The PS3 vs. the Xbox 360. When it comes to debating the merits of one system against the
other, I can easily hold my own against anyone I know. Whether it's the boys at work, or
hanging out with friends, my game is as good as anybody's.

But it's not as good as John Carmack's game. It's not even in the same league. I mean, come on, this is a guy who once taught himself aerospace engineering. And now he's the lead engineer of his own aerospace company, Armadillo Aerospace. While I, on the other hand, recently taught myself how to cook the perfect rice. Hey, it's not as easy as it sounds!

Let's move on, shall we? 1UP's Shawn Elliott recently sat down with the man himself at QuakeCon 2008. In less than 30 seconds into the interview, "Mr. Doom" started spreading the love, "...the only thing Sony has going for them over the 360, is the data storage on the blu-ray..." And about a minute and a half later, just in case we didn't quite hear him correctly the first time, he said, "...the only real advantage that the PS3 has over the 360, from our point of view, is the extra space." Okay, I think I got it. The PS3 and it's blu-ray win, but only by default.



Shawn then asks him, "I might have misinterpreted you last night in your keynote, but it seemed to be that you said in some ways the hardware for the 360 might even be superior to Sony's, outside of the compression issues and the DVDs.?" "Yeah, I mean that's our position that it's almost unequivocal across the board that the 360 is a better platform to develop for. When you get down into actual comparisons on the hardware performance characteristics, it's not quite an apples to apples comparison. On almost anything on the strictly graphical side, in terms of pushing vertexes and triangles on there, the 360 hardware is superior to the PS3's RSX on there." I think I got this one too. And the winner for best in-game graphics, the Xbox 360.

"On the processing side it's a little bit more complicated, where the main processor on the PS3 is roughly equivalent to one of the three processors on the 360. But then you wind up saying, you have to compare two other symmetric processors on the 360 versus the eight quirky cell processors. And that comes down to one of those questions, where if you just look at the raw numbers, the cells are much more powerful. Many more flops on there, in theory you can do a lot more, but that's where you come to the difference between theory and practice. And given an infinite amount of development time on there, you can craft a program that's gonna work more efficiently on the cells there than on two additional processors on the 360. But given a finite amount of development time, it's much-much easier to get things working well on the 360 than it is on the PS3. And that's pretty much the case across the board." A tougher one to call. For overall processing power the winner is the PS3. For ease of development the winner is the Xbox 360. Let's call this one a draw.



"And the other major difference is the memory partitioning. Where they're both 512mb machines, but on the PS3 it's partitioned into 256mb of video and 256mb of main. And one of the biggest things that Sony does poorly for developers is their system stuff sucks up a lot more resources than it does, than Microsoft's does on the 360. So memory is much more painful on the PS3. We spend a lot more time trying to crunch down the memory for that..." I'm gonna have to chalk up another win for the Xbox 360. I feel that Sony really shot themselves in the foot here.

On development for Rage. "...and we're trying to say pretty plainly that this is going to be the one thing that the PS3 version is gonna be better at, and in fact it's almost the worst sort of thing for Microsoft there because we are having to work twice as hard on the PS3 to bring it up to spec. But in the end it's going to be 60fps game, and it's going to wind up looking just like the 360, we just had to sweat lot more for it. And if it winds up getting a benefit because of the blu-ray and having the better compression on there, then it's going to wind up looking like the PS3 was the better machine, even though it really wasn't..." So John, how do you really feel about the PS3?



That's kind of a hard act to follow. Personally, I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Carmack's intelligence and his deserving place in the history of video games. So it's hard for me to doubt the validity of anything he said in that interview. I thought that all his points were clear and to the mark, and I didn't sense any animus in them. It was as if I was listening to a professor simply talking to his class.

Upon further examination of what he said, his points seem to be sound. Let's start with the graphics. Whenever a game is on both systems, the Xbox 360 version routinely looks better than the PS3 version. The processor is all about raw numbers. And the raw numbers give the advantage to the PS3. But do most developers have the time to get it right on the PS3? This question has plagued the PS3 almost since it's inception. And developers are no fans of the PS3's memory configuration. I still wonder why Sony chose to do it that way? Was it a cost issue? You want the developers to be in your corner, and in making a machine that is so unique, Sony seems to have limited themselves to only a select few developers who are even up to the task.

I'm not here today to choose a winner. And I am well aware that a number of the arguments presented in here are already many years old. As I stated at the beginning of this piece, I will debate almost any person I know, on whichever system is the best. But not John Carmack. And he has declared that the Xbox 360 is the best.

The entire interview is below.