It’s like a scene out of West Side Story, with two groups of fanboys spitting into gangs and ready to rumble in a back-alley somewhere. I speak of the impending battle between PS3 owners and Xbox 360 loyalists in light of the impending release of Final Fantasy XIII. The issue? Which platform will the game look better on?

Answer: PS3.

There isn’t even an argument.

Here’s the facts:

According to Square-Enix, the PS3 version of Final Fantasy XIII will ship on a single Blu-Ray disc, containing uncompressed video and music for maximum quality. The Xbox 360 will ship on multiple discs and audio and video will be compressed. Why is this happening? Simple: it’s Blu Ray versus DVD. Blu holds up to 50GBs on a single disc whereas the Xbox 360 can only hold 9GBs.

So, yes, the PS3 will look better. Will you be able to notice? Probably not. But that isn’t the point in a fanboy war.

Source

Update: Those are the facts when it comes to the old format wars and the benefits of Blu-Ray over DVD (and the now dead HD-DVD) and it will certainly give PS3 owners a clear advantage when it comes to the audio and pre-rendered video of cutscenes. However, it is still unknown whether or not Square Enix decided to use some of that extra room for the code needed to handle the compensations in the software developers need to write to overcome the anti-aliasing deficiencies in the PS3’s GPU. The hardware native to the Xbox 360 which allows it to smooth the geometry of curves, circles, arches, and certain diagonals in 3D games being rendered in real-time wasn’t included in the PS3’s internal architecture and was glaringly obvious in the system’s early games. Many recent games compensate for this by asking the PS3 to overcome this through extra routines they write into their software – often at the significant cost of some of the main processor’s clock cycles which can subsequently mean lower framerates. So was that a trade off Square Enix was willing to make? Were they clever enough to make it so you still won’t even notice? We don’t know yet, but it is a battle that will have to be won by more than capacity alone. It will probably be determined by how smart they were in working around the different limitations unique to each platform – no matter which one you personally are rooting for. – Christiaan Allebest