XBox 360 or PS3 for christmas?

MoeSyslack

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Oct 14, 2008
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Im looking to get one of these for christmas this year. My question id\s which should I get? I figure everybody here could help me figure it out. I mostly want one for sports games. Madden on the Wii is horrible. But I am interested in other games.

Any questions or advice to help me decide. Right now I am leaning more towards Xbox because of the netflix streaming ability. Im not sure if PS3 does that or not.
 

Evil_Ernie

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Oct 11, 2008
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The best thing to do is to stop by a Best Buy or GameStop and test both machines to see which one you like the most. Both systems are good, but the deciding factor should be based solely on what you want, not what people on the Internet tell you.

I have owned both systems and I prefer the PS3 as that one gets played more. My 360 is boxed up and collecting dust at the moment, but not for much longer when I sell it to one of my co-workers.

If you want Netflix streaming for now, then it appears your decision is already made. The PS3 does not offer Netflix streaming on they system itself, but there is a program called PlayOn that will allow you to do that for a price. However, according to this article, it may come to the PS3 sometime in the future.
 

memebag

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Oct 11, 2008
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I'm no help. I won't buy any Sony products for a long list of reasons. Play with them like Ernie suggested and see if there are any exclusive titles that could tip the scales.
 

tsave31

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Dec 16, 2008
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It's all personal preference. I have a 360 and will vouch for it until the end (and I love the Netflix feature), but also know many people that have PS3's and love them.

Technically speaking, someone correct me if I am wrong, but I remember reading the actual hardware in comparing the PS3 and 360 are fairly similar. PS3 does have the Blu-Ray built in, so if you are a blu-ray guy then you may want to go that route.
 

Tristan

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Oct 17, 2008
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I have the WII, 360 and the Playstation 3.

I never use my Wii other then "Something came out on Wii only you must play it" But since you seem to already have one we can just forget about the Wii.

My personal favorite is the XBOX 360. Mainly because everyone I seem to run into has one and the XBOX Live experience is far superior to the Playstation 3 online experience. For that reason alone I prefer the XBOX 360. I can sign on at any given time and have between 5-10 people online wanting me to play a game with them.

The Playstation 3 online experience is kinda meh. You can see your friends list but you can't join a party and chat with them. So I find myself hardly playing the Playstation 3 online. It's main function is my Blu-Ray / DVD Player.

The XBOX 360 media experience is pretty awesome with Netflix. Some people complain they need to have XBOX LIVE Gold and a Netflix account. But the money I don't spend going to the movies is saved using this experience.

The thing that I really don't like about either consoles is the size and the loudness. When they get warm the machines sound like an aircraft taking off unless you have them in a well ventilated area. I find that the Playstation 3 does run hotter.

But out of all the consoles I enjoy the XBOX 360 the most because there is always something to do and check out. The Playstation 3 has almost all of the same games but unless you want some exclusive PS3 game that is not on XBOX 360. I would go for that console.

It really all depends on what you wanna play and how you want your experience to be. But my priority list would be.

1. XBOX 360
2. Playstation 3
3. Wii
4. Dreamcast - ThinkGeek :: Original Sega Dreamcast Console
 

xan_user

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I'm no help. I won't buy any Sony products for a long list of reasons.
Ditto. That left M$360 and Wii for me, and I went whith the one with the best kids games, so i'm no help either. I do wish I could play Gran Turismo, but morals are morals.
 

PACanesFan

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Oct 13, 2008
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I have the 360. If you don't mind getting your ass handed to you by 12 year olds, it's the way to go (for online play). XBox live will set you back $50.00 or so for a year, but it's well worth it.

I've read in magazines and the like the hardware of the PS3 is better and capable of doing a lot more. The trouble is the game designers are not taking advantage of it.

So I would have to recommend the 360 if you are thinking about online play.
 

hexagram

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I've read in magazines and the like the hardware of the PS3 is better and capable of doing a lot more.

The Xbox 360 processor was designed to give game developers the power that they actually need, in an easy to use form. The Cell processor has impressive streaming floating-point power that is of limited use for games.

The majority of game code is a mixture of integer, floating-point, and vector math, with lots of branches and random memory accesses. This code is best handled by a general purpose CPU with a cache, branch predictor, and vector unit.

The Cell's seven DSPs (what Sony calls SPEs) have no cache, no direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and a different instruction set from the PS3's main CPU. They are not designed for or efficient at general purpose computing. DSPs are not appropriate for game programming.

Xbox 360 has three general purpose CPU cores. The Cell processor has only one.

Xbox 360's CPUs has vector processing power on each CPU core. Each Xbox 360 core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread, with a dot product instruction, and a shared 1-MB L2 cache. The Cell processor's vector processing power is mostly on the seven DSPs.

Dot products are critical to games because they are used in 3D math to calculate vector lengths, projections, transformations, and more. The Xbox 360 CPU has a dot product instruction, where other CPUs such as Cell must emulate dot product using multiple instructions.

Cell's streaming floating-point work is done on its seven DSP processors. Since geometry processing is moved to the GPU, the need for streaming floating-point work and other DSP style programming in games has dropped dramatically.

Just like with the PS2's Emotion Engine, with its missing L2 cache, the Cell is designed for a type of game programming that accounts for a minor percentage of processing time.

Sony's CPU is ideal for an environment where 12.5% of the work is general-purpose computing and 87.5% of the work is DSP calculations. That sort of mix makes sense for video playback or networked waveform analysis, but not for games. In fact, when analyzing real games one finds almost the opposite distribution of general purpose computing and DSP calculation requirements. A relatively small percentage of instructions are actually floating point. Of those instructions which are floating-point, very few involve processing continuous streams of numbers. Instead they are used in tasks like AI and path-finding, which require random access to memory and frequent branches, which the DSPs are ill-suited to.

Based on measurements of running next generation games, only ~10-30% of the instructions executed are floating point. The remainders of the instructions are load, store, integer, branch, etc. Even fewer of the instructions executed are streaming floating point—probably ~5-10%. Cell is optimized for streaming floating-point, with 87.5% of its cores good for streaming floating-point and nothing else.

PACanesFan said:
The trouble is the game designers are not taking advantage of it.

Game programmers do not want to spread their code over eight processors, especially when seven of the processors are poorly suited for general purpose programming. Evenly distributing game code across eight processors is extremely difficult.

The full article is available on IGN: E3 2005: Microsoft's Xbox 360 vs. Sony's PlayStation 3 (Get a cup of coffee, it's a long read) [It's a four year old article, but the specifications still remain the same]

Most of this stuff doesn't matter to the average consumer though, and it really boils down to preference.
 

blyons200

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Oct 12, 2008
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I have a PS3, I don't have enough time for it so I won't be getting an Xbox. I have a Wii but it collects dust now that I have a PS3. My brother has an Xbox360. They're pretty close to the same graphics-wise, at least right now. I do find the Xbox 360 is much louder than the PS3 is, but the PS3 can get noisy in a hot room, but normally I don't hear it when I use it. I do like the controllers on the PS3 better and it has a Blu-Ray player as well.

As far as games go the PS3 and the Xbox both have a handfull of exclusive games. The other reason I bought the PS3 is because of Metal Gear Solid 4 (awesome game), and Gran Turismo and God of War 3 should be coming out around the end of the year. I'm not really an online gamer so that's not a factor for me.
 

Evil_Ernie

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JoeTan

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I'm no help. I won't buy any Sony products for a long list of reasons. Play with them like Ernie suggested and see if there are any exclusive titles that could tip the scales.

I'm down with that! Sony SUCKS! They invent everything and then put out garbage! Nothing I've ever bought Sony ever lasted or was problem free including their garbage video game nonsense.

Yeah, we can play a game...we'll play WII while we wait for the Playstation to boot up and load a game....oh wait, it won't read the disk. WHY SONY WHY DO YOU MAKE TRASH???????
 

hexagram

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Something just came to mind...

Xbox 360 and Xbox Live will enjoy free advertisement on the PlayStation 3...

Adidas-SeatleSounders-HomeJersey-2009-2010-1.jpg


When the Seattle Sounders FC debut in FIFA 10. It will be available on October 20th (for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) :p

Sony's main competitor getting free advertising on it's own system (and for years to come)... That's gotta sting.
 
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hexagram

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... and God forbid they feature Ljungberg or another Sounders player on the cover of a future FIFA title! :p

Ljungberg%20Blanco.jpg
 
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Chob

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What I'd suggest would be to check out the exclusive games and DLC available on each console and see if that helps you decide. Also look at the selection of games available to download on the Playstation Store and Xbox Live Arcade.

And look into the other features mentioned in this thread already, the online play, Netflix, Blu Ray, etc.

I have a PS3 and am very happy with it and can't speak for the XBox 360.
 

MoeSyslack

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I went with the Xbox 360. I got it last weekend (beat the Christmas rush....:bs:). The netflix was dissapointing but the games are awesome. I got Madden 10 first and love that game. Its hard as hell and the online play is fun.

Thanks for all the help and opinions everybody.
 

MoeSyslack

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The selection of new movies was pitiful, and the streaming quality was bad. The quality I know was because of my connection. I have a 1.5Mb connection and I was only getting 2 bars on connection to netflix so the quality just wasnt that good.

But I set up Media Center on it and my computer and that works and looks great, so not a total loss as far as that goes.
 

hexagram

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The selection of new movies was pitiful

You do know that you can add movies to your Xbox 360 by going to Netflix and adding them to your queue? As soon as you click 'Add to queue', it will automagically update on your Xbox 360 within seconds.

Also, what's shown on the Netflix Xbox app isn't the entire selection of what's available. Best to browse around on the website first.
 

xan_user

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Netflix need to overhaul its search and suggestions completely! It the worst.

Do you need to pay for xbox 360 live account to use netflix?
 

MoeSyslack

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Yeah you have to have the gold account to use Netflix. And I did use the website to set up a que but there just wasnt much available for streaming. The quality was the biggest issue anyway.