Sony’s PlayStation 3 first launched in November 2006 and right from the get-go, the platform holder faced a stiff challenge in the form of Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Here we were looking at two machines of the same generation, Sony’s fiercest rival launching a full year ahead of the competition – and packing a hardware advantage in the form of its Xenos GPU from AMD. With hardware locked years prior, how did Sony react? Part of the marketing response was to concentrate on something Xbox could not deliver: full support for the new HDMI digital video standard, including the ability to output at full HD – 1080p.
Of course, in the years since, we know exactly how this situation played out – or do we? Today, I’m really excited to reveal the public launch of DF Retro’s biggest project yet: a generation-wide analysis of just how well PlayStation 3 delivered on its initial 1080p promises. Split into four parts, with a new episode launching every Sunday at 3pm BST, John Linneman aims to cover every single PS3 title we’ve managed to track down that supports 1080p resolution, to rank them all, and then – at the end – to see which year was best for full HD gaming on the ‘Triple’.
First up, a disclaimer: we can’t cover every single 1080p game. Some may have slipped through the net, others supported 960×1080 output (or even lower on the horizontal axis) as a fallback option when 720p was not available, and we’re not particularly interested in those. However, across the four episodes, we cover a total of 88 titles. In an era where many PlayStation 3 (and indeed Xbox 360) games struggled even to deliver native 720p rendering, the full HD credentials of Sony’s machine were left in tatters across the years, but perhaps surprisingly, there are many, many highlights – as you’ll discover over the weeks.
