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ATI – PS3 Is Unrefined

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Sony got the better side of the deal with Nvidia in regards to GPU. Nvidia are also better cost per performance. So Sony will be well chuffed that they outsmarted their competition once again. No doubt RSX will be the undisputed best in the console world.
 
Striek said:
Theres ~1 year Xenos - RSX gap. (late last year vs. late this year)
And theres a larger CPU gap IMO. Who knows? I think its too early to declare such things.

Xenos design was completely finished this year... May 2005 IIRC. Even the 7800GTX design was ready before the Xenos One. Larger CPU gap? The Cell design was finished last year IIRC... The only reason why PS3 has not been launched yet, it's the Blu-Ray Player.
 
"The only reason why PS3 has not been launched yet, it's the Blu-Ray Player."

... and the specs _still_ aren't locked yet
... and the cell hasn't gone into mass production
... and the devs could do with final dev kits so the games are ready
... and the OS needs finalised
... etc...
 
MbGCaM said:
Larger CPU gap? The Cell design was finished last year IIRC...

And how long ago was the G5 design completed?

The CPU gap is indeed much larger than the GPU gap between the two systems.

Next gen is all about physics and animation for me so even if the games end up looking similar I know where my multiplatform titles will be heading.
 
MbGCaM said:
Xenos design was completely finished this year... May 2005 IIRC.
Hmm, last June the architecture for X360 was pretty much finalised (we had a leaked diagram that was exactly what we got, minus CPU clock downgrade), and the GPU taped out November last year (CPU - December).
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/9004/Burning-Down-the-Xbox-360/

# Microsoft began the Xbox 360 project in late 2002.
# In 2003, Microsoft decided it wanted to launch its next-generation console before Sony.
# IBM put 400 engineers to develop the Xbox 360 CPU.
# IBM taped out (finished the design) of the CPU in December 2004.
# ATI put 300 engineers to developer the Xbox 360 GPU, aka Xenos.
# ATI finished its GPU design on November 2004.

MbGCaM said:
The Cell design was finished last year IIRC
Not sure, I think initial design was finished either late last year or earlier this year, but thats irrelevant, since there have been revisions since then.

There is no denying that there is a considerable transistor advantage for CELL vs. XeCPU (as well as, by all accounts, even greater architectural advantages).
 
DCharlie said:
oh , okay, you are right! the only reason it's not out head to head with X360 is Bluray! hurrah!

Maybe because Sony is still making $$$ with PS2? Maybe they really want to deliver AAA, great looking software? I will enjoy reading the damage control commentary by you when Sony shows the finished hardware at CES. Oh and few devs also have the final PS3 dev kit. Charlie am cry :'(
 
Every public statement or info I've seen Sony ever make or state about the PS3 release schedule has indicated an early to mid 2006 release for the console.

So to talk about the PS3 not 'being released yet' doesn't make much sense unless there is some public statement I've missed about Sony wanting the PS3 to be already on the shelves.
 
monkeymagic said:
And how long ago was the G5 design completed?

The CPU gap is indeed much larger than the GPU gap between the two systems.

Next gen is all about physics and animation for me so even if the games end up looking similar I know where my multiplatform titles will be heading.

you really think that with devs like activision and EA out there we'll see different sets of animation and physics per port? :lol good luck with that.
 
Liquid said:
you really think that with devs like activision and EA out there we'll see different sets of animation and physics per port? :lol good luck with that.
Depends if they get used to it with Revolution ;)
 
"Maybe because Sony is still making $$$ with PS2? Maybe they really want to deliver AAA, great looking software?

i have absolutely no idea what you are going on about here. I'm responding to "the only reason PS3 isn't out is because of Bluray" - i don't see what this has to do with my post.

I will enjoy reading the damage control commentary by you when Sony shows the finished hardware at CES. Oh and few devs also have the final PS3 dev kit. Charlie am cry :'("

then our information differs. As far as i know there is still things that are not nailed down yet. I don't expect final hardware announcements at CES. Who has final dev kits then?
 
Liquid said:
you really think that with devs like activision and EA out there we'll see different sets of animation and physics per port? :lol good luck with that.

The Madden team has already said that they're waiting until next year to implement physics based animation in their game. What console comes out next year? :)

The developers of Fight Night already said that the PS3 will be getting a different version than the one being released on the Xbox 360. Hopefully the PS3 version doesn't use the current gen animation system thats currently in place.
 
pestul said:
Okay.. I'm an ATI fanboy and all, but that's just bitter. You can't knock the 7800GTX design. :P


I don't think he's knocking the 7800 design per se though. He's simply saying that the PS3 is akin to 1980's Detroit parts-bin technology. IOW, the RSX isn't purpose built for the PS3. It's a 7800GTX modified to work with the Cell architecture. Consequently, while it's a brute, it will have to be to keep up with the Xenos design.

This type of propaganda reminds me of the "Sony will sell 200 million consoles in five years" stuff. Eventually, time will tell, but IMO, the truth resides somewhere betwixt the bullshit being slung from both sides.
 
Of course there is marketing spin in their but I thought it was accepted that sony tried to use only cell chips, even for graphics which didn't work out. This would have been their goal to make the chips themselfs like with the PS2. Now they had to resort to parts from nvidia which is going to eat into their profits. How much of a late start nvidia had due to this I don't know but the fact certainly didn't help them.

I don't know what this talk about the split rendering architecture is with SPEs doing vertex work (what are the vertex shaders for then?) and the RSX exceling in fill rate (from what I hear the 360 outperforms PS3 in fillrate). Was this just marketing fluff reworded or actual inside knowledge?
 
Deg said:
Sony got the better side of the deal with Nvidia in regards to GPU. Nvidia are also better cost per performance. So Sony will be well chuffed that they outsmarted their competition once again. No doubt RSX will be the undisputed best in the console world.

That's debatable.....
 
Liquid said:
you really think that with devs like activision and EA out there we'll see different sets of animation and physics per port?

Yes because all multiplatform titles come from EA and Activision :lol

Besides, PS3 will be the lead platform for these companies and it will be easier to downgrade ports for X360 than it would the other way round.

If X360 were the lead platform obviously that wouldn't be the case but luckily it won't be by virtue of Playstation's historical dominance, market presence and consumer mindshare.
 
BigBoss said:
The Madden team has already said that they're waiting until next year to implement physics based animation in their game. What console comes out next year? :)

The developers of Fight Night already said that the PS3 will be getting a different version than the one being released on the Xbox 360. Hopefully the PS3 version doesn't use the current gen animation system thats currently in place.

We also know that the next gen MoH is being built from the ground up on the PS3.
 
elostyle said:
Of course there is marketing spin in their but I thought it was accepted that sony tried to use only cell chips, even for graphics which didn't work out. This would have been their goal to make the chips themselfs like with the PS2
They do make it themselves, with royalties per chip made to nVidia, its not really that bad a deal (vs. MS who subcontract production and pay royalties).

elostyle said:
from what I hear the 360 outperforms PS3 in fillrate
I'm pretty sure this was one of the areas where the RSX definitely schools Xenos quite badly? So uh, one of us is confused here.
 
Liquid said:
you really think that with devs like activision and EA out there we'll see different sets of animation and physics per port? :lol good luck with that.


Some of the most interesting footage and information came at the end of the piece, when Young talked about the latest iteration of the Medal Of Honor series for PlayStation 3, currently in development at EA Los Angeles. He revealed that, while still early in development, the PS3 version of the game was already fill-rate bound, leaving 4 SPUs of the PlayStation 3 ready to be used for code-powered effects such as physics, particles, AI, and so on.

As an example, Young showed a video of an actor playing a soldier in Medal Of Honor being motion captured with the incredibly sophisticated mocap set-up, as used in The Matrix sequels, and then showed it transposed into a Medal Of Honor PS3 game scene, where the actor's expressions and frenzied shouting looked wholly believable, with both high resolution models and realistic facial animation.

:)
 
Striek said:
They do make it themselves, with royalties per chip made to nVidia, its not really that bad a deal (vs. MS who subcontract production and pay royalties).


I'm pretty sure this was one of the areas where the RSX definitely schools Xenos quite badly? So uh, one of us is confused here.
My understanding is that the theoretical fill rate is slightly higher on the RSX but the bandwidth is pretty similar. The EDRAM helps the 360 conserving bandwidth with zbuffer etc writes. The fillrate limiting factor on the PS3 thus would be bandwidth.

He revealed that, while still early in development, the PS3 version of the game was already fill-rate bound, leaving 4 SPUs of the PlayStation 3 ready to be used for code-powered effects such as physics, particles, AI, and so on.
See? Izzy of course spun that in Sony's favor :P
 
Striek said:
Hmm, last June the architecture for X360 was pretty much finalised (we had a leaked diagram that was exactly what we got, minus CPU clock downgrade), and the GPU taped out November last year (CPU - December).
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/9004/Burning-Down-the-Xbox-360/






There is no denying that there is a considerable transistor advantage for CELL vs. XeCPU (as well as, by all accounts, even greater architectural advantages).

?

CELL has so many transistors because it contains a lot of six transistor SRAM. Each SPE is made of 21 million transistors: 14 million SRAM and 7 million logic. Then one of the eight SPU's is deactived, so you have 7 left. So that lowers effective number of transistors in CELL's original 234 million transitor count down to 213 million.

For the the 7 active/useable SPU's you have 98 million transistors dedicated to memory storage, and 49 million for logic.
 
Izzy said:
Spun what? Please elaborate - I'm all ears.
Well, you can read that quote in 2 ways. Either the Cell is so powerful that you can have spare spes for physics and stuff or the RSX is so weak fillrate wise that it leaves the cpu idling :)

By the way Izzy,
izzyds9sy.png

Wtf?
 
elostyle said:
Well, you can read that quote in 2 ways. Either the Cell is so powerful that you can have spare spes for physics and stuff or the RSX is so weak fillrate wise that it leaves the cpu idling :)

I was specifically referring to the 'EA physics' comment - I wasn't even involved in the fillrate argument. And yet I 'spun'?
 
Izzy said:
I was specifically referring to the 'EA physics' comment - I wasn't even involved in the fillrate argument. And yet I 'spun'?
Well, I was using the quote in my fillrate argument against the RSX and you used it for your Cell argument. That just made me think that, sorry.
 
MbGCaM said:
Do you remember first-gen PS2 games?

Do you remember first gen XBOX games? Four years later, Halo, PGR, DOA3, Wreckless, and Rallisport still have yet to be blown away by today's software on the same system. Those games turned out to be very accurate representations of the power of the XBOX, and all came within 6 months of launch.

The ease of X360 development suggests that history may repeat itself.
 
Or maybe it's because the development process was so sililar to a PC's............

The best looking games on Xbox today look a shitload better than Halo, PGR, DOA3, Wreckless, and Rallisport.
 
mashoutposse said:
Personally, I would be highly disappointed if XBOX 360-ish performance is all that one can expect from the upcoming generation.

At the absolute least I expect PS3 to be this generation's XBOX graphically (with X360 being the equivalent of PS2).

1. You act like you've seen "Xbox 360-ish" performance. You know, MS could have taken the concept footage route with the Xbox 360 if they wanted to, but seeing as the console was launching six months later, concept footage wouldn't cut it.

2. You act live you've seen real PS3 graphics performance based on a bunch of concept footage. Real-time or not, concept footage is concept footage.

3. If you're expecting PS3 to have the same level of graphics advantage over the Xbox 360 like the Xbox had over the PS2, you might as well buy a fishing rod and take up a new hobby. You're heading for disappointment. The Xbox launched damn near 20 months after the PS2. The PS2 will launch within six months of the Xbox 360.
 
mashoutposse said:
Do you remember first gen XBOX games? Four years later, Halo, PGR, DOA3, Wreckless, and Rallisport still have yet to be blown away by today's software on the same system. Those games turned out to be very accurate representations of the power of the XBOX, and all came within 6 months of launch.

The ease of X360 development suggests that history may repeat itself.

Halo 2, PGR2, DOA:U, Rallisport 2 and Riddick beg to differ?
 
There is barely any real time rendering technology more powerful than the 360 gpu on this entire planet. How can you be disappointed in the hardware?
 
So that lowers effective number of transistors in CELL's original 234 million transitor count down to 213 million.
There's redundant logic in every chip - if you start counting this way you'll have to readjust all numbers downwards.
 
mashoutposse said:
Do you remember first gen XBOX games? Four years later, Halo, PGR, DOA3, Wreckless, and Rallisport still have yet to be blown away by today's software on the same system. Those games turned out to be very accurate representations of the power of the XBOX, and all came within 6 months of launch.

The ease of X360 development suggests that history may repeat itself.

what? :lol
 
mashoutposse said:
Do you remember first gen XBOX games? Four years later, Halo, PGR, DOA3, Wreckless, and Rallisport still have yet to be blown away by today's software on the same system. Those games turned out to be very accurate representations of the power of the XBOX, and all came within 6 months of launch.

The ease of X360 development suggests that history may repeat itself.

those games werent ports and leftovers from other systems. again PGR3 is like the only game that was built just for the 360 and it also shows the bst even though it was rushed. still, i expect the ps3 will be more power, but not by much. a gamecube/xbox difference, to be exact.


:lol :lol
 
mashoutposse said:
Do you remember first gen XBOX games? Four years later, Halo, PGR, DOA3, Wreckless, and Rallisport still have yet to be blown away by today's software on the same system. Those games turned out to be very accurate representations of the power of the XBOX, and all came within 6 months of launch.

The ease of X360 development suggests that history may repeat itself.

Rallisport 2 destroys Rallisport 1 and PGR2 destroys PGR1 graphically.
 
StoOgE said:
Halo 2, PGR2, DOA:U, Rallisport 2 and Riddick beg to differ?

With the exception of maybe Riddick, none of those games blow away their respective predecessors. Are they graphical improvements over the originals? Yes; of course they are. However, none of them are superior to the point where one might not have believed them to be possible back in 2001. Not even close.

There's nothing about the "jump" from, say, Halo to Halo 2 that suggests that a significant amount of horsepower was unlocked in between their releases. The X360 situation will likely be very similar.
 
Q&A: Richard Huddy European developer relations manager, ATI

The Xbox 360 GPU is designed to be a console GPU - that's what we set out to produce

We're a bit underpowered

let's have things pretty predictable and easy to work with, and let's generate about the best performance that we can

in the short timeframe microsoft afforded us

The PS3 has been designed in a quite different way because of the way the process worked.

IE, more forward-thinking

We sat down with Microsoft and said: 'This is what we think we can build',

in the amount of time you're giving us (or lack thereof)

and they said: 'Yes, but what about...?'

..backwards compatability?

And they started picking holes in our design, so we came up with a collaborative design.

we asked for more money

They didn't put a spec in front of us and say: 'How much for this?' That definitely wasn't the dialogue

my subconscious betrays me...can you scratch that part?

Instead what we have is a very collaborative design.

for what we got paid in the time microsoft afforded us

With the PS3 my understanding of what happened is that they had three different internal hardware solutions

but, i aint one ta gossip, so you didnt hear it from me...

- at one point, for example, as I understand it there was a proposal to use multiple Cell processors just to handle the graphics.

i'm pulling this part out my ass, but if it's printed in a magazine, it may as well be true

And towards the end of the process, as the story goes, they took a look at the three internal tenders and decided than none of them would actually do; none of them would deliver the kind of performance and quality that games programmers could use and would make for a good cost-effective console,

ibm and sony's engineers are known to make blunders such as these

so they had to go out and shop around.

after saturn and xbox, it was the in-thing to do

And one of the places they shopped was Nvidia, and what Nvidia did was say: 'Well, you've got this relatively short timeframe, you've got roughly this kind of budget, I'll tell you what we'll do: we'll do you a good price on what is essentially the 7800GTX'.

and rofl! omg! that's exactly what we did with microsoft! only our stock is falling! copycats!

So that's a PC chip, and if you look at the architecture of the two consoles you can see we've done bizarre things that they haven't.

like kick our feet up and yawn

ps3 is essentially a PC graphics design bolted on to a Cell processor and 256 meg of fast system memory...

unlike our chip and xbox360 which...is...essentially a PC graphics design bolted on to a processor and...can we scarcth that last part too?

So how about this one: can those E3 PS3 demos be achieved on Xbox 360?

Indeed, it's well beyond what we expect the PS3 to be able to do. So I guess we'll just have to see what happens..."

and then there was tgs...and mgs4...and whoops! can we scratch that?
 
Heh, ati, tsk, tsk, tsk. He shouldn't speak so boldly especially when several of the initial s/w products are said to be missing even basic easy to implement stuff like AF, from what I've heard.

Ps3 much weaker non-final dev. kits, which were at e3 and the later ones at tgs were capable of displaying gphx that, IMHO, exceed pretty much 90+%, some would argue all, of the s/w that's outhere on any platform announced or out now. That while going at a solid 60fps, so highly detailed that famous dev.s have said it's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to dev. full games while keeping such an extraordinarily high lvl of detail(ffvii demo)... 60fps on substantially weaker non-final kits and the lvls of details possible with such, already stressing top dev.s in terms of their ability to create such highly detailed content, hitting the limits of what the largest dev.s with the largest budgets and greatest amounts of sales, can humanly hope to accomplish! :lol
 
Divus Masterei said:
Heh, ati, tsk, tsk, tsk. He shouldn't speak so boldly especially when several of the initial s/w products are said to be missing even basic easy to implement stuff like AF, from what I've heard.

Ps3 much weaker non-final dev. kits, which were at e3 and the later ones at tgs were capable of displaying gphx that, IMHO, exceed pretty much 90+%, some would argue all, of the s/w that's outhere on any platform announced or out now. That while going at a solid 60fps, so highly detailed that famous dev.s have said it's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to dev. full games while keeping such an extraordinarily high lvl of detail(ffvii demo)... 60fps on substantially weaker non-final kits and the lvls of details possible with such, already stressing top dev.s in terms of their ability to create such highly detailed content, hitting the limits of what the largest dev.s with the largest budgets and greatest amounts of sales, can humanly hope to accomplish! :lol
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but how did they hide these at e3 and tgs?
kaigai01.jpg

000092104.jpg
 
mashoutposse said:
With the exception of maybe Riddick, none of those games blow away their respective predecessors. Are they graphical improvements over the originals? Yes; of course they are. However, none of them are superior to the point where one might not have believed them to be possible back in 2001. Not even close.

There's nothing about the "jump" from, say, Halo to Halo 2 that suggests that a significant amount of horsepower was unlocked in between their releases. The X360 situation will likely be very similar.

:lol on rsc2 on a hilly night course over live you could be at the base of the moutain and a 1/2 a mile back, look up at the hills ahead and see other players headlights making there way up the mountains all at 60fps.
 
mashoutposse said:
Do you remember first gen XBOX games? Four years later, Halo, PGR, DOA3, Wreckless, and Rallisport still have yet to be blown away by today's software on the same system. Those games turned out to be very accurate representations of the power of the XBOX, and all came within 6 months of launch.

The ease of X360 development suggests that history may repeat itself.
:lol :lol :lol

If only gaf banned people for stupidity.Then again that would whipe away 50% of this forum :)
 
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