ikaz :
Because xbox 360 was closer to PC as far as design, that means big devs could uses and modify tools that they already in house that would work and they had more experience. Since the PS3 had much more custom hardware they have to create new tools or make large modifications to their current tools to get them to work for PS3. So basically it was easier to port/make games on the 360 at first until the dev had experience making games for the ps3 architecture. It's also why and the end of a console (pretty much any long lived console) life normally the best looking games come out since they have had years working with the hardware.
The architecture of the Xbox 360 itself lent itself to superior performance, despite ostensibly inferior specs:
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-xbox-360-dominated-a-decade/1100-6432469/
“The challenge for console manufacturers is always finding the sweet-spot in technology, between price, complexity, and capability, and the truth is Sony over-shot with PS3,” Bach says. “They went for this chipset design that was more complicated than it was worth, and they went for Blu-ray, which was expensive. It's never a straightforward transition from one generation to the next, but we wanted to make sure ours was easier than most. The coherence between developing on Xbox original and Xbox 360, along with the continuity of Xbox Live, helped make developers’ lives easier if they were developing games for us.”
The Xbox 360 shipped with an ATI card that Multerer describes as monstrous. "You would have to wait a year to even buy a video card for PC that matched it,” he adds.
Since PlayStation 3 combined a Cell processor with an Nvidia GPU, and considering the system was far more expensive than its competition, players were regularly astonished to find that certain games looked superior on Xbox 360. This wasn’t the near-indecipherable difference between 900p and 1080p, this was colossal performance gaps in key games such as Bayonetta, PES 2008, Lost Planet, Valve’s Orange Box, etcetera.
The secret to the Xbox 360’s superior performance was how it handled memory; it was the first major games console to unify RAM across the GPU and CPU. The PlayStation 3, by contrast, evenly split its memory between graphics and processing, with both capped at 256MB. It meant that, in games developed for PC or Xbox 360--such as all those mentioned above--if certain scenes demanded far more memory than 256MB for graphics, the Xbox could adjust accordingly. But when that code was ported to the PS3, the adjustment could not be replicated. Like with most problems in games development, there are many solutions to this, but the easiest remedy was to downgrade the graphics on PS3.
“Too many people back then thought the issue is compute; how many gigaflops or teraflops. It's not. Just as big of an issue is memory bandwidth,” says Multerer, who proceeds to offer me a crash-course in graphics rendering. "So there are three pieces to a game engine. The first is a resource manager that pulls stuff off the disc into memory, and to constantly manage what's in there. That is super complicated. The rendering engine, meanwhile, takes a look at all the resources in memory and tries to draw a picture from them. And it's going to do that a whole bunch of times per second, and it’s probably going to be on a big screen with a lot of pixels, so you have got to move a lot of memory.
"But there's the thing. If the resource manager and the renderer are running in separate memory spaces [like with PS3], you have to copy all those resources across a bus in order to draw a picture. However, in the 360, the resource manager loaded the data into RAM, and then just passed something like four bytes over, which is a pointer, to where it is. That's so much faster. This was a tremendous advantage.”
Unified memory was not common before the Xbox 360 launched, but its influence cannot be underestimated. “Put it this way,” Multerer adds, “there is a reason why both the new consoles have unified memory.”
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