It is very difficult to program for, from what I have read.

 

I'm going to wait on the first price drop before i even pick up a next gen console and it will more than likely be a 360 as i agree forza owned GT4, I even played GT4 for 5 months before i bought forza , once i found out about all the car upgrading options and more casual gamer settings and features it beat the crap outta GT4, tourist trophy is still great though, all in all had more fun with NFS:MW than all other race games I've played and the dual shock still pwnz!!

 

Not sure who the "developer" in the post quoted above is, but he certainly has some facts wrong. For now the xbox 360 looks better because people are still learning how the cell processor works. The unified architecture is a new concept that is slowly being put into all future graphics platforms, for example the newest nvidia powerhouse (8800gt i think?) has a similar architecture that essentially gives the card over all processing power, instead of specific chips to handle different parts of graphics.

For me its a wait and see, as always the release titles for Playstation are pretty weak and the price is ridiculous (for those of you saying how high the price is for ps3, you must have not payed attention during the psx and ps2 releases as they were both almost as much as well). But I am pretty sure that once the work flow for creating ps3 games has been optimized you will see an increase in the quality of graphics and titles that are released.

Last comment is about how 360 has an optional hd-dvd drive. While at first this seams like a good thing, when it comes to game development with next gen graphics it is actually a minus. The reason is that by having the blue-ray standard in all ps3's, the developer knows that the 100% of the audience will be able to play a game that is developed and put on a blue ray disk (some games are easily breaking the 8gig limit of a standard double layer dvd on pc due to not only high def movies, but higher resolution meshes and texture maps). Having got my degree in 3d graphics for games, and having the pleasure of working with a pre-production development mule ps3 box I pretty accurately say that when big dollar games are developed for ps3 alone (with no intention of being done for 360 as well) the graphics will be able to take another large step up in quality, but don't expect these titles for another year or so.

 

Interesting post, geoff. Assassin, how do you KNOW the PS3 graphics processor will work better? Most of what I hear is hype. Why is it that state-of-the-art video cards for PC's tend to show their advantages immediately, with only incremental driver improvement? Several sources I've read are more in line with geoff's source, even for the long-term view. I read somewhere that the 360 has a serious texture memory advantage.

I've got both systems and the GT HD comments were spot-on. I was playing it and wondering when the "next gen" experience would kick in. It didn't. Especially with lack of Six-Axis force feedback.

You're right, the launch titles are weak. I bought my Xbox originally for Halo. I bought my PS2 for GT. Of course many more rockin' games have gone by since. I don't have much optimism for the PS3.

Mine was an Xmas gift but I don't recommend 'em. Blu-Ray? I wasn't even thinking about buying a Blu-Ray player so all that "benefit" is vapor to me. What? You're really going to amass a Blu-Ray library now, before we know how the format wars will shape up? Based on several reviews I'd pick HD-DVD before Blu-Ray, for the 'disk extras' handling and more common VC-1 encoding, though that can change.