Posted on 03/06/2013 at 10:18 PM
| Filed Under Blogs
The PS2 was considered difficult to program for. But since it was so popular, game designers sucked it up and developed for it, and they got pretty damn good at it after a couple of years. They even figured out how to compensate for the PS2's lack of built-in antialiasing. If the PS3 had the same kind of huge popularity edge over the 360 as the PS2, again as I've noted above, developers would have been more willing to find ways.
One of the most commonly cited problems developers had with the PS3 was its memory structure. The PS3 has 256MB of RAM and 256 MB of VRAM, while the 360 has 512MB of RAM. A lot of developers, including John Carmack of Id Software, felt the 360's RAM was much more flexible since it could be allocated as they saw fit for the game or the graphics. On the PS3, if you needed more than 256MB of RAM, you were SOL as you couldn't borrow from the VRAM. Obviously, a lot of developers got a good grasp of the PS3 and made some amazing games for it, but a lot of multiplatform developers optimized for the 360 and left the PS3 version as an afterthought.