Is it a FANBOY attitude that has us disagreeing as to which platform has the better picture or gameplay, or is it a hardware difference?
You're really blowing my mind here, because you just posted a rather fanboyish post. I don't think anyone would deny that the 360 and PS3 both have some exceptional looking games - well, anyone but a fanboy.
Displaying pictures on all TVs generally look better when using a PS3 as with the PS3 every dot in a 1080P screen is active (AA not needed). On a Xbox it is limited to 720P with AA filling in the pixels.
Um, no. First of all, the 360 can do native 1080p output, including rendering at that resolution internally. Second, most PS3 games are outputting at 720p with no upscaling from the console. Third, even if the 360 game is rendering at < 1080p, the internal scaler will output a 1080p signal, totally bypassing your high-end TV's scaler.
So Video and gameplay will look better on a XBOX when using a cheaper TV and about the same when using a better TV. High res pictures will look better using a PS3 on all TVs.
Due to the PS3's lack of an internal scaler, this just isn't true.
As to framerate and quality of picture, the PS3 has the potential to be better depending on your display and how well the game takes advantage of the hardware. This is to be expected as the PS3 has 7 + processors and the Xbox three ++.
SPEs are more akin to DSPs than proper CPUs. But I know that little things like facts never stop fanboys, so, uh, here we go.
The PS3 was designed with a modified (crippled) 7800 GPU as it was assumed that parts of the cell processor would be used for video processing as the cell elements were better at that than the fully implemented nvidia 7800 GPU. This hardware hacking of the GPU and the use of the cell by SONY made the PS3 harder to program but potentially more robust.
This is true. But, then again, there are also niche situations where the 360 will outperform the PS3.
Being a half generation newer the PS3 included features that MS has added to later itterations of the the Xbox design, IE: HDMI, HDs, larger HDs. Later versions of the XBOX firmware will probably require a HD as standard equipment so a large hardware divergance with two different firmware releases will probably occur in 2010. The PS3 has seen a minor feature difference with the release of the slim as HDMI CEC commands are only possible with the SLIM.
Ignoring the dubious "half generation newer", you conveniently neglect the fact that Sony has dumped a whole bunch of features from their console.
The PS4 may use a 16 element Cell processor, twice as much memory and a faster but possibly not redesigned GPU. The XBOX will have a NEW GPU and CPU which will require much more work for them to implement.
The problems with the PS3 are almost exclusively from the non-intuitive way you do threading with SPEs, cache limitations in the SPEs, and a non-flexible memory architecture. Throwing in more SPEs won't fix this problem. Similarly, doubling the number of cores in the next-gen Xbox 360 will not make it appreciably more difficult to program for, although, as always, wringing out performance will get trickier and trickier (a common problem for applications that are not obviously parallelizable) as optimal thread count increases.
I don't see why some people feel the need to defend their consoles to the death. Microsoft, for example, really dropped the ball when they didn't include better sound (7.1 TrueHD/DTS-HD) and HDMI-CEC. I will readily acknowledge and whine about that, because they're both features I could use. Similarly, Sony doesn't get a free pass from me. Neither does Nintendo.
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