I think the first thing gamers should say about CryEngine 3 is kudos to Crytek for actually managing to fit their monstrous PC engine into the lowly 360 and PS3 (sorry, Wii) and making it damn beautiful. Of course, the next thing many gamers will be thinking is, “what system handles it better?” The short answer is the 360 will run it better, except when the PS3 runs it better.

In an interview with Edge magazine, Crytek’s director of technology Mark Atkinson reveals that the 360 version and the PS3 version run “at the same speed.” But there has to be some kind of difference, right? Atkinson goes a bit more in depth about each system’s architecture, saying “if the game’s shader-heavy it runs a bit faster on 360; if it’s compute-heavy with physics and particles, then the SPUs take over and it’s a bit quicker on PS3.”

Well, there you have it. Though essentially looking the same to the human eyes who don’t have two HDTV’s running two versions of a game on both systems side by side, gamers who choose to do so can resort to theoretical spreadsheet data to stroke their console egos. One thing’s for sure, though - this may very well be the best looking middleware engine when it’s released. Sorry UE3.