PS3 Vs. Xbox360

Systems

The Battle of the Consoles has been going on for years, ever since the old Super Nintendo.  Then PlayStation came out with their new system, the PlayStation 1 to compete with Nintendo's 64.  A few years later, Microsoft took the scene, with their Xbox.  From then on, it has been a fight between Microsoft(Xbox) and Sony(PlayStation) to see who gets the sales.  The hottest systems on the market, The Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are now going to battle it out to see which has the most bang for the buck.  Keep reading to see which console has the best games, graphics, and online gameplay!

Games

Round 1:Game Selection

This round is going to compare the game selection between the PS3 and the Xbox 360. It has been like a game of tug of war, each system fighting to be on top with the best games. The xbox 360 owns the Halo franchise, Gears of war, Bioshock, and many more games. On the other side though, Sony currently holds Resistance, the Tom Clancy games, and God of War. The Xbox 360 has had 727 games released since its debut, vs the PlayStation 3's 557 games currently released. The Xbox 360 definitely has a larger selection of games available to the consumer, but the question is which console has the better games?  Unfortunately for Sony, the Xbox 360 comes out on top.  With Halo 3, Gears of War, and all the other 119 games exclusive to the xbox 360, consumers definitely seem to prefer the Xbox 360's game selection to that of the PlayStation 3. 

Round 2: Xbox360 Vs PS3 specs

This is a one sided competition here. The PlayStation 3 is definitely more technologically advanced than its competitor, the Xbox 360.  Below is a side by side comparison of the specs of each system.

Xbox 360 specs:

Custom IBM Power-PC Based CPU

• Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
• Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
• VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
• 128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
• 1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance

• 9 billion dot product operations per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor

• 500MHz processor
• 10 MB of embedded DRAM
• 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
• Unified shader architecture

Polygon Performance

• 500 million triangles per second

Pixel Fill Rate

• 16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA

Shader Performance

• 48 billion shader operations per second

Memory

• 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM
• 700 MHz of DDR
• Unified memory architecture

Memory Bandwidth

• 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
• 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
• 21.6 GB/s front-side bus

Overall System Floating Point Performance

• 1 teraflop

Storage

• Detachable and upgradeable 20GB hard drive
• 12x dual-layer DVD-ROM
• Memory Unit support starting at 64 MB

I/O

• Support for up to four wireless game controllers
• Three USB 2.0 ports
• Two memory unit slots

Optimized for Online

• Instant, out-of-the-box access to Xbox Live features with broadband service, including Xbox Live Marketplace for downloadable content, gamer profile for digital identity, and voice chat to talk to friends while playing games, watching movies, or listening to music
• Built-in Ethernet port
• Wi-Fi ready: 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g
• Video camera ready

Digital Media Support

• Support for DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG Photo CD
• Ability to stream media from portable music devices, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PCs
• Ability to rip music to the Xbox 360 hard drive
• Custom playlists in every game
• Built-in Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
• Interactive, full-screen 3-D visualizers

High-Definition Game Support

• All games supported at 16:9, 720p, and 1080i, anti-aliasing
• Standard-definition and high-definition video output supported

Audio

• Multi-channel surround sound output
• Supports 48KHz 16-bit audio
• 320 independent decompression channels
• 32-bit audio processing
• Over 256 audio channels

If you want more on the Xbox 360 specs check out:http://xbox.about.com/od/xbox2/a/xbox360specs.htm

PS3 Specs:

CPU: Cell Processor

• PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
• 1 VMX vector unit per core
• 512KB L2 cache
• 7 x SPE @3.2GHz
• 7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
• 7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
• * 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS

GPU: RSX @550MHz

• 1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
• Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
• Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

Sound: Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell-base processing)

Memory:

• 256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz
• 256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz

System Bandwidth:

• Main RAM: 25.6GB/s
• VRAM: 22.4GB/s
• RSX: 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s (read)
• SB: 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read)

System Floating Point Performance: 2 TFLOPS

Storage:

• HDD
• Detachable 2.5” HDD slot x 1

I/O:

• USB: Front x 4, Rear x 2 (USB2.0)
• Memory Stick: standard/Duo, PRO x 1
• SD: standard/mini x 1
• CompactFlash: (Type I, II) x 1

Communication: Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x3 (input x 1 + output x 2)

Wi-Fi: IEEE 802.11 b/g

Bluetooth: Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR)

Controller:

• Bluetooth (up to 7)
• USB2.0 (wired)
• Wi-Fi (PSP®)
• Network (over IP)

AV Output:

• Screen size: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
• HDMI: HDMI out x 2
• Analog: AV MULTI OUT x 1
• Digital audio: DIGITAL OUT (OPTICAL) x 1

CD Disc media (read only):

• PlayStation CD-ROM
• PlayStation 2 CD-ROM
• CD-DA (ROM), CD-R, CD-RW
• SACD Hybrid (CD layer), SACD HD
• DualDisc (audio side), DualDisc (DVD side)

DVD Disc media (read only):

• PlayStation 2 DVD-ROM
• PLAYSTATION 3 DVD-ROM
• DVD-Video: DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW

Blu-ray Disc media (read only):

• PLAYSTATION 3 BD-ROM
• BD-Video: BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE

If you want more on the PS3 specs check out:http://playstation.about.com/od/ps3/a/PS3SpecsDetails_3.htm

Basically PS3 wins this one hands down.

Round 3:Online Gameplay

The final round comes down to one of the most important controversial topics of the fans, online gameplay. Some people prefer the Playstation network over the Xbox Live Network due to the fact that it is free. However, you pay for what you get. Xbox live, at only 5$ a month is a much better investment. It is lag-free due to server maintenence by microsoft, and also has very good customer support if you ever encounter a problem. There are approximately 12 million people who currently play on Xbox live vs. the 1 million on PlayStation online, so naturally you will have a better selection with xbox live matchmaking. When it comes down to it, I think that Xbox live wins this round. They are both enjoyable, but Xbox live's quality and number of players definitely wins it the round.