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[entremet]

Please support your choices with evidence--either screenshots, ports, exclusives, gifs, technical analysis (if that's your thing) or at least full sentence posts.

Please, please let's avoid one word answers.

Seeing that The Crew will be skipping the PS3, presumably due to development resources, it's been a common thread that the 360 was easier to develop, but the PS3, when coupled with dedicated and talented developers, such as Naughty Dog, ended up producing some of the best console graphics last generation.

Later on, some developers started leading on the PS3 and ports got better.

But do we know which system wins out definitely in the graphical race?

Personally, it seems to me that PS3 has a sliver of an edge, but development needs are higher and more complex due to Cell, so only those with the luxury of single platform development could take advantage.

I do go back and forth. Nuts and Bolts and Halo 4 are beautiful games. And the edge of 3rd party ports is also compelling, although that gap was bridged some as developers lead on PS3, such as GTA5.

What are your thought?

 

[Ryce]

Definitely PS3. The Last of Us looks far better than anything on 360.

 

[Brick]

...does it matter?

 

[Newline]

PS3

 

[bananafactory]

Not sure about raw power but I never played anything on my 360 that looked as beautiful as Journey, Uncharted 3, The Last of Us, Beyond: Two Souls or God of War 3.

Halo 4 came pretty close, though.

 

[The Llama]

360 is more powerful if you don't put as much time in optimizing it, PS3 is more powerful once you know how to use it.

 

[Fracas]

PS3 by far for me. Nothing on 360 touched Beyond, God of War III or any of Naughty Dogs' later games.

Gears and the Halo games looked great, but didn't quite get there.

 

[Oppo]

it's the PS3, if the games budget supports the attention required.

 

[Ouren]

PS Triple

look at this man's beard.

 

[Fisty]

Cell was certainly a beast, but ps3 was definitely hampered by the RSX and split memory pool. That pretty much negated the lead offered by the cell... tough to say, really.

 

[BigDug13]

Open World: 360
More Linear experience: PS3

Split RAM is too challenging to open world as effectively.

 

[bananafactory]

PS3 by far for me. Nothing on 360 touched Beyond, God of War III or any of Naughty Dogs' later games.

Gears and the Halo games looked great, but didn't quite get there.

It's insane how good God of War III looked in 2010. Would still hold up if it got a PS4 port to 1080.

 

[Herne]

The 360 has a stronger GPU, the PS3 has a stronger CPU. The latter is also hamstrung by having seperate allocated ram for each - which is why Skyrim ran like shit on the PS3.

They're both damn close, though.

 

[3bdelilah]

I haven't played all big games on the 360 yet, but from what I've played then definitely PS3, due to God of War III, Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us (I don't count Beyond because that's more of a huge cut scene in my opinion). But I haven't played Halo 4 and Gears of War 3 yet, they're in the backlog, and I've heard they look pretty damn good visually.

 

[DaveTheSnake]

PS3 - Look at Last of Us and Beyond.

Beaten

 

[entremet]

Definitely PS3. The Last of Us looks far better than anything on 360.

Could that be done hypothetically on the 360, however?

I don't know. I'm not a graphics programmer.

 

[DizzyCrow]

8 years later, which console is powerful graphically--360 or PS3?

Both. I think you missed something in the title OP.

 

[Curufinwe]

TLoU looked better than any 360 game, although Halo 4 was close.

But late gen multiptaform games like Skyrim and AC4 ran at higher framerates on the 360.

It's close.

 

[MarkMclovin]

360 is more powerful if you don't put as much time in optimizing it, PS3 is more powerful once you know how to use it.

Trying to get my head around this.

 

[Monty Oliver]

Issue with this is power and output are not the same. Jaguar was more powerful than the 3DO and the Saturn (assumingly) yet pretty sure no one started getting any power out until it was too late.

I can slap a GTX in my Atari 2600 and have it run at 4k, it's still not going to have better output than my Gamecube.

 

[Vitor711]

PS3

Beyond still puts most current-gen PS4 and Xbox One games to shame when it comes to character rendering. It's incredible what Quantic achieved.

Halo 4 looked great too, but that and TLOU really show just how much further the PS3 could go.

 

[Ubersnug]

Definitely PS3. The Last of Us looks far better than anything on 360.

Subjective, of course, and as good as the last if us was, I would argue Halo 4 was technically better looking.

Art direction for both games are completely different however...

 

[UncleSporky]

You know, I see a lot of screens of how awesome PS3 games look pretty often, Last of Us etc. What are some screens of the 360's peak?

 

[Inferno313]

From what I've gathered, PS3 is technically more powerful, and that showed in their exclusives like The Last of Us.

However, the 360 was much easier to code for, that's why a majority of third-party games ran better on 360 than PS3.

 

[Steel]

PS3 first party. 360 everything else. 360's first party is pretty good looking too, though.

 

[Aokage]

It's apples and oranges.

360 had numerous advantages over PS4, primarily its familiar architecture.

But devs willing to "code to the metal" on PS4's bizarro architecture and split RAM (Yes ND and Sony Santa Monica, I'm looking at you) could indeed produce arguably better results.

 

[Zornack]

TLoU, Journey and Beyond are the best looking console games of the last generation as far as I'm concerned.

 

[sublimit]

I think they were basically the same.Some things the PS3 did better and some the 360.
Ultimately graphic quality always depended on the type of game and the developer's budget/expertise.

 

[Fisty]

Open World: 360
More Linear experience: PS3

Split RAM is too challenging to open world as effectively.

Heres another:

On UE3: 360

Not on UE3: PS3

 

[Neff]

At its best, 360 RE5 kills anything on either platform imo.

 

[MagicShadowZ]

At the beginning X360 because of easier technical design, but at the end definitely PS3

 

[Superflat]

This was my impression from gaming last gen:

360 can put out higher base fidelity with less work for dev.

PS3 always had more potential power, but was more difficult to work with -- it just depended on the dev and its resources.

 

[entremet]

Both. I think you missed something in the title OP.

Ah thanks.

Could a mod update it to add "more" to the title.

 

[Brazil]

PlayStation 3 without any shade of doubt. Nothing on the 360 comes close to The Last of Us or Beyond.

 

[BouncyFrag]

As a late adopter to the ps3 I'd go with it. I'm still floored with God of War 3, but I still play most multiplats on the 360 since they are generally a little better.

 

[SuperSonic1305]

Open World: 360
More Linear experience: PS3

Split RAM is too challenging to open world as effectively.

Saint's Row 3 and GTA5 both were better on PS3.

 

[3bdelilah]

PS3 - Look at Last of Us and Beyond.

Beaten

I'm not too sure if it's fair to mention Beyond, since it's more of a huge cut scene that anything in my opinion. Not that the Naughty Dogs games have incredible player freedom, but there's much more gameplay to them than Beyond.

And of course, how can we forget about SSM's incredible work.

 

[ComputerMKII]

PS3

 

[Monty Oliver]

In other words, the PS3 is more powerful, but it was not designed to push tht out and had restraints, so the 360 output is better cumulatively.

 

[ramparter]

Both are powerful graphically. Don't understand the question.

 

[UncleSporky]

Trying to get my head around this.

Seems pretty obvious to me. Some platforms are easy to make a decent-looking game on quickly, perhaps due to having a simple or common architecture, while others take more effort but result in a better looking game overall when you put the work in.

He worded it weird. The 360 isn't "more powerful" if you don't put as much time into it. What he means is basically if you have 3 months to make a 360 game and 3 months to make a PS3 game, the 360 game might end up looking better due to the ease of slapping together a good-looking game. PS3 takes more finesse to eke out the best graphics.

 

[Ishida]

PS3, no doubt.

 

[Fisty]

Saint's Row 3 and GTA5 both were better on PS3.

Yeah streaming from the hard drive was faster on PS3 iirc, so it worked out better for ps3 in that dept

 

[sixteen-bit]

PSTriple

 

[icespide]

it's kind of a draw honestly. they both of advantages and disadvantages

 

[ThatsMytrunks]

Subjective, of course, and as good as the last if us was, I would argue Halo 4 was technically better looking.

That's a bullshot, considering the game ran at 720p. Also some of those textures look terrible. I love me some Halo 4 Campaign and Halo 4 Graphics, but that image is bullshot.

The PS3 was capable of more than the 360, but from what I understand it was a beast to figure out.

 

[IKizzLE]

I wonder what 360 games would of looked like if Microsoft had as many dedicated teams as Sony working on exclusive games that were coded to the metal?

The fact that halo 4 looks so good shows that if Microsoft had 3 or 4 different first party studios with the creative freedom to make whatever they want, they probably would of had games that looked as good as beyond, gow3 and tlofus.

 

[OverHeat]

360 90% of 3rd party look better on it.

 

[CorruptionDee]

It's clearly debatable. Both consoles have their pros and cons. Overall I'd say that the 360 has been more consistent overall in regards to superior multi-platform ports.

PS3 advantages: The Cell processor and Blu-Ray discs for streaming data and data capacity.

360 advantages: More available RAM and a superior GPU.

Naughty Dog has pulled off amazing looking games on the PS3 like the Uncharted series and Last of Us. However, they're first party so we can't accurately do a direct A/B comparison. It would be like comparing Nathan's to McDonald's, then saying that Nathan's is superior because they make better hot dogs, even though McDonald's doesn't sell hot dogs.

Like I said, there's no clear winner since they both have their pros and cons. Any game that is optimized for Blu-Ray like LA Noire will always be superior on PS3. Other games will be clearly superior on the 360 or the 360 version will slightly edge it out with image quality, resolution, or frame rate.

 

[itzknickknac]

From my experience, PS3.

360 had more screen tears than PS3. That is graphically distracting.