 forces discipline on the developer that the Xbox doesn't. It comes down to the fact that in every way the PS3 has a very different architecture and development model when compared to the 360. All your points were lifted from a feature sheet for the PS3 and have little to nothing to do with development. From a software point of view the unified memory of the 360 allows a very tightly programmed game to devote a ton of memory to graphics, potentially allowing more detailed textures in games running above 720p. On the other hand, a large game could restrict the memory available forcing the developer to run their game at a lower resolution and allow the 360 to scale the frame back up to 720p or higher. On the other hand the PS3 frees up a developer by offering distinct boundaries. Your graphics work will have to fit in 256MB, your game and the resident OS has to fit in 256MB. I can see ow some would find this a restriction, but at the same time I remember working on systems in the 8-bit days that made a virtue of varying the amount of RAM available depending on the graphics mode used. It's really annoying to have completed your coding only to find that you can't run in the desired screen mode because there isn't enough memory to do so and run your code. So I can see the virtue of having a well defined resource to work with. As it happens I do think that over all the PS3 is more powerful, in raw terms, and I think that there are many games that will be able to take great advantage of the Cell and it's SPEs. Xbox360 games are hitting the sweet point right now, but it's far easier to max out a homogeneous architecture like the 360s. The PS3 will start hitting it's stride in the coming year, but developers will continue finding ways to stretch the Cell in the years beyond that. Developers are a long way from maxing out the potential of the Cell.

Indeed, I see Amazon and Play are doing the PS3 for £279, very close to the 360 price, but you get so much more (a kick-ass Blu-ray for starters).

Yeah... you get much more... a BD drive, and a lot of gadgets, but no games. duh

Guillemot was saying that the effort for developing for either is about equal and the gaming performance is about equal, he is not even comparing the value of the consoles, I guess that means both parties should rejoyce as they will get even more better games, why the arguement?

And the only thing the PS3 has over the XBox 360 is the price. It cost more I our book it is not worth the money to buy the PS3. But I am sure that there will be a flame on this for the Sony fans. After their head man said what he did on the price of the PS3, just work harder, stopped us from buying anymore from them. Don't diss the buyers and hope to do well in the market place.

I think the ps3 & 360 performance discussion will end up going the same way as the ps2 xbox one. The xbox was a more powerfull platform than the ps2 but because of mutiplatform development and the lower xbox numbers developers targetted the ps2 platform. This resulted in very similar games. I think the same will happen with the 360 & PS3. The 360 is the dominant platform this time around with the ps3 having potentially higher specs (if developers can tap that potential). We will probably find developers targetting the 360 (higher sales) and not spending time extra to 'enhance' the PS3 version. There will be flagship games for each platform that will show what they are capable of but generally games will be direct ports between the 2.

Considering he's the games programmer and you're merely someone looking at the specs, I'd come to the conclusion that he's hinting at how the software and Cell's lack of being a general processing powerhouse (more floating point anyway, it's still better than 360's Tri-core either way). The 360's GPU is better as I recall, and the BluRay drive is a major problem if the developers cannot be bothered to massively compress files. Either way, I can't see how you, or I for that matter, can judge on how to make games when you're only looking at the hardware. As the woes of ATi's recent graphics cards show, hardware is only as good as the software that runs it.