Our review of Ghostbusters is out, along with notes about which version to buy. One big difference between the current-generation consoles? The quality of the texture work in the game. LensofTruth did a very eye-opening comparison of the different versions of the game and they came to a single conclusion: avoid the PS3 version if you have a 360.

"The big issue was in the texture quality, and let me tell you it was a huge difference! The texture quality for the PlayStation 3 left us shaking our heads in disbelief," the site explained. "This went beyond the traditional consoles rendering textures differently, as we've seen in other Head2Heads, the PlayStation 3 seemed to have ? the texture quality of the Xbox 360 and in other areas, even less. This was present on all the PlayStation 3 textures, normal maps, spec maps, light maps, etc. even the dynamic shadow maps looked blocky and half the quality of the Xbox 360." Even worse, the compression added to the PS3 textures resulting in bad banding and blockiness that "couldn't be ignored."

The site has a number of rollovers to show the difference in the graphical quality, and it's rather striking. The PS3 also suffers from a mandatory install that doesn't seem to decrease the loading times from the 360 version. In other words, you'll be eating hard drive space without a marked decrease in loading time. Not good. It also appears as if the game is running at a lower resolution on the PS3.

What's even more surprising? Sony is publishing the game in Europe as a timed exclusive. It looks like if gamers in Europe want the best version of the game, they're going to have to wait.

Update: A few things. First, people are saying these tests are being performed on pre-release software that isn't yet finished. To prove that isn't the case, I'll include a picture of both copies of the game, and my card. As you can see, this is retail product.

Someone else said that I hadn't played the PS3 version, or I would have seen this myself. That's a good point. I played the 360 version for the review, and basically installed the PS3 version and ran around the firehouse for a few minutes just to check the game out. It looks okay by itself, but when you get used to the 360 version and go back, you can definitely see the difference in quality show in the above story. I also have an HDMI switcher that allows me to switch the systems back and forth, and yes, those comparisons are legit.

Even more damning? This began to happen when I played the game.

Ghostbusters PS3 from Ars Technica on Vimeo.

Ouch.