On the face of it, the notion of adding a second gaming network to the PS3 sounds somewhat superfluous and perhaps overly fussy, bringing back unhappy memories of multiple logins required for games like Metal Gear Solid 4. So with improvements to visual quality and performance, the PlayStation 3 release is already looking good, but the addition of Steamworks functionality is another big plus point it has in its favour. Regardless though, if you're overly sensitive to any spoilers whatsoever, it's probably best to skip the video.

From a rendering perspective, the levels here are typically more complex than the puzzle-based stages, giving us the ideal testing ground to compare engine performance. Performance analysis on Portal 2 is an interesting challenge - how best to stress the engine bearing in mind the relatively sedate nature of the game? And how can we do it by showing as few spoilers, or puzzle solutions as possible? Well, in this section of the game, taken around a third of the way through, the player is simply running through various environments in a linear manner, and not actually solving any puzzles at all. Tearing on 360 can creep lower to the point where very occasionally you might notice it, but the overall impression is that image consistency is retained on both versions. In common with a great many PS3 titles there is a tear evident in the top couple of lines (suggesting that the game is flipping the framebuffer just a little too late) but it's invisible to the human eye. Performance analysis of Portal 2 suggests that while both games run very close to the target 30 frames per second almost all of the time, there are some occasions where we see the odd torn or dropped frame on Xbox 360 - there's no real impact to visual quality, controller response or anything like that, but it is interesting to note that these very minor issues with frame-rate are even less of an issue on PlayStation 3. This is no one-off project: the studio has clearly put significant resources into the development of its engine on the Sony platform and the results are self-evident, over and above the minor graphical improvements we see over the Xbox 360 game. There were never any real frame-rate problems with Source on Xbox 360 and nothing has really changed here, but it's clear that Valve has put some genuine effort into the way Source runs on the PlayStation 3. The good news is that things have changed with Portal 2.

Use ps3 controller on mac portal 2