Digital Foundry: MW3 Face-Off

The biggest game of the year has finally arrived. The latest chapter in the Modern Warfare saga may well be short on revolutionary new concepts and never-seen-before technology, but what Infinity Ward and co-developers Sledgehammer and Raven have delivered is a supremely enjoyable, highly polished package that offers a ton of value across its principle single-player, Spec Ops and multiplayer components.

While the Call of Duty games have enjoyed mammoth levels of success across both console platforms, the game has arguably found its home on Xbox 360. Putting aside DLC exclusive windows and a perceivably higher level of multiplayer performance, the core technology itself just seems to run better on the Microsoft architecture: every metric we've run on COD titles from Modern Warfare onwards has produced a palpably higher performance level on Xbox 360.

[thereapersson]

The PS3 version is inferior to the 360 version, which is inferior to the PC version. The PS3 version lacks the Anti-Aliasing that the 360 version has, but the PC version shits all over the console versions in regards to lighting and (of course) AA.

It is no surprise considering how much work they've done optimizing the engine in every game for the 360 hardware. It's not fanboyism, it's facts. Call of Duty and XBox are synonymous with one another this generation, despite strong sales numbers on the PS3.

Now you have to ask yourself, "how much will I get worked up over Call of Duty when there are so many other better games to focus my time and efforts on?" The decision is yours.

[PirateThom]

"Both versions run at the standard COD resolution of 1024x600 with 2x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) applied."

[gamingdroid]

Yeah, but the all important frame rate is significantly better on the Xbox 360 version that makes the PS3 version feels "slightly" less responsive.

"Improvements to PlayStation 3 frame-rates were also promised and while it's clear that the Xbox 360 version does command something of an advantage over its counterpart, the gap does appear to have narrowed. At worst we do see the same sort of 10FPS-15FPS advantage that we saw in Modern Warfare 2, but overall, there is the perception that PlayStation 3 frame-rates are improved across the overall run of the video."

"In our tests, the PS3 version seemed to feel a little less responsive when the engine was really under load, but the frame-rate drop manifested more as a judder as opposed to the more crippling kind of jerkiness we see when the more usual 30FPS console game drops down to the low 20s. This isn't so much of an issue in single-player gameplay, but could be a problem for multiplayer, so the next step was to take both versions online and see how they played."

The other thing is also texture loading:

"there are occasions in the game where we wish that an option existed to dump texture data on the hard drive for faster access. We often saw very low texture work on the PS3 - mostly noticeable during cut-scenes - that appeared to arrive between 1-2 seconds later than it did on the Xbox 360."

So in conclusion, MW3 on PS3 is just trying to match up with the Xbox 360 version. After all these years, you would think they would be able to make the PS3 version closer in performance to the Xbox 360 version....

[ProjectVulcan]

Meh. 360 does win but its not massive massive you would notice unless you ran them tightly side by side. Not the kind of gap you would notice, like having a halfway decent PC would be obvious. Same res, level of AA, same framerate like 95 percent of the time. Teeny rendering differences made less noticeable by the fact the whole image is upscaled just to reach 720p anyway!

Sometimes i think the differences are overblown between the consoles. I don't get it, as someone who plays most stuff on PC.

[T-Jani]

When I see both versions being played I can't tell the difference...but that's just me. All I know is that I'm really enjoying it on PS3. Black ops on the other hand was a disgrace on PS3.

[Venjense]

Well at least the PS3 version is not as bad as BLOPs - that one was so bad it turned me off the series - so blurry and the variable framerate made it jerk too much.

Whatever though, I'm sick of COD (and military shooters in general) so I got Gears 3 and Uncharted 3 instead.

[Oldman100]

I don't understand why they render at an oddball aspect ratio. They should be rendering it in a native 16:9 aspect ratio like 1040x585, 1056x594, or 1072x603 for better scaling.