Although the PlayStation 3 was released a year after the Xbox 360 and on paper had better performance (as well as a significantly higher price), it was usually the Xbox 360 versions of multi-format games that looked the best.
The reason was that the PlayStation 3 was considered very difficult to develop for, while it was often reported how smooth and easy the Xbox 360 was. This led to several rather substandard releases for Sony's console, including classics such as Red Dead Redemption and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
In an interview with VideoGamer, former Bethesda game designer Bruce Nesmith talks about how they struggled with Skyrim for PlayStation 3 and describes the work as a real struggle:
"The PS3 had a memory architecture difference [compared to] the Xbox 360. So they had this bifurcation of memory where you had 50% for game logic and 50% for graphics. And that was a hard boundary, you couldn't break that. Whereas the 360 had a single block of memory and it was up to you how you wanted to divide it up.
It was a real struggle and it was much smoother on the 360 than it was on the PS3. I remember the enormous amount of effort our programmers put into making it work at all on the PS3. It was a Herculean effort, and my hat's off to everybody on that team who did that work, because that was thankless, hard, long hours to make that happen at all."
Did you play Skyrim yourself on PlayStation 3 and did you react to the fact that it both ran more smoothly and looked better on Xbox 360?