Back in 2006 (when the current generation of consoles was still called the next generation) we did our first Xbox 360 vs. PlayStation 3 graphics comparison. Since then we've released rounds 2, 3, and 4, but we hadn't touched the third rail--the PC--until now. The graphics comparison features started out as a way to examine which console had better graphics, but readers began asking us to include PC image comparisons for games available on all three platforms. We focused on more recent games for our current comparison, because those are the games people are still buying and playing. You'll likely recognize many of the shots from our previous graphics comparisons. The results aren't terribly surprising, but the differences are still interesting to see. A well-equipped PC beats both consoles easily--of course, that same PC also costs three to four times more than either of the consoles.
On the PC, we used FRAPs to capture images at 1920x1080 resolution. We equipped our test PC with high-end components, a GeForce 280 GTX, and a quad-core Intel Core 2 CPU. The PC allowed us to enable high-quality settings in most games and have plenty of power left over to kick antialiasing up to 4x and anisotropic filtering up to 8x. For the consoles, we captured all of our images over HDMI with games running at 720p resolution, and we enabled full HDMI range on the PS3.
