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Arstechnica: the Xbox 360 and the next generation
>> From arstechnica.com:
[QUOTE]
Microsoft is confident enough in their position that they invited me to New York to see how the Xbox 360 stacks up against the PS3 when both are hooked into the same 1080p display and using the highest-quality connection possible. For the 360 that means the VGA cable, which is currently the only way the system can output 1080p; the PS3 is hooked up via HDMI.
* The hard drive problem
The Microsoft team defends the drive by talking about how you can delete a television show and redownload it later to save space, but it's clear that these solutions are a workaround. It's a problem, and if Microsoft wants to really get people into buying more content through the 360 and Xbox it's something they're going to have to fix. And I'm not going to be happy if I end up paying $200 for a 40GB HDD.
* Microtransactions and you
EA has recently angered a lot of gamers with their new habit of putting up what amounts to cheat codes online for pay, and "tutorial videos" for Madden that also cost money.
"Vote with your wallet!" I'm told. Fair point, but the fact that these things are being sold at all makes the microtransaction system itself look pretty bad.
* Ana is a bot
It's time to put the systems in the room to the test and check out how the games look and how the Xbox 360 and PS3 handle upscaling. "If you really wanted to be mean you would have run these tests in 720p or 1080i," I say, referring to the issues that Sony is having with those two resolutions. They realize what I'm talking about, and Scott Henson opens a small package and shows me what's inside.
"Is that it?" I ask. He nods.
"We call it Ana. This is the scaling chip that's in the 360," he tells me.
The PS3 has no internal hardware scaler, which means games that are 720p native can only be shown in 720p or 480p; there is no scaling up to 1080p or 1080i.
"It was a critical design decision; we wanted the 360 to be high-definition, not just 1080p or some other standard. That's why we included component cables in the box; there is no HDTV that doesn't have a component in," said Greenburg.
They assume that Sony didn't include a hardware scaler to keep costs down, but get a little cagey when I ask how much it costs to put Ana into the 360. "This isn't a $1,000 scaler," Henson says, "but it's a good one."
* Mission Impossible 3: the search for an equal resolution
We popped Mission: Impossible 3 in the 360's HD DVD drive, which is external, and we also put in the Blu-ray version for the PS3. Both systems were hooked up at the same time, so we could flip back and forth effortlessly to compare the video quality. In this case, both systems were outputting in 1080p, so there was no advantage in terms of resolution.
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Full Story: arstechnica.com (3 pages)
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