The passive Vs active arguement only gets even more confusing when you learn how the 3DTV standard was even implemented in the first place.
HDMI 1.4 is essentially just the 3d tv spec- with it there is bandwidth available for for what amounts to a 120hz option and a 48hz option. At 120hz , resolution is capped at 2560X720, essentially 2 frames displayed side by side (this is the more common method , I'm unsure how top/bottom 3d works, I guess it would run at 1280X1440?) , each frame is intended for 1 eye and is a 1280X720 image, the active glasses work in combination with the television to black out either the left or the right eye 60 times a second , hence the 120hz. Within this field of resolution you can place varying sizes of images but it will just get scaled into each eye's view. For gaming, some special effects don't display so well in 3d so the end up getting turned off and while 3d 720p isn't quite as many pixels to draw as a full HD image , it's still obviously 2X the pixels required normally so it's harder for many games to maintain their frame rate and a broken framerate in a 3d game can cause all sorts of issues with synching that can lead to ghosting and other problems. This is why the best looking 3d on console right now tends to be games that run at 60fps in 1080p, since fullHD is actually a bit more pixels then 720p3d is , it's only up to coding the engine to run at 2 slightly different angles to optimize framerate. This is why games that run at 30fps /720p have no choice but to drop down the resolution some more. You could have full resolution but it'd run at 15 FPS which no one wants. So details get snipped out and resolution is cut down.
The second mode hdmi 1.4 has for 3d is the 48 hz mode- this allows for a full HD image in 3d running at 24 fps. Sadly, no matter how good your computer is , this framerate is capped because of the limits of hdmi 1.4 bandwidth, I imagine it could exceed this in scenarios where sound wasn't required but I haven't looked into that. What this means is although you get the substantial resolution increase of 720p- 1080p (900K pixels up to 2.1MPixels-and for 3d you've got 3820X1080 being rendered) the framerate sacrifice makes it not worth using for gaming. This is an issue I've noticed playing PC games in 3D, a good 3d monitor in pc tends towards the Full HD size but if you decide to render the game in 1080 p, it just gets downscaled to 720p by the 3d driver which gives you free AA but makes text look like shit. So instead you run the game at 720p for added performance and less scaling, now your monitor just has to blow up the final image a bit giving it an ever so slight blur.
Finally, if you decide to use passive 3dtv, there is no rapid switching between the side by side 3d. Instead the software displaying the 3d on the screen is simply displaying the left eye and right eye side of the 2560X720 image on top, almost like folding a sheet of onion skin paper in half from top to bottom. Passive 3d glasses work the same as the ones you get at the theater , light waves travel horizontally and vertically and each lens blocks one of the 2 , while the other lens blocks the other. The same software that has folded the image into itself has also made sure each layer is only putting out light in the way the lens will see it. I'm sure it's a very complicated process from an engineering/programming perspective.
Either way, because of how this works and the fact that you aren't at a giant theater screen with a likely 2000X4000 projector and are instead at home with your 1920X1080p television, there's simply not enough pixels on the screen to display every pixel , to compensate it interlaces the image, interlacing is the process of displaying 50% of the lines at any given time but over the time period of a full second , the image is showing 50% then the other 50% in rapid fire , this is how almost all televisions displayed in image up until around the year 2000 when progressive scan and edtv/hdtv started becoming a thing. So while an active shutter allows the tv to display the full 1920X1080 image by blocking 1 eye, then blocking the other eye to give you the other 1920X1080 image, passive technology for the most part has to compesate for both your eyes seeing the tv at all times, so it's flipping between layers at 120hz and the odd lines are being sent out as light visible only to your left eye while the even lines are being sent out as being visible only to your right eye or whatever, because of this the technical resolution is going to get halved but the functional resolution is still almost the same as the real thing , most people won't be watching a 3d movie or playing a 3d game and pause it just to find faults.
The problem I see after this big huge dissection for the OP in particular is that on the PS3 most of the games are running sub HD to achieve their 3d graphics (stardust being a notable exception) so you've got a game that's rendering at say 640X480, that's being stretched to fit on a 1280X720 window which is then going to get scaled up to 1920X1080 pixels for the tv screen to show it and in turn get downscaled to 1920X1080i to fit within the parameters of the passive 3d , it's going to look blurrier most likely and having that much scaling going on will undoubtedly add some microseconds of lag if you're concerned about that sort of thing.
But at the end of the day the choice really comes down to price more then anything else, nearly negligible differences to all but the biggest technophiles out there and frankly the ps3 isn't strong enough to do real good 3d gaming for the triple A releases anyway so I'd say you're perfectly safe to jump into the passive market unless you really hate input lag.
