Gaming Multimedia Wars: Who’s the Best?
Sony’s PlayStation 3 is widely touted as the best gaming machine money can buy, though the small but hardcore group of Xbox 360 loyalists would 
contest that. They’d do so by citing the ‘superior GPU’, mindboggling hardware related figures or the online gaming portal that doubles as a Facebook of sorts, never mind the fact that these arguments just don’t hold water in the face of the sheer variety of titles that can be enjoyed on the PS3. Then there’s the infinitely better support on offer too. But let’s not indulge in unnecessary baiting here; we must talk of the PS3.
Gaming Multimedia: What Makes PS3 Rock
- It is always on, so you can access your PlayStation3 from a remote location as long as you have a working internet connection.
- The PS3 CPU is several times faster than Xbox360, its nearest competitor, in terms of GFlops.
- The PS3 has a worthy companion on the PlayStation Portable; we can connect the PSP to our Playstation 3 and transfer media files such as music, videos, gaming multimedia etc.
- The multimedia game portfolio of published titles for PS3 is phenomenal; developers and publishers of over 230 games had already announced titles even before the console came out.
- PS3 has excellent backward compatibility with PlayStation 2 console, games and accessories.
Gaming Multimedia: What Makes PS3 Lag behind the 360
- Comes with only 256 MB video RAM, less than the 512 MB the Xbox 360 comes with. It may, however, be argued that while all of the 360’s RAM is shared from the system, the PS3 GPU’s RAM is onboard. A further 240 MB may be shared from the system, bringing PS3 closer to the Xbox360.
- The PS3 GPU lacks eDRAM, which enables the Xbox360 to edge it out in terms of sheer GPU bandwidth.
Microsoft is closing the gap with Xbox 360 and probably will eventually catch up with Sony in gaming multimedia consoles. For some gaming multimedia users, it may come down to something as simple as which one is more compatible with the games they already have in their gaming multimedia collection.
