1Up as has reported the shocking news that the upcoming football games (American football, to our European neighbors) Madden NFL 2008, NCAA Football 2008 and All-Pro Football 2K8 will be running at a smooth 60 fps on the Xbox 360, and a less smooth 30 fps on the PlayStation 3 - at the same resolution.
Why is this? The Xbox 360's flexible RAM? The DirectX language? The murky PS3 architecture? The difficult programming language?
Sega remained mum, and Todd Sitrin, EA's vice president of marketing sports branding, stated:
We want to make sure that we give the best experience we can on each platform. In designing a game, there are all sorts of tradeoffs that include frame rate, visuals, features, AI, etc. Football is an extremely challenging sport to replicate because of the number of people on the field, their interaction, and the scope of the environments. As you can see, every company making a football game this year made a decision that the best experience for the Xbox 360 included 60fps whereas the best experience for the PS3 was 30fps. We certainly believe that both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions are our football products are outstanding experiences and recommend that each gamer look at the entire experience, not just one aspect. We think they'll be very happy no matter which version of the game they play.
Which tells us nothing.
Whatever the case, this is a blow for the more expensive machine to once again fail to match, much less exceed, its less expensive counterpart's output.
