IGN posted a hands on review of Oblivion for the PS3, based on an almost final build on the game. I played the game to death on the 360 (I think my last save was 210 hours), so I have no desire to get it for PS3. However, IGN has some points that did peak my interest. First off, the load times on PS3 are about half of the times for the 360. This is most likely due to the data being replicated on the disk. Regardless of how they’re doing it, shorter load times are always a plus. The other big thing that got my attention was that the game looks noticeably better on the PS3. Sure, it’s had longer to tweak things. But IGN states:

“the PS3 version has been optimized to take advantage of the Cell processor and hardware that the system offers.”

This makes me think that developers are finally able to start using the Cell and RSX to their potential. According to IGN,

“the amount of framerate drops or hitches that cropped up in the wilderness as you accessed a new area on the 360 have been substantially reduced on the PS3 version.”

This could be due to the extra time in development, but I personally think the Cell has something to do with it. That processor has an insane amount on power. The other big graphical jump appears in all textures. New shaders are dedicated to rendering the foreground textures, which frees up more processing power to render the background textures. In the 360 version, everything in the background looked soft, and there was a lot that wasn’t rendered until you got closer. With the PS3, the draw distance has been increased greatly to allow a smoother transition as you move around the world.

The best quote from the article sums it all up:

“screens from the PS3 version should approach those from high end PCs running Oblivion, which is an impressive feat”

This could be the first multiplatform game that truely looks much better on the PS3 than the 360. I’m not Sony fanboy by any means, but I think as developers start to learn the PS3 hardware and SDK more, we’re going to start seeing the PS3 jump past the graphical capabilities of the 360.