There have been lots of confusions whether Sony playstation 3 is better than Microsoft Xbox 360 or the other way round. Both consoles boast good indy support with games like Braid on XBLA and PixelJunk games on PSN. Both are available with big titles like Street Fighter HD and Mega Man. So, what are the differences between the two consoles?
CPU:
The CPU of Xbox 360 has vector processing power and a dot product instruction. The console also has three general purpose CPU cores and each core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread with a shared 1 MB L2 cache and a dot product instruction. The CPU of Sony Playstation 3 allows an environment where 87.5 work is DSP calculation and 12.5 work is general purpose computing.
GPU:
The GPU of Xbox 360 is more powerful than that of Sony playstation 3. The Xbox 360 GPU has larger number of transistors and the total programmable GFLOPs number is almost equal. In order to add additional floating point options for graphics rendering the PS3 has extra seven DSPs on the Cell. On the other hand the three general purpose cores of Xbox 360 with dot products instructions and custom D3D are tailored for true graphics related calculations.
Multithreading and balanced designs are other features of the Xbox360`s GPU. the automatic shader load balancing, full rate texture fetching in the vertex shader, programmable triangle tesselator, memory export features, programmable vertex fetching are the other features of the Xbox 360 that contribute to the rendering performance of the gadget.
Bandwidth:
For a total system bandwidth of 48 GB/s, the Playstation 3 has 25.6 GB/s of RDRAM bandwidth and 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth. On the other hand, for a 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth the Xbox 360 has a 256 GB/s of EDRAM bandwidth and 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth. PS3 try to compensate the lack of memory by using Z and color compression.
Multimedia:
When it comes to multimedia, the major advantage of PS3 is that it can stream media and also allow the users to store media on it. In case of Xbox 360 it is like a media extender and does not allow you to save your AVI files on the hard drive. Again, PS3 is, till date, the only Blu Ray playing video game console. It has high video quality, responsive controls and also it supports all the latest features.
Backwards Compatibility:
In case of backwards compatibility Xbox 360 excels PS3. The PS3 does not support any PS2 library as it does not have PS2 functionality. Alternatively, you can buy a used 20GB or 60GB if you want a backwards compatible PS2. This can be considered as one of the drawbacks of PS3. However, Microsoft has allowed backwards compatibility for Xbox 360 and the online library if the console is adding original XBOX games regularly.
Open Source Operating System:
Playstation3 is the only gaming console that allows the user to install Linux, it does not allow to play games while operating in Linux though. Microsoft is planning to upgrade Xbox 360 and working on a version of Linux that can be installed on the console.
PS3 simplifies the choice for import gamers and is a completely region free gaming console. Xbox 360 has superior graphic power and its GPU allows it to perform at high resolution. With Playstation 3, some of the games require mandatory installation to the hard drive, whereas with Xbox 360, you have the choice of installation.
Both the video game consoles have their own strengths and shortcomings, and both are tremendously successful.
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