View Full Version : Major Nelson - - PS3 vs Xbox 360
Major Nelson's blog (Xbox team blog) has an interesting comparision of the PS3 vs the Xbox360.
http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-1-of-4/
http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-2-of-4/
http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-3-of-4/
http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-4-of-4/
Part1
One of the great things about working at Xbox is that we have some of the smartest people in the world working on the Xbox 360. When Sony came announced the PS3, along with the product specs some of our team started looking at some of the numbers to see what they mean. Floating Point, shaders, bandwidth….what does it all mean. Clearly there are some numbers and stats that mean more to gaming then others, so the team cranked out some facts for everyone to absorb. Our world class technology team looked at the numbers and claims and decided to do what everyone else does: compare them to the PS3. The difference it that these guys are uniquely qualified to do so, and can cut through the smoke and mirrors to see what the real deal is. To that end, I present this summary, which I have broken up into four parts to make it more RSS Reader friendly.
Warning: Some of this stuff may make your head hurt, but these are the facts as they stand right now. Enjoy the read:
XBOX 360 / PLAYSTATION 3 PERFORMANCE COMPARISON
SUMMARY
Now that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 specifications have been announced, it is possible to do a real world performance comparison of the two systems.
There are three critical performance aspects of a console:
• Central Processing Unit (CPU) performance.
o The Xbox 360 CPU architecture has three times the general purpose processing power of the Cell.
• Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) performance
o The Xbox 360 GPU design is more flexible and it has more processing power than the PS3 GPU.
• Memory System Bandwidth
o The memory system bandwidth in Xbox 360 exceeds the PS3’s by five times.
The Xbox 360’s CPU has more general purpose processing power because it has three general purpose cores, and Cell has just one.
Cell’s claimed advantage is on streaming floating point work which is done on its seven DSP processors.
The Xbox 360 GPU has more processing power than the PS3’s. In addition, its innovated features contribute to overall rendering performance.
Xbox 360 has 278.4 GB/s of memory system bandwidth. The PS3 has less than one-fifth of Xbox 360’s (48 GB/s) of total memory system bandwidth.
Part2
DETAILED ANALYSIS OF PERFORMANCE SPECIFICATIONS
CPU
The Xbox 360 processor was designed to give game developers the power that they actually need, in an easy to use form. The Cell processor has impressive streaming floating-point power that is of limited use for games.
The majority of game code is a mixture of integer, floating-point, and vector math, with lots of branches and random memory accesses. This code is best handled by a general purpose CPU with a cache, branch predictor, and vector unit.
The Cell’s seven DSPs (what Sony calls SPEs) have no cache, no direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and a different instruction set from the PS3’s main CPU. They are not designed for or efficient at general purpose computing. DSPs are not appropriate for game programming.
Xbox 360 has three general purpose CPU cores. The Cell processor has only one.
Xbox 360’s CPUs has vector processing power on each CPU core. Each Xbox 360 core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread, with a dot product instruction, and a shared 1-MB L2 cache. The Cell processor’s vector processing power is mostly on the seven DSPs.
Dot products are critical to games because they are used in 3D math to calculate vector lengths, projections, transformations, and more. The Xbox 360 CPU has a dot product instruction, where other CPUs such as Cell must emulate dot product using multiple instructions.
Cell’s streaming floating-point work is done on its seven DSP processors. Since geometry processing is moved to the GPU, the need for streaming floating-point work and other DSP style programming in games has dropped dramatically.
Just like with the PS2’s Emotion Engine, with its missing L2 cache, the Cell is designed for a type of game programming that accounts for a minor percentage of processing time.
Sony’s CPU is ideal for an environment where 12.5% of the work is general-purpose computing and 87.5% of the work is DSP calculations. That sort of mix makes sense for video playback or networked waveform analysis, but not for games. In fact, when analyzing real games one finds almost the opposite distribution of general purpose computing and DSP calculation requirements. A relatively small percentage of instructions are actually floating point. Of those instructions which are floating-point, very few involve processing continuous streams of numbers. Instead they are used in tasks like AI and path-finding, which require random access to memory and frequent branches, which the DSPs are ill-suited to.
Based on measurements of running next generation games, only ~10-30% of the instructions executed are floating point. The remainders of the instructions are load, store, integer, branch, etc. Even fewer of the instructions executed are streaming floating point—probably ~5-10%. Cell is optimized for streaming floating-point, with 87.5% of its cores good for streaming floating-point and nothing else.
Part3
GPU
Even ignoring the bandwidth limitations the PS3’s GPU is not as powerful as the Xbox 360’s GPU.
Below are the specs from Sony’s press release regarding the PS3’s GPU.
RSX GPU
• 550 MHz
• Independent vertex/pixel shaders
• 51 billion dot products per second (total system performance)
• 300M transistors
• 136 “shader operations” per clock
The interesting ALU performance numbers are 51 billion dot products per second (total system performance), 300M transistors, and more than twice as powerful as the 6800 Ultra.
The 51 billions dot products per cycle were listed on a summary slide of total graphics system performance and are assumed to include the Cell processor. Sony’s calculations seem to assume that the Cell can do a dot product per cycle per DSP, despite not having a dot product instruction.
However, using Sony’s claim, 7 dot products per cycle * 3.2 GHz = 22.4 billion dot products per second for the CPU. That leaves 51 – 22.4 = 28.6 billion dot products per second that are left over for the GPU. That leaves 28.6 billion dot products per second / 550 MHz = 52 GPU ALU ops per clock.
It is important to note that if the RSX ALUs are similar to the GeForce 6800 ALUs then they work on vector4s, while the Xbox 360 GPU ALUs work on vector5s. The total programmable GPU floating point performance for the PS3 would be 52 ALU ops * 4 floats per op *2 (madd) * 550 MHz = 228.8 GFLOPS which is less than the Xbox 360’s 48 ALU ops * 5 floats per op * 2 (madd) * 500 MHz= 240 GFLOPS.
With the number of transistors being slightly larger on the Xbox 360 GPU (330M) it’s not surprising that the total programmable GFLOPs number is very close.
The PS3 does have the additional 7 DSPs on the Cell to add more floating point ops for graphics rendering, but the Xbox 360’s three general purpose cores with custom D3D and dot product instructions are more customized for true graphics related calculations.
The 6800 Ultra has 16 pixel pipes, 6 vertex pipes, and runs at 400 MHz. Given the RSX’s 2x better than a 6800 Ultra number and the higher frequency of the RSX, one can roughly estimate that it will have 24 pixel shading pipes and 4 vertex shading pipes (fewer vertex shading pipes since the Cell DSPs will do some vertex shading). If the PS3 GPU keeps the 6800 pixel shader pipe co-issue architecture which is hinted at in Sony’s press release, this again gives it 24 pixel pipes* 2 issued per pipe + 4 vertex pipes = 52 dot products per clock in the GPU.
If the RSX follows the 6800 Ultra route, it will have 24 texture samplers, but when in use they take up an ALU slot, making the PS3 GPU in practice even less impressive. Even if it does manage to decouple texture fetching from ALU co-issue, it won’t have enough bandwidth to fetch the textures anyways.
For shader operations per clock, Sony is most likely counting each pixel pipe as four ALU operations (co-issued vector+scalar) and a texture operation per pixel pipe and 4 scalar operations for each vector pipe, for a total of 24 * (4 + 1) + (4*4) = 136 operations per cycle or 136 * 550 = 74.8 GOps per second.
Given the Xbox 360 GPU’s multithreading and balanced design, you really can’t compare the two systems in terms of shading operations per clock. However, the Xbox 360’s GPU can do 48 ALU operations (each can do a vector4 and scalar op per clock), 16 texture fetches, 32 control flow operations, and 16 programmable vertex fetch operations with tessellation per clock for a total of 48*2 + 16 + 32 + 16 = 160 operations per cycle or 160 * 500 = 80 GOps per second.
Overall, the automatic shader load balancing, memory export features, programmable vertex fetching, programmable triangle tesselator, full rate texture fetching in the vertex shader, and other “well beyond shader model 3.0” features of the Xbox
Part4
Bandwidth
The PS3 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and 25.6 GB/s of RDRAM bandwidth for a total system bandwidth of 48 GB/s.
The Xbox 360 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and a 256 GB/s of EDRAM bandwidth for a total of 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth.
Why does the Xbox 360 have such an extreme amount of bandwidth? Even the simplest calculations show that a large amount of bandwidth is consumed by the frame buffer. For example, with simple color rendering and Z testing at 550 MHz the frame buffer alone requires 52.8 GB/s at 8 pixels per clock. The PS3’s memory bandwidth is insufficient to maintain its GPU’s peak rendering speed, even without texture and vertex fetches.
The PS3 uses Z and color compression to try to compensate for the lack of memory bandwidth. The problem with Z and color compression is that the compression breaks down quickly when rendering complex next-generation 3D scenes.
HDR, alpha-blending, and anti-aliasing require even more memory bandwidth. This is why Xbox 360 has 256 GB/s bandwidth reserved just for the frame buffer. This allows the Xbox 360 GPU to do Z testing, HDR, and alpha blended color rendering with 4X MSAA at full rate and still have the entire main bus bandwidth of 22.4 GB/s left over for textures and vertices.
CONCLUSION
When you break down the numbers, Xbox 360 has provably more performance than PS3. Keep in mind that Sony has a track record of over promising and under delivering on technical performance. The truth is that both systems pack a lot of power for high definition games and entertainment.
However, hardware performance, while important, is only a third of the puzzle. Xbox 360 is a fusion of hardware, software and services. Without the software and services to power it, even the most powerful hardware becomes inconsequential. Xbox 360 games—by leveraging cutting-edge hardware, software, and services—will outperform the PlayStation 3.
http://majornelson.com/wp/images/moreimages/specs.gif
PS Gamer
05-20-2005, 22:08
It seems every time, the 360 wins. I would like to know where they got ALL there info...they are also stating that the 360s CPU is a lot faster then it actully seems. Which is hard for me to believe. Until I seem some real source behind this then I will regard it as more specualtion.
This is the thing that bugs me
The Xbox 360 CPU architecture has three times the general purpose processing power of the Cell.
Well, I don't think this is true to one bit...if they are just talking about raw processing power, the CELL easily creams the 360 CPU in raw processing power.
yeah i stopped reading it after the first few paragraphs. This article is mostly limiting itself to only the good sides of the xbox360 and is illustrating the bad sides of the xbox360. I could write a just as worse article where I make the ps3 shine as it is my savior but I see both sides...
straightballin
05-20-2005, 22:41
This is the thing that bugs me
Quote:
The Xbox 360 CPU architecture has three times the general purpose processing power of the Cell.
Well, I don't think this is true to one bit...if they are just talking about raw processing power, the CELL easily creams the 360 CPU in raw processing power.
Yea i was laughing at this even if it is better in general purpose we dont need a general purpose cpu in a conlsole we need a cpu capable of computing AI, some graphics, physics and other stuff which the cell does well and probably much better then the xbox 360's cpu
Dorfdadbanned
05-20-2005, 23:15
To the Average Gamer this means absoultely nothing. To Tech heads it means something I suppose. What matters is HOW the games look, and how the story is played out. What concerns me about the 360 is that they are 5-6 months out from launching there new system, and the EA PS3 Demo's looked better than most 360 games.
I have seen only 2 titles that intrest me, Gears of War, and Elder Scrolls. PDZ was not show so I dunno, but If they want to get me to spend another 300.00 plus now ask for 60.00+ for games They need GRAPHICS that WOW the consumer. Otherwise why not just stick with current gen's till All three new consoles are out and I can first hand see the difference.
Dorfdad
They are using facts that they don't even know, it's ANNOUNCED, but not confirmed. They also said that sony over promises, I think sony only did that 'cause they know they can win, but this time around they have a call of defeat if they play their games wrong...
*Dramatization of a big SONY icon and a big MS icon*
In this corner we have SONY!!! and in this corner we have MS! Who will win the battle? We'll see in this 6 year match....
So the XBox wins in a match between the XBox 360 and PS3 written by the boss(?) of XBox Live? Suprice... I think I wait until both are out and I can read some independent reviews of the systems :)
/Viktor
The Cell’s seven DSPs (what Sony calls SPEs) have no cache, no direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and a different instruction set from the PS3’s main CPU. They are not designed for or efficient at general purpose computing. DSPs are not appropriate for game programming.
Uh.... right.... They must have missed the 256KB of SRAM that's directly accessable to the SPE's :roll:.
Final verdict: I admit I haven't read all 4 parts, but seeing as how they made such a crital mistake, I'd say they're pretty much clueless and biased at the same time. Adios, have a nice day reading those long and pointless articles, gentlement.
Another thing, those 256GB/s bandwidth is ONLY for accessing the eDRAM, which is only 10MB and used as buffers. You do not store any actual game information, so it's pointless comparing it to the PS3's system bandwidth. The actual bandwidth for the Xbox 360 is half what it's peak bandwidth (22.4GB/s) is since it's being shared by the GPU and CPU.
I mean, this is the same argument PS2 fanboys used against Xbox back when PS2's 4MB of eDRAM's bandwidth whipped Xbox's meager unified RAM's bandwidth.
PeanutButterMunky
05-20-2005, 23:52
These comparisons mean jack without finalized hardware. :?
bustabusta196
05-21-2005, 00:11
These comparisons mean jack without finalized hardware. :?
So all the times you said PS3 creams the 360.. means jack without the finalized hardware?
PeanutButterMunky
05-21-2005, 00:13
What are you talking about? I'm getting both so it doesn't concern me. Passing up either console would lead to missing out on a lot of great games.
Chaotic_King
05-21-2005, 00:22
If all of this is true, and Microsoft has created a better system, in less time than Sony, who specializes in this, I.. :| Sony really would have blown it this time. Of course, hopefully, it's not, maybe Sony is holding back as well, but, I think Microsoft should be commended for their work on the Xbox360. I guess now we know why J Allard kept saying that the Xbox360 would be the most powerful next-generation.
I beleive the article to an extent. I honestly think that everyone just brushed 360 off WAy too fast. They saw some preliminary in game footage and said "wtf that looks garbage, F! 360" and then when PS3 comes out and shows a bunch of Pre-rendered stuff everyone hops on the wagon.
I believe that M$ has a very strong chance at taking a HUGE share of the market. Nintendo doesnt seem like a factor anymore so its just the big boys now.
I agree with Peanut Butter, i prolly will pick them both up BUT for sure will have a 360 in my room at launch.
bustabusta196
05-21-2005, 00:29
What would the resolution of your screen be compared to HDTV.. like 720p and 1080i or w/e...
cause right now i have my monitor on 1280 by 720... so what would that be..
the most it can go is.. 1280 by 1024.. so what is that?
Thanx.
PS Gamer
05-21-2005, 00:36
I agree with PBM, your gonna miss out if you don't get both consoles...I will get both consoles as well. One of the reason I am getting both is because of Halo 3...though I think KillZone is going to put up a good fight against it this gen.
PeanutButterMunky
05-21-2005, 00:38
One of the reason I am getting both is because of Halo 3...though I think KillZone is going to put up a good fight against it this gen.
It should be an interesting battle. ;)
bustabusta196
05-21-2005, 00:53
Halo3 Co-Op online.. 50 players maybe more online... spectator mode :shock: I cant wait for this stuff to drop its gonna be Fire!
PS Gamer
05-21-2005, 00:58
I beleive the article to an extent. I honestly think that everyone just brushed 360 off WAy too fast. They saw some preliminary in game footage and said "wtf that looks garbage, F! 360" and then when PS3 comes out and shows a bunch of Pre-rendered stuff everyone hops on the wagon.
I believe that M$ has a very strong chance at taking a HUGE share of the market. Nintendo doesnt seem like a factor anymore so its just the big boys now.
I agree with Peanut Butter, i prolly will pick them both up BUT for sure will have a 360 in my room at launch.
You do know that there was hardly any pre-rendered stuff being shown right? It was all Real-Time Rendered. Also to stop you from saying that it was not Gameplay, Real-Time Render is NOT gameplay... Real-Time render is A CGI that is rendered using the consoles (PS3) GPU and CPU.
While Pre-Rendered is stuff rendered off-line (Not in real time).
Chaotic_King
05-21-2005, 00:59
I believe that M$ has a very strong chance at taking a HUGE share of the market. Nintendo doesnt seem like a factor anymore so its just the big boys now.
I agree with Peanut Butter, i prolly will pick them both up BUT for sure will have a 360 in my room at launch.
I'd get both, but I'm not too sure I'll be able to have time for both. I don't know which way I'm going. I am a Sony fan, but Microsoft has everything down this coming generation. Great developer support, unrivaled service/features, equal to or better hardware, perfect controller, and great looking console. (After seeing all of them, I really think it has the best design, mainly because of the controller, but also because it looks really sleek.) "Xbox 1.5" this is not.
If Square Enix announces a main series FF, Dragon Quest, or Chrono for the X360, I think that will definitely be my choice.
straightballin
05-21-2005, 01:30
Ign xbox 360 vs. ps3 http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html MS sent them this and it is showing that the 360 will outpeform the ps3
PeanutButterMunky
05-21-2005, 01:42
Again...this means jack without finalized hardware. I won't care one way or the other, but comparing them at this point is just silly.
MS sent them this
That statement, coupled with it being affiliated with IGN makes me not give a hoot.
I'll stick to the more technical websites for this kind of information.
straightballin
05-21-2005, 01:48
That statement, coupled with it being affiliated with IGN makes me not give a hoot.
I'll stick to the more technical websites for this kind of information.
True thats exactly why I stated it.
I think that the article is base off the system specs that sony and ms release during E3. So it seems that in a pre hardware stage even though the ps3 has more floating operation per second the xbox360 beats it in other areas. Both systems are poweful, but I tend to think that it will take more than just raw power to win. It's like if you take two people one smart an one really strong who would win. Everybody would think the stronger person would win. I would put my money on the smart person to out wit and think the stronger person. To me it's going to be power versus architecture. And what I mean by that is sony seems to have gone for raw power, but from ms standpoint I think they went in the direction of a balance design not so much as high numbers, but more so how hardware is created to get the best efficency from it. That's why I think the gpu from ms can't be compare to any pc gpu. And come to find out that everybody though that ms gpu was going to be a custom R520 but it's not. ATI said that the chip was built separate from there other chips. It was also built from the ground up an it's designed by MS themselves an it took two years to build. To me numbers don't means nothing just something for tech heads to debate over. I will admit that the PS3 did look impressive, but I respect MS more for showing real in game footage that people got a chance to sit down and play. Only time will tell.
I just bothered to read everything, and here's some more stuff I noticed that are skewered:
The Xbox 360 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and a 256 GB/s of EDRAM bandwidth for a total of 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth.
The fact that the 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth is shared by the GPU and CPU, the actual real-time performance is cut in half, meaning that the CPU and GPU gets 11.2GB/s of bandwidth each.
I won't bother repeating myself about the eDRAM.
With the number of transistors being slightly larger on the Xbox 360 GPU (330M) it’s not surprising that the total programmable GFLOPs number is very close.
The reason why the X360 GPU has more transistor is because the 10MB of eDRAM uses 70~75 million transistors by itself! The real number of transistors that process logic is only 260 million, how's that greater than 300 million :roll:?
Can we say BIASED with a capital B?
Chaotic_King
05-21-2005, 02:57
I will admit that the PS3 did look impressive, but I respect MS more for showing real in game footage that people got a chance to sit down and play. Only time will tell.
Microsoft is launching this year. Sony is not. That's why Microsoft had real time in game footage.
I will admit that the PS3 did look impressive, but I respect MS more for showing real in game footage that people got a chance to sit down and play. Only time will tell.
Microsoft is launching this year. Sony is not. That's why Microsoft had real time in game footage.And what that suppose to mean? Nothing. The fact of the matter is that sony is just now putting out there devs kits. That seems like a sony problem to me.
Well, Xbox is trying to make exscuses for themselves 'cause they know they've lost graphic hungry people already. And to the sense, March 2006 is Spring somewhat, and PS3-Release then, and E3, Sony will take the show again. What is this like the 3rd time they have? I don't remember.
Chaotic_King
05-21-2005, 03:45
I will admit that the PS3 did look impressive, but I respect MS more for showing real in game footage that people got a chance to sit down and play. Only time will tell.
Microsoft is launching this year. Sony is not. That's why Microsoft had real time in game footage.And what that suppose to mean? Nothing. The fact of the matter is that sony is just now putting out there devs kits. That seems like a sony problem to me.
Microsoft is launching this year. One year ago, what did we know about the Xbox360? Nothing. What do we know about the PS3, coming out in a year? A whole lot more. It is true that Microsoft has had kits out for a lot longer than Sony, that's the reason they had things playable.
Well, Xbox is trying to make exscuses for themselves 'cause they know they've lost graphic hungry people already. And to the sense, March 2006 is Spring somewhat, and PS3-Release then, and E3, Sony will take the show again. What is this like the 3rd time they have? I don't remember.
This isn't them making excuses. Microsoft seems to have created the better console, equal to, or greater than the PS3. The Xenos really is one of a kind. Lots of interesting features inside of it. The RSX, I hear, is an off the shelf PC GPU (G70).
Well, Xbox is trying to make exscuses for themselves 'cause they know they've lost graphic hungry people already. And to the sense, March 2006 is Spring somewhat, and PS3-Release then, and E3, Sony will take the show again. What is this like the 3rd time they have? I don't remember.
???? wtf ???? you sound so ignorant right now.
At first people saw M$ !!IN GAME FOOTAGE!! and went "eh, that doesnt impress me"
Then they heard that it was running on alpha kits (30-40% of total power), thats when people gave it a little more slack
Then PS3 came and showed a bunch of "Real time" but no GAMEPLAY. Yet people confused to two; so now they think games will look like that on ps3
Then M$ came back with full specs comparison and PROVES that 360 will trump on the PS3 with a 5 month lauch headstart TO BOOT!
bottom line ----> this is gonna be one heck of a battle.
...I was just saying this because I read somewhere that microsoft stated something that makes people wonder why they didn't say it before the conference - it felt like an exscuse. , I forgot what was said, but close to right after the ps3 conference they said something. I'm not being ignorant, I'm being opinionated like the forum is.
@Siren: Why would you ever post something so horribly biased?
I couldn't read the whole thing, I got to the part where the Xbox360"wins" you know the one, very similar to the "1 billion" users they claim(remember mcdonalds signs showing 86 Billion served?)
Let's go on some opinionated facts for a moment, ones that many will agree with:
PS3 videos looked much better than xbox360 ones did with almost 1/4 the time to work on them and what does this mean?(any of the following may apply but possibly not all)
1)PS3 is easier to code for than xbox360 and will have better games based on the number of games the PS2 had
2)Xbox360 is far inferior in power to PS3
3)Developers don't care about Xbox360 as much as they do PS3 which in turn makes PS3 games better and faster to come out.
@Mudger: "Then M$ came back with full specs comparison and PROVES that 360 will trump on the PS3 with a 5 month lauch headstart TO BOOT! "
Proves? I know I didn't read the whole thing but all I saw was "Xbox360 has 3 cores making it more powerful" Honestly, if I could have seen this guys face as he said/typed this I bet I would have seen his eyes scan the audience looking for people who actually believed his "proof"(proof with absolutely no figures to back it and no tech explanations for tech inclined people to talk about and make those who didnt understand see which is better)
IMHO M$ is lying through their teeth trying to save the next gen for themselves and by reading some peoples reactions to M$ they are doing a good job.
GAH! M$ makes me so angry! Windows is the biggest joke I have ever seen, Xbox could have easily been done on computers being that their system was identical to a computer...(not only that but I hav seen M$ controllers on peoples computers that are only missing the black and white buttons and one analog stick) The run the software industry and know so little about it, all they really know is business, and even that only the kind that involves buying out any company that shows any promise so that the people dont actually see how horrible they are.
/end rant
Sorry about that
I really don't know why MS is being secretive about there hardware specs even ATI is keeping hush about a lot of things. All I know is that MS designed there own GPU and I want to know what it can do and what type of features it has. I also think that this generation will bring fanboys of different systems closer together. What I mean by that is that I have been to a lot of forums and seen a lot of hardcore fanboys starting to embrace each other system. You have those who refuse too, but still being in love with there system of choice they are still giving the other system a chance. A lot people feel if you don't have both systems than you will be missing out on a lot great games and that's how I feel. Xbox is my system of choice, but I most definately will have both systems.
Also here goanother person perspective on the matter. He actually work for MS, but I think he's a sony fan take look. I think this will balance the debate. http://spaces.msn.com/members/jeromeontech/
Next Gen Gaming. Bringing gamers closer together!!!!
That wasn't a bad article at that place you said X2, he did fix up some things and he's not a biased fan if I am to add.
straightballin
05-21-2005, 19:53
That was a good article great find.
Hello,
This is my first post, I had been looking around for a good forum about the next gen machines, and found this to be one of the most interesting ones.
I'll start short and direct, since I've posted about a lot more stuff in different places, but what I think most people here is missing, is about two facts:
1. There were NO Xbox 360's running games on E3, they were G5s with some PC card (most likely Geforce Ultra, or Radeon X850), with no AA enabled, and with the logical low framerate, and lack of spectacular looking graphics. The Xbox 360 is going to be way more powerful than what we saw on E3.
Source:
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2420&p=5
2. All points that PS3 was NOT running anything (means, if there was something rendering anything - movies, games, demos - in real time, it was NOT the PS3, but, according to the article, something more powerful).
Please, read the article for more details about it.
Source:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/25/rsx_still_in_development/
I'd like to know what do people think, either if they like the idea of having BluRay on the PS3 or not. I mean, paying much more money (like 30% more than X360 according to estimations, and most likely more on games also - if they're based on BluRay), to have something else than a gamming feature. I'm pretty sure you'll be able to have HD-DVD player available when it's really necessary (and standard) and @ a little more price than the difference you paid for the PS3, over X360. In my opinion, I would've added EDRAM instead, to allow 4XAA withuout performance hit, wich to me is better than a higher resolution output (1080p) but without AA and maybe some performance hit.
I've got a lot more to say, but I think this is enough to start with.
Regards.
venomman
05-27-2005, 00:06
they will cost the same. unless 360 is less then 299. ps3 will be 299. So for the same price you are getting a lot more.
And Nvidia already looked at EDRAM and didnt think it would benefit what they are doing. I believe Nvidia knows what they want out of the RSX. So its safe to leave it to them instead of comparing hardware we yet to understand.
REMEMBER Nvidia said the technology is so advanced on the RSX is would take years to explain. So I am sure they are on to something good.
they will cost the same. unless 360 is less then 299. ps3 will be 299. So for the same price you are getting a lot more.
And Nvidia already looked at EDRAM and didnt think it would benefit what they are doing. I believe Nvidia knows what they want out of the RSX. So its safe to leave it to them instead of comparing hardware we yet to understand.
REMEMBER Nvidia said the technology is so advanced on the RSX is would take years to explain. So I am sure they are on to something good.
Where did you get that information about the price?
I was only talking based on estimations (about the cost), but none of them pointed that PS3 would cost less than $400.
About the RSX, let me tell you that Nvidia's GPU is most likely based on the same technology that the current GPUs, but with more raw power (more pipelines, higher clock speed, etc), while the real improvement in the GPU side will be delivered by ATI, with their Hybrid pripelines (48 actually), which, according to ATI itself, won't appear on desktops until 2007.
Regards.
kingarthurivvi
05-28-2005, 23:58
how did you get those numbers? how is a similar to shelf gpu going to be so advanced next to something ms and ati has worked on for 2 years? that post is purely opinion and inaccurate. With a blue-ray drive and all those dam ports for nothing and the hardware alone i would expect no less than 400 if not 500. that is just speculation like your post is. on the blue ray question from Aquanox i feal from what i have hear the movies are 50$..... the games will definitely be more expensive. on that note what about the sdk's adding even more of a price tag im sure dev on the xbox 360 will be less time and $$ while i think revolution will be leader in this department.
LoversNotFighters
09-10-2006, 23:25
Hah. Major Nelson making a technical comparison of Xbox 360 and PS3. It's like Ken Kutaragi did one.
Nothing to see here, drive through.
Hah. Major Nelson making a technical comparison of Xbox 360 and PS3. It's like Ken Kutaragi did one.
Nothing to see here, drive through.
If its "nothing to see here", why the hell did you dig it up? Very old.
paranoia13
09-11-2006, 00:02
Hah. Major Nelson making a technical comparison of Xbox 360 and PS3. It's like Ken Kutaragi did one.
Nothing to see here, drive through.
Seriously, are you stupid? This was a rebuttle to sonys 2x powerful statement, both are complete and utter bull****
Why the bump....my god LOCK THIS
Seriously, are you stupid? This was a rebuttle to sonys 2x powerful statement, both are complete and utter bull****
Why the bump....my god LOCK THIS
I think we should make it a sticky. There are STILL to this day, many who believe these spec comparisons. This thread should be stickied, not locked.
paranoia13
09-11-2006, 00:37
I think we should make it a sticky. There are STILL to this day, many who believe these spec comparisons. This thread should be stickied, not locked.
There are still people to this day who think the PS3 is capable of 2teraflops, when In real world performance its under 1teraflop
spazchicken
09-11-2006, 00:43
HAHAHA...aquanox's first post.....awww...this is were he was created....
The Taskmaster
09-11-2006, 01:08
Good read, regardless if the fanatics want to try to deny it.
It's nice to see some actual facts and comparisons, rather than assumptions.
It's clear the 360 is the more powerful console.
EbonySeraphim
09-11-2006, 01:14
If Major Nelson was supposed to have a shred of technical credentials in this industry before writing that, I gaurantee he lost it afterwards. It was probably a bad idea to dig this one up.
The Taskmaster
09-11-2006, 01:16
If Major Nelson was supposed to have a shred of technical credentials in this industry before writing that, I gaurantee he lost it afterwards. It was probably a bad idea to dig this one up.
I haven't seen one person attempt to prove his article wrong, (with actual facts) if any of you have proof that he made it all up, please by all means provide it.
EbonySeraphim
09-11-2006, 01:19
I haven't seen one person attempt to prove his article wrong, if any of you have proof that he made it all up, please by all means provide it.
I know you didn't just ask me to do what I already did a while ago...
http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=22858
I break things down even further than his team down so maybe you can understand if you have a bit of computer hardware or programming knowledge.
MikeAaronB
09-11-2006, 01:24
Major Nelson can suck my bawls. ITS ALL PERSONAL PREFERENCE PEOPLE! [/angry]
There have been many, many articles proving this wrong. They're probably harder find now though because this is so old. Major Nelson's "facts" are no more credible than what Sony was first saying regarding PS3 vs. 360.
Besides, IF this were true, wouldn't it show? The last time I checked, the PS3 versions of Call of Duty 3, Sonic, and Virtua Tennis looked better than the 360 versions of the same game. Hmmm.. :P
LegendaryArcturus
09-11-2006, 01:34
This is from a comparison by ArchangelMorph from that Microsoft email if you want to read the whole thing for yourself heres the link http://forums.gamespot.com/gamespot/show_messages.php?board=909102863&topic=21114947&page=0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SECTION 2 - The CPU's
Ok let's continue shall we..
Microsoft wrote:
The Xbox 360 processor was designed to give game developers the power that they actually need, in an easy to use form.
True and concise.. good job MS.. no lies here..
Microsoft wrote:
The Cell processor has impressive streaming floating-point power that is of limited use for games.
Not true at all but we'll get to that in a second..
Microsoft wrote:
The majority of game code is a mixture of integer, floating-point, and vector math, with lots of branches and random memory accesses. This code is best handled by a general purpose CPU with a cache, branch predictor, and vector unit.
Nice little half-truth.. The majority of game code to be processed at any one time by a processor is a mixture of standard game code and computationally heavy vector math and floating point ops for things like Physics, sound and A.I.
Since physics and AI are probably the most computationally intensive code data to be processed on a CPU, surely its logical to assume that a CPU that can process it better will have an advantage..?
Microsoft wrote:
The Cell's seven DSPs (what Sony calls SPEs) have no cache, no direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and a different instruction set from the PS3's main CPU.
Ok let's clarify.. each SPE contains a local memory store which is used instead of a singular cache memory.. the APU's read/write from local memory and the local memory can access main memory in blocks of 1024 bits but the APU's cannot access main memory directly..
Blanchford wrote:
This may sound like an inflexible system which will be complex to program and it most likely is but this system will deliver data to the APU registers at a phenomenal rate.
Branch prediction is difficult to do with the cell but not impossible and can be performed in software at a higher level of abstraction, thus allowing overall performance to be boosted by a reducing in complexity at the lower level..
Microsoft wrote:
They are not designed for or efficient at general purpose computing. DSPs are not appropriate for game programming.
Games programming isn't general purpose computing and MS are trying to compare apples and oranges here.. but again i'll get into this a bit more later..
Microsoft wrote:
Xbox 360 has three general purpose CPU cores. The Cell processor has only one.
But since the non-graphics based game code is by far the least computationally intensive data to compute, then why do you need more than one..?
Microsoft wrote:
Xbox 360's CPUs has vector processing power on each CPU core.
Each Xbox 360 core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread, with a dot product instruction, and a shared 1-MB L2 cache. The Cell processor's vector processing power is mostly on the seven DSPs.
SPE's to be precise, and which can work together a heck of alot faster to calculate vector math.. Nice of you to omit that info MS..
Microsoft wrote:
The Xbox 360 CPU has a dot product instruction, where other CPUs such as Cell must emulate dot product using multiple instructions.
But the Cell can still perform more dot product operations/sec than the 360 regardless of the fact that it performs them using more than one instruction per op..
Microsoft wrote:
Cell's streaming floating-point work is done on its seven DSP processors. Since geometry processing is moved to the GPU, the need for streaming floating-point work and other DSP style programming in games has dropped dramatically.
Except for complex physics which MS carefully neglected to mention here.. And since game code doesn't get more complex as games grow, (the graphics, AI and physics code does..) so cell is much more useful at this kind of processing then MS are trying to imply..
Microsoft wrote:
Based on measurements of running next generation games, only ~10-30% of the instructions executed are floating point. The remainders of the instructions are load, store, integer, branch, etc. Even fewer of the instructions executed are streaming floating point—probably ~5-10%. Cell is optimized for streaming floating-point, with 87.5% of its cores good for streaming floating-point and nothing else.
The figures are incorrect but more importantly, cell may not be optimised for stream processing integer code but it can still do it at very high performance levels in comparison to the 360's processor (not beating it, but not too far behind).. And this also draws back to my point that the least computationally intensive code will be general purpose so MS don't have much of an arguement here..
Microsoft wrote:
Game programmers do not want to spread their code over eight processors, especially when seven of the processors are poorly suited for general purpose programming.
But they don't have to becausde the compiler will handle this.. The code will be modularised into software cells and sent to the PPE which distributes data to the SPE's.. Its an efficient processing methodology and works very well provided the system has a very efficient compiler.. Also since the complexity has been moved up into the software, its easier to improve performance just by updating the compiler and implementing more effective scheduling algorithm's.. Also I would assume that Sony already have some very efficient ones working on the Cell at present considering how long they have spent developing the processor (not to mention IBM is working on it too..)
Microsoft wrote:
Evenly distributing game code across eight processors is extremely difficult.
On independant processors yes but using the cells architecture it simplifies things a great deal.. It's still complex but not as much as MS are trying to imply..
I got the second part of ArchangelMorph's posts from Gamespot forums pointing out bias and flaws. Unfortunately, those posts were deleted and he got banned. You can go to Beyond3D for the reviews of Nelson's slanted comparison too.
Anyway, I miss Watashi-chan.
The Taskmaster
09-11-2006, 01:38
I know you didn't just ask me to do what I already did a while ago...
http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=22858
I break things down even further than his team down so maybe you can understand if you have a bit of computer hardware or programming knowledge.
I have no interest in your opinions, you have no credibility. Anyone can write an article claiming anything, but I take Major Nelsons word over yours..at least until Sony can prove this wrong theirselves. (Curious that they haven't though eh?) Nothing personal.
I am however, inclined to agree the power difference between the PS3 and 360 will not be noticable, either way. I'm a fan of ALL systems, regardless of their "power"
I have no interest in your opinions, you have no credibility. Anyone can write an article claiming anything, but I take Major Nelsons word over yours..at least until Sony can prove this wrong theirselves. (Curious that they haven't though eh?) Nothing personal.
I am however, inclined to agree the power difference between the PS3 and 360 will not be noticable, either way. I'm a fan of ALL systems, regardless of their "power"
Who does Major Nelson work for?...oh I see now.
I would trust ebony more...he does have credibility, he is a programmer and he does know his stuff.
If you can't see that the ps3 is the more powerful console, you definetly don't know about
the power of the cell.
Ricokillercon
09-11-2006, 01:40
Wow so ull take nelsons words over ebony...when this article is over a year old...and not really uptodate on what ps3 would be...
and ebony has done alot of reaserch too about the facts that are out there...
AJJets107
09-11-2006, 02:01
Please do not bump year old threads.
According to Jeuxvideo.fr the Gran Turismo HD Concept game will indeed be available on the European PlayStation Network Platform on the release of the PlayStation 3. And that it will indeed be a free downloadable game, just like it is in North America and in Japan.
However, Jeuxvideo.fr also confirmed that Polyphony Digital will release it's Gran Turismo 5 Prologue in the autumn of 2007, as a downloadable demo.
This prologue version will include new cars and new tracks, and the players will be able to experience the online Gran Turismo for the first time.
They also confirmed Gran Turismo 5 for spring 2008. However, we wouldn't be surprised if the game would be delayed till late 2008.
Keep checking PSU.com for the latest Gran Turismo news.