There is a lot of competition in America's favourite game genre, with Madden 08, All-Pro Football 2K8 and NCAA Football 08 all set to battle it out this year.

They're due out on both PS3 and Xbox 360, but evidence collected by 1UP suggests that the Xbox 360 editions are technically superior.

According to the site, the PS3 versions run at 30 frames per second (fps), whilst on the 360 they run at 60fps. This ultimately means a much smoother experience.

Obviously this raised some concern, as the PS3 has always been touted as a graphical powerhouse. Unfortunately, David Karraker, SCEA's senior director of corporate communications, had a rather blunt response:

"We have already proven that sports titles can run on the PlayStation 3 at true HD with 1080p output with NBA 07. If you have questions about specific third-party games, you should speak to those publishers."

1UP did exactly that, so EA's vice president of marketing sports branding tried to explain the trend in the genre:

"We want to make sure that we give the best experience we can on each platform. In designing a game, there are all sorts of tradeoffs that include frame rate, visuals, features, AI, etc. Football is an extremely challenging sport to replicate because of the number of people on the field, their interaction, and the scope of the environments. As you can see, every company making a football game this year made a decision that the best experience for the Xbox 360 included 60fps whereas the best experience for the PS3 was 30fps. We certainly believe that both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions are our football products are outstanding experiences and recommend that each gamer look at the entire experience, not just one aspect. We think they'll be very happy no matter which version of the game they play."

It's interesting to note that Karraker explained on the official PlayStation blog a couple of weeks ago that games built on the PS3 and ported to the 360 will work better on both systems, as opposed to porting to PS3. Things are a little dubious, however, given that All-Pro Football 2K8 was built from scratch on both systems.