Impress Watch Japan has just published the latest in a series of articles comparing the PS3 and the Xbox 360. This time, the technical specifications of the GPUs go under the microscope, along with a comparison to the current GPU offerings from nVidia and ATI. Since Google’s translation tools often leave much to be desired when trying to understand the details of an article, a forum member at Beyond 3D has offered their translation. Most interesting are the comments from various anonymous developers; there’s a lot more feedback on the Xbox 360, since it has been on the market longer. One developer says that to work around some of the memory restrictions, developers can render to an internal frame buffer of either 960x540 or 880x540 and then upscale the output for 720p using the built in Display Controller—so gamers may not be getting “true” HD resolutions. In both the PS3 and Xbox 360’s design, though, it looks like memory bandwidth is going to be the killer. Trying to mix high resolution textures with enough of a frame buffer to render HD resolutions is difficult for these machines at 720p, and 1080p for the PS3 is going to be difficult when mixed with multi-sample anti-aliasing; the trade-off will be high resolutions with fewer effects, or lower resolutions with more effects and MSAA implemented. So far, most developers appear to be taking the second approach.

Read More | Original Impress Watch Article
Read More | Beyond3D Translation