October 27, 2010 2:30 PM

Your PS3 will play nicely with all Samsung 3DTVs, except the older DLP models. You need to be connected via HDMI and your game must support 3D play. Also, you need to be running the latest firmware.

The XBOX 360 is a slightly different animal, as the 360 doesn't officially support 3D or frame sequential (full resolution) 3D. Game developers can integrate support for half resolution 3D formats directly into the game, making it selectable in the games menu. There are only two games thus far which do this, Avatar and Call of Duty: Black Ops.

October 27, 2010 3:40 PM

I thought the effect in Avatar was great, and I'm hearing that Black Ops (not released until November 9th) is really good too. There are several ways to create 3D images. Field sequential shows one full resolution image to each eye after another in rapid succession, where as formats like side-by-side, top-bottom, and checkerboard only show half of the image resolution to each eye. That doesn't mean "bad", just not full resolution. Both methods are true stereoscopic formats. I suppose your analogy to 480p and 1080p is good, although the truest analogy would be 1080p vs. 1080i.

December 9, 2010 3:53 PM

Dan in the Rockies said: Are the discussed games in true full 1080p (i.e. not side by side, checkerboard, or top-bottom)?

Currently, no console supports 1080p frame-sequential 3D.

The PS3 supports frame sequential 720p as its native 3D format, but developers can build in support for half-res formats into their games if they choose (like Black Ops). The 360 does half res formats if the developer includes support for them.

June 6, 2011 10:07 AM

Dustin said: None of the discussed games are true 1080p even in 2D. PS3 is the only system that can do 720p in 3D. Xbox 360, with it's HDMI 1.2 port (3D in HD requires 1.3/1.4) is forced to squeeze 2 sub-HD images into one 720p frame, side by side. The TV then sends each half of the 720p frame to each eye. So the analogy that it's more like 1080i vs. 1080p isn't exactly right. More like 720i vs. 720p. Neither PS3 or 360 have enough RAM/frame buffer to handle 1080p in 3D. Being that 360 doesn't support the industry standard 3D format, HDMI 1.4, it can't be guaranteed to work on all 3DTVs. PS3 doesn't support 1.4 either, but does have 1.3 which has the same bandwidth as 1.4, so it is able to support 3D on any 3DTV as a result, and is able to do so at twice the resolution/frame rate as Xbox 360 can.

You're over analyzing a bit. No one said it was 1080p frame sequential. In context of the discussion, 1080i to 1080p was a more accurate representation over 480p vs 1080p - staying true with how 1080p was used in the original example. I'll also point out that the example game, Black Ops, is side-by-side or top/down on both the 360 and PS3. For games like these, I'd say neither console has a significant edge. For games that support the frame-sequential support on the PS3, it will have a visual edge in 3D games for sure. :-)

September 10, 2011 11:12 AM

The simple answer is that PS3 is capable of higher resolution 3D than xbox 360 is. Here's the detailed answer. Before a game console can send it's frame to the TV for display, it is drawn into what they call a "frame buffer". a little piece of memory that is set aside specifically for holding the frames just before being sent to the TV (they also apply image filtering techniques on the frames there as well).

Xbox 360 has 10MB's of EDRAM that it uses as it's frame buffer. While EDRAM is ultra fast, allowing 360 some advantages in image post processing, the fact that it only has 10MB's of it is a bottleneck. It cannot fit a 1080p frame inside the frame buffer (it takes 13MB), and since 1080p is about double the resolution of 720p, it can't fit two 720p frames in the frame buffer at once either. So, what 360 is forced to do is take one 720p frame, divide it in half, and then draw each eye's frame in those halves. This means that 3D on Xbox 360 will always be sub-high definition resolution, at least half of 720p, HD's lowest resolution. PS3 uses it's video memory (it has 256MB's of VRAM) for it's frame buffer, allowing more room and the ability to store a 1080p frame in it's buffer. This is why there are more native 1080p games on PS3 than 360, it's much easier to fit in the frame buffer. This is also why 3D on some PS3 games is able to hit 720p at 120 frames per second (60 per eye), it has the room to work with.

However, both systems were not designed for 3D and are memory starved when doing it, so you rarely will see true 720p 3D on PS3 even with the larger frame buffer. PS3 still has to be able to fit all the other image data in it's video ram as well, like textures. So, it often is limited by what it can do. Killzone 3 for instance runs at an aweful resolution, but games like Motorstorm actually do quite well in 3D. Super Stardust HD is the game I mentioned earlier that actually could hit 3D at 720p 120fps.

Eyepet isn't the best example of 3D though, reason being is that the playstation eye camera is a 2D camera, and eyepet uses augmented reality to superimpose it's little critter onto that 2D image from the camera. When you kick eyepet into 3D mode, you see the critter running around in glorious 3D on top of a flat 2D image from the playstation eye camera. It makes for an odd looking unnatural effect of 2D mixed with 3D.

My best results with 3D on PS3 so far have been (in the order of best to worst): Uncharted 3, Motorstorm Apocalypse/3D Rift, MLB The Show 2011 (this one and Wipeout both had the highest image quality of the bunch, but the 3D effect wasn't as good as motorstorm's), Wipeout HD (great true 720p 3D at 30fps per eye, but the lack of a 3D slider adjuster in the options menu means there is some ghosting that you cannot adjust. the other games let you fine tune the 3D effect to eliminate the ghosting), Tumble, Killzone. Note that those are the only ones I've tried in 3D so far, and there are a bunch of new 3D titles on the market now like Resistance 3.

On Xbox, it struggles a lot harder to do 3D. Even the Gears of War 3 devs came out saying that there was "room for improvement" on the 3D effect they were able to pull off on the console. However, multiplatform games can be expected to perform similar in 3D since the developers very rarely will take the time to optimize a game more on one platform than the other for the sake of saving time and money (and the fact that MS heavily pressures developers to develop their games with "parity" to other consoles). It's the exclusive titles that you'll see the best 3D effects on, the first party Sony games like Uncharted, Motorstorm, etc. Games that were made to take full advantage of the PS3.