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I know it is easy to get off base but come on? This might be a new one even for this forum.

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Email them.  They respond quite quickly.

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I read various game forums from time to time, and often see gamers complaining about 'lazy ports' to the ps3. They often mention how the ps3 is the most powerful game console and blame developers working on the console for doing a bad job. Sony has all of these people duped by impressive marketing spin, and I'm often amazed at how potent this type of rhetoric proves to be. For those unaware, I'm going to break it down simply and explain exactly why ports to the ps3 will never be as good as their 360 counter parts, and why most ps3 exclusives will likely continue to suck. First, lets debunk a few common misconceptions:

"The PS3 is more graphically advanced than the 360"

Fill rate is one of the primary ways to measure graphics performance - in essence, it's a number describing how many pixel operations you can perform. The fill rate on the PS3 is significantly slower than on the 360, meaning that games either have to run at lower resolution or use simpler shader effects to achieve the same performance. Additionally, the shader processing on the ps3 is significantly slower than on the 360, which means that a normal map takes more fill rate to draw on the ps3 than it does on the 360. And I'm not talking about small differences here, we're talking roughly half the pixel pushing power.

"Ok, fine, but the cell is like, super powerful"

In theory, sure, but in reality it doesn't work out that way. Game code simply doesn't split well across multiple processors. You can probably find a way to split a few things off fairly easily - put the audio on one processor, animation on another; but generally the breakup is always going to leave several of the SPUs idle or underutilized. On top of that, it's usually not CPU speed that restricts the visuals in games - it's fill rate.

"Uh, Blue Ray!"

Great for watching movies, but not so great for games. Getting data off the blue ray drive takes about twice as long as it does to get the same data off the 360's DVD drive. That translates into longer load times, or god forbid if your streaming from disk, tighter constraints on the amount of data you can stream.

"But it's got a lot more space than DVD"

Ok, you got me there - it does have a lot more space, and there is the potential to use that to do something cool, but thats unlikely to be realized in any useful way. There are tons of compression techniques available for data and I'd personally rather be able to get my data faster than have more of it. Most developers who use the entire Blue Ray drive are doing it to work around other problems with the ps3 such as it's slow loading - for instance, in Resistance: Fall of Man, every art asset is stored on disk once for every level that uses it. So rather than storing one copy of a texture, you're storing it 12 times. If you took that entire game and removed all the duplicate data, it would likely fit on a DVD without any problem. They do this to speed up load times, which, as I pointed out before, are painfully slow on the ps3. So in this case, the extra space is completely wasted.

"Once developers figure out the PS3 they'll maximize the hardware and it will be amazing"

I suspect a small number of PS3 only developers will optimize the hardware to do something cool. However, this will be an exception to the rule, and will likely involved game designs that are specifically designed for the hardware and funded by Sony. If those will prove to be fun or not is another question.

Most of the performance centric research into the PS3 has been around making it easier for developers to get the same level of performance you get out of the 360 naturally. For instance, some developers are using those extra SPU's on the cell to prepare data for the rendering pipeline. Basically, they take the data they would normally send to the graphics chip, send it to an SPU which optimizes it in some manner, then send it to the graphics chip. So, once again we see an 'advantage' in hardware being used to make up for a disadvantage in another area - a common theme with the ps3. And this introduces an extra frame of latency into the equation, making controller response slower.

So, the common theme is this; developers must spend significantly more time and resources getting the PS3 to do what the 360 can already do easily and with a lot less code. Lets look at how this translates into practical realities for a moment:

Why the PS3 version often pails in comparison to the 360 version, and why exclusives often suck:

As outlined above, getting equivalent performance out of the PS3 requires a lot of work unique to the platform, and in many cases, even with all these tricks, you still won't see equivalent performance. Thus, many ps3 games have simplified shaders and run at lower native resolutions than the 360 versions. On top of this, there is shrinking incentive to do this work; the PS3 isn't selling.

The code needed to make the PS3 work is most likely only useful to you on the PS3, as the types of tricks you need to do to make the thing perform are very unique to the platform and unlikely to be useful on any other architecture now or in the future. These issues all stem from unbalanced hardware design, and any future hardware that is this unbalanced will likely be unbalanced in a completely unique way.

Finally, there's the problem of resources. Game Development is, at it's heart, a resource management challenge. Given finite resources, do I have these five engineers work on optimizing the PS3 version to look better, or do I use them to make the game play better and fix bugs? Do I change my design to fit with what the PS3 hardware does well, or simply run the game at a slightly lower resolution on the PS3 to make up for it? Developers striving to push the PS3 hardware have often sacrificed their game in the process.

This post might come across as a lot of Sony bashing, but it's just the reality from the trenches. Sony let their hardware be designed by a comity of business interests rather than a well thought out design that would serve the game development community. They are going to loose hard this round because of it, and I hope that in the next round they take lessons from this round and produce a more balanced and usable machine.

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My 360 was locking up so I took it back to Best Buy for a replacement. it was great. I got a whole new console plus two free games. The new 360's also have an HDMI port as well. This console is much more quiet. I haven't bothered to look up what rev of HDMI it is, but it doesn't really matter to me.

A_S your comment about you knowing more about PC hardware than a software devoloper, exactly how did you come up with this conclusion? Because all the sofware devolopers I know sure know a lot about the hardware they are writing code for. I can see, and this is a stretch, maybe people who code third party apps for Windows XP/Vista, but not code that is written directly to interact with hardware. I can tell you for a fact this friend of mine who writes code for his company that makes disk controlers for SAN's sure knows a lot about disks, HBA's, iSCSI, FC's. He has forgotten more about SAN hardware than i will ever know. This is a bold statement to make, even for you.

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Quoting Ascended_Saiyan:

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We SHOULD all know be now that games that and developed from the ground up on each platform ends to look and/or play better than the Xbox 360 version.  Oblivion, DiRT, and COD4 are some examples.

GARBAGE (including your english).
Madden 08 - 30fps on PS3, 60fps on 360, Skate - noticeable lag and slowdown on PS3 compared to 360, PES 2008, noticeable lag and slowdown on PS3, COD4 is unreleased, you have no clue if it will run any different between the 2 systems.

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There are NO complex native 1080p games on the Xbox 360 or coming to the Xbox 360 in the foreseeable future. There are more than a few complex native 1080p games coming to the PS3 in the foreseeable future.

GARBAGE.
What is a "complex native 1080p" game? That term is subjective drivel dressed up as one of your objective "FACTS".

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Why do games like Forza 2 and PGR4 not look as good as GT5?  If the Xbox 360 is capable of better graphics and/or physics, why aren't we seeing that?  The xbox 360 has been out a ENTIRE year longer than the PS3.

GARBAGE.
GT5 is not finished yet. What are you basing your opinion on? The japanese demo of a demo of GT5? Have you played Forza 2 and PGR4? Are you going by screenshots? Or just paraphrasing from ps3fanboy.com?

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Drive speed between Blu-ray (PS3) and DVD (Xbox 360). ...blablabla... 1x DVD is 10Mbps.

GARBAGE.
If the wait and cost involved with choosing BD over DVD means that games have to store the data multiple times to match read speeds, it was a TERRIBLE decision. PS3 games are on 25GB BD discs, DVD are 9GB so essentially for better or matching load times, the extra space is wasted.

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Also, developers for Xbox 360 games (like PGR4) said they had to cut out some content due to lack of space on a DVD9.  The developers of Assassin's Creed and GTA IV expressed difficulty in trying to deal with the space constraints of DVD9. 

They have NEVER shown these 2 games running on PS3. NEVER. Every demonstration or video from both games is from the 360 build. Care to tell us why? And the rest of Ubi's statement that you are quoting from explains the difficulty of programming for PS3's limited memory - "How we handle memory is really different between the two machines and we're struggling right now on the PS3." See how easy it is to take statements out of context for the purpose of retarded internet forum console arguments?

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Rockstar said this is why L.A. Noire will not be on the Xbox 360.

I guess thats why its been delayed till 2009 then?

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IS it difficult to program for the PS3?  Yes.  Will it help them be more capable of taking advantage of multi-core processors that are becoming the norm?  Of course, it will.  Do people fight progress tooth and nail?  Absolutely!  The PS3 is a great advancement in technology and the KEY to real-time Ray-Tracing.  Learning to program for the PS3 will get developers use to the PS4 which I believe will have 2 Cell processors in it.

GARBAGE.
The cell is not a symmetric multi-core chip, whereas the xenon, and all new pc cpus, are. Cell cannot profit from regular multi-threading, as it does not have symmetric cores. I don't care what you "believe" the PS4 will have in it, neither does anyone else. The Sony plan for the PS3 was 10 year lifespan, there is little chance of the ibm cell still being a viable CPU option in even 4 or 5 years time. Real-time ray tracing - you are so clueless its gone past funny and reached pitiful.

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Remember, extremely advanced technology usually has a steep learning curve involved.  In the end, this will allow people to see what developers are up for the challenge and which ones are not.  From that blog you posted, that develop ISN'T up for the challenge (and he doesn't know the hardware).

GARBAGE.
Lets see you program games as successful as Guitar Hero and then you can lecture us about being "up for the challenge".

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You don't ask people to believe you.  You just ask them to NOT believe me.

I don't ask people to believe me, because i'm not interested in preaching anything to anyone. If people are interested in games then I assume they have the intelligence to buy and consume what they enjoy and what they feel is value for their money.

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Do you want to sheck this one for spelling, too?

Hilarious "intentional spelling error" for comic effect. Sadly it doesn't mask the fact that you genuinely can't spell, a real problem for you due to its contrast with the supercilious nature of your posts and the disdain you show for readers by not bothering to spell check.