Is The GPU Holding The PS3 Back? Short Answer, NO

There is an article on Bruce On Games, entitled Is The GPU Holding The PS3 back. Primarily, I think that this is a load of bulls**t. The Xbox 360 might have higher memory system bandwidth, CPU floating operations, GPU shader operations and what not than the PS3, but in the real world it all amounts to meh. Absolutely nothing. It doesn’t matter how powerful a hardware is if game developers can’t tap its true potential.

The main reason that I think for PS3 games performing poorly is due to that developers have had more time to familiarize with the 360 hardware and tools than that of the PS3. The PS3 is powered by Nvidia’s 7800GTX and the more-than-capable Cell processor. So, obviously, hardware constraints are not at play here. Developers had more time to work out the kinks with the 360 because it was released about a year earlier than the PS3.

This issue has been brought in the limelight because the recently released GRID by Codemasters, perform at a solid 30 Frames Per Second on the 360 and suffers from hiccups on the PS3 version. How true is that? While I [still] don’t own GRID on the 360, but my friends do, and they often have stuttering frame rates. And so does the PS3.

And hear this, they were talking about the demo version and not the final product. Here is what executive producer Gavin Raeburn had to say. “Secondly, our performance tests show that the 360 is running at a rock solid 30fps and the PS3 rarely drops, being rock solid 99% of the time. San Fran in the demo is probably our worst performer when the action gets really heavy on a couple of those long straights”.

For a complete breakdown of both the consoles hardware and how they compare to each other, read this article Xbox 360 Vs. PS3.