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[evil ways]

How about we discuss why the PSP IS THE GREATEST THING EVER.

I love my PSP, but today we sorta had a falling out due to the fact that I spent nearly an hour trying to put a free screen protector I got with the Mad Catz case and every single time I got air bubbles and/or dust particles. We worked things out and now evberything's fine.

 

[EviLore]

I have a dumb question for the techies in this thread. Will the beefed up hardware in PS3/xb360 lower or eliminate load times? Also (slighty OT) is there any advantage in range/reliability for controllers in Blue tooth over the 360's 2.4 Ghz?

Load times will be influenced by the data transfer rate on the optical drives. As far as I can tell the BRD spec is 54.0Mbps for 1x, and the PS3 will have a 6x drive according to sony. Xbox 360 will have a 12x dual layer dvd drive. So the comparison is as follows:


PS3's 6x BRD-ROM: 324Mbps
X360's 12x DVD-ROM: 133Mbps

 

[kaching]

Uhm... no it isn't. It's people like you that spread this complete farce.

The only thing 2x as powerfull (in some regards) is the CPU. The whole system isn't. The GPU is barely more powerful, if at all. There's not twice as much RAM at twice the speed. There's not twice the bandwidth on everything. There's not twice the resolution.

Just stop already.

So you went from putting a question "to all you smart techie people" at the beginning of this thread to challenging one of the smart techie people about their estimations? My, aren't you a quick study

Since you seem so confident that his estimate is wrong, what do you consider a more accurate estimate?

And I'm also rather perplexed by the way that a >100 GFlop gap in CPU performance can be rationalized into anything other than a significant performance gap.

 

[CosmicGroinPull]

I'm kidding, calm... I've come to accept that the PS3 is more powerful although I have to admit it sounds weird (I'm just basing this on this technical talk here... still think all the SONY stuff was CG so I'm not basing it on that).

Hah! You're not fooling me....I see what you did there....Xbox360 is more powerful...

 

[jimbo]

"And I'm also rather perplexed by the way that a >100 GFlop gap in CPU performance can be rationalized into anything other than a significant performance gap."

Ok I'm not a tech-wiz but this is what I see. As far as raw horsepower, the PS3 is capable of twice the calculations the Xbox can do. However a large portion of that comes from the CPU, and if we are to believe what a lot of people are saying that the GPU will bottleneck the PS3's CPU, much the same way the PS2 was, then a lot of that CPU power won't translate into that much more power for the PS3. So IN aWORKING system, all together, does it still equal in twice as much power? I don't know. Like I said I'm not a tech guy, but I'm sure those guys can answer that question. It depends on which one is more efficient. The general sensus is that the next ATI card will be better than the next Nvidia card, so the 360 might have the better GPU of the two. This remains to be seen. Even if it does...the difference here will be really small.

What does this mean? More geometry, more characters for PS3..."but pretty-ness" will be pretty much equal.

Overall the PS3 has the edge, with it being 1.5-2 times as powerfull as the Xbox. This results in an equal to smaller difference than the Xbox and PS2.

There will be games built from the ground up on PS3 not possible on the Xbox without downgrading. But everything else will be pretty much equal.

Someone correct me if I said something wrong.

 

[Endymion]

Load times will be influenced by the data transfer rate on the optical drives. As far as I can tell the BRD spec is 54.0Mbps for 1x, and the PS3 will have a 6x drive according to sony. Xbox 360 will have a 12x dual layer dvd drive. So the comparison is as follows:


PS3's 6x BRD-ROM: 324Mbps
X360's 12x DVD-ROM: 133Mbps

Yes. Xbox360 has the advantage of the built-in hard drive, though, which I think will turn the load time 'contest' in Xbox360 favour. Still, PS3 has the direct access advantage.

 

[Diablos]

All I can assume at this point is that they both basically utilize 512MB of extremely fast memory, but the way it's used is completely different.

On PS3 it's split in half; XBox is unified. Results at the end of making a game will probably be similar, but how the games are actually made would have to be completely different.

What sucks, though, is that one probably is somewhat more powerful than the other, but because the specs are similar in some ways, it'll take a while to see who really has the power (I'm guessing the second gen of games).

 

[Lazy8s]

Endymion:

they are both state of the art technology

Neither seems suited to the focus on image quality that'll provide the most return for graphics next. If PS3 is to stick to its claim of HDR and 128-bit precision out to the framebuffer, resources for AA will be very low. X360 only provides 2xAA as standard. These levels of performance aren't even up to mobile chips which can get 4xAA at no practical penalty.

Both the X360 and the PS3 process scaling of the scene size for manageability and evaluation of it for visible surface determination too near to application level to really be effective.

 

[Dr_Cogent]

Don't even think about comparing X360's ALUs directly to PS3's pipelines

Seriously, it's just not comparable like that at all.

As for the GPU, we need more detail. But twice the transistors, a higher clock, and higher claimed performance peaks could possibly be telling us something..

Each will have different strengths and weaknesses, but my money's on PS3's GPU to be more powerful in general given what we currently know. That said..we don't know that much yet. Hopefully we'll get more info during E3.

I asked a simple question. How many pipelines does it have? Sorry, I can compare the two thank you very much.

I asked a technical question, and I want a technical answer.

This isn't some CUT on the PS3. I am not a big PS2 fanboy as obviously noted, but I want to know about this NEW machine. What Sony has put out in the past has nothing to do with what they are releasing soon.

 

[shpankey]

You don't know how the NVdia GPU works, and still make such bold claims as "The GPU is barely more powerful, if at all".

that's not the point. the point is, it's not 2-3 times more powerful than the GPU of the X360.

So you went from putting a question "to all you smart techie people" at the beginning of this thread to challenging one of the smart techie people about their estimations? My, aren't you a quick study

it doesn't take a techie to know that the PS3 won't be twice or thrice as powerful as the Xbox 360. like i said. it doesn't have twice/thrice the ram at twice/thrice the speed. it doesn't have twice/thrice the power of GPU. it doesn't have twice/thrice the bandwidth. even if the CPU can realize twice the power in FPU, that doesn't make the whole system 2-3 times as powerful on a whole. you can't isolate out one thing in the hardware as 2x more power and just extend it to everything else. it doesn't work that way.

none of that takes a genius to figure out.

 

[Fatghost]

I asked a simple question. How many pipelines does it have? Sorry, I can compare the two thank you very much.

I asked a technical question, and I want a technical answer.

This isn't some CUT on the PS3. I am not a big PS2 fanboy as obviously noted, but I want to know about this NEW machine. What Sony has put out in the past has nothing to do with what they are releasing soon.

I don't think the number of pipelines has been released yet

 

[Tekky]

Looking at things from a high level, both X360 & PS3's CPU/GPUs are about on-par with each other. The machines have the same total amount of RAM, and similar output capabilities. The only significant difference is that the PS3 features Bluray.

You guys can argue about meaningless details all you want. The fact is that the games from each system will look similar to each other. Any cross-platform games will look EXACTLY the same. Cross-platform developers will utilize the lowest-common denominator among the two platforms, which is still pretty freaking impressive.

The only reason to buy one vs. the other will be:

-games unique to a given platform (exclusives).
-services such as Xbox Live or Playstation online.
-Bluray movies.

But please continue to have fun with all the fanboyish talk, if it encourages you to learn something about computer architecture. Learning is good, mm'kay?

 

[Pochacco]

Looking at things from a high level, both X360 & PS3's CPU/GPUs are about on-par with each other. The machines have the same total amount of RAM, and similar output capabilities. The only significant difference is that the PS3 features Bluray.

You guys can argue about meaningless details all you want. The fact is that the games from each system will look similar to each other. Any cross-platform games will look EXACTLY the same. Cross-platform developers will utilize the lowest-common denominator among the two platforms, which is still pretty freaking impressive.

The only reason to buy one vs. the other will be:

-games unique to a given platform (exclusives).
-services such as Xbox Live or Playstation online.
-Bluray movies.

But please continue to have fun with all the fanboyish talk, if it encourages you to learn something about computer architecture. Learning is good, mm'kay?

Talking out of your ass is just as bad as talking like a fanboy. mm'kay?

The fact is NOBODY KNOWS how the 2 consoles compare. Nevermind the fact that we haven't seen enough/any realtime footage, but both consoles (especially PS3) are using some pretty new technologies.

You guys, talking like you know what you're talking about, look silly doing it.

Appologies to the handful of people here that actually do have a clue of what they're talking about...

 

[Gek54]

it doesn't take a techie to know that the PS3 won't be twice or thrice as powerful as the Xbox 360. like i said. it doesn't have twice/thrice the ram at twice/thrice the speed. it doesn't have twice/thrice the power of GPU. it doesn't have twice/thrice the bandwidth. even if the CPU can realize twice the power in FPU, that doesn't make the whole system 2-3 times as powerful on a whole. you can't isolate out one thing in the hardware as 2x more power and just extend it to everything else. it doesn't work that way.

none of that takes a genius to figure out.

:lol did you learn that while getting your EE degree from OU????? :lol :lol

 

[shpankey]

light the candle Gek... keep hope alive. :lol

 

[Drozmight]

This thing must be $500.

 

[Gek54]

light the candle Gek... keep hope alive. :lol

Alright, this candle is for you.

 

[shpankey]

 

[Tekky]

Talking out of your ass is just as bad as talking like a fanboy. mm'kay?

The fact is NOBODY KNOWS how the 2 consoles compare. Nevermind the fact that we haven't seen enough/any realtime footage, but both consoles (especially PS3) are using some pretty new technologies.

You guys, talking like you know what you're talking about, look silly doing it.

Appologies to the handful of people here that actually do have a clue of what they're talking about...

It's okay. I have a smart ass.

Really, though, how good a game looks or plays this next gen will be totally dependent upon the amount of work a developer puts into it, and NOT on how many pipelines or functional units some processor has. For all practical purposes, the hardware is not the limit anymore.

At least, it's going to take a while for the development tools to catch up with the hardware such that development time is no longer the biggest bottleneck on game development.

 

[sonycowboy]

Uhm... no it isn't. It's people like you that spread this complete farce.

The only thing 2x as powerfull (in some regards) is the CPU. The whole system isn't. The GPU is barely more powerful, if at all. There's not twice as much RAM at twice the speed. There's not twice the bandwidth on everything. There's not twice the resolution.

Just stop already.

And you're just as bad. At this point, we just don't know.

 

[Pochacco]

It's okay. I have a smart ass.

Really, though, how good a game looks or plays this next gen will be totally dependent upon the amount of work a developer puts into it, and NOT on how many pipelines or functional units some processor has. For all practical purposes, the hardware is not the limit anymore.

At least, it's going to take a while for the development tools to catch up with the hardware such that development time is no longer the biggest bottleneck on game development.

Very true
But it really is more fun to argue over 'potential' power

 

[Pimpwerx]

Having more raw power means nothing overall, but from what I gather, the PS3 has a slight to significant power gap in certain areas.

CPU - clearly Cell is better. It's like EE to the Celery in the Xbox, but now instead of a few GFLOPs difference, it's 100GFLOPS. What devs use that for is any guess, but *gasp* it could well be graphics.

GPU - Not much known here, but we know RSX has roughly twice the tranny bugdet and 10% more clock. Unless it's a step back, it should write more pixels to the screen per clock, at least twice (16-24). That's a lot of fillrate. But the XGPU has a great thing going with the 4xMSAA. But if the RSX is outputting 1080p natively (Deano suggests this is already doable for the indoor stages of his game Heavenly Sword), then that's gonna translate into some free supersampling when downscaled to 720p. Besides which, I don't think there's a need for AA at 1080p. Not many tvs will support it, and if you have problem with jaggies at that godly resolution, then you should just kill yourself anyway. :lol It's really hard to say on the GPU front, but at the very least, I think the RSX will have a small advantage. But I think there's also a chance for it to have a big advantage depending on how effectively they can implement HDR support.

NVidia made a big deal of it in their presentation, and Epic also made special note of it for their UE3 demo. So you're talking about more advanced shader effects there. That combined with increased fillrate could be something else. But now I'm stepping into uncharted territory. I'm not as well versed on the software side, and that really does help a lot in understanding how the shaders work, as well as what some of the numbers mean. So I prefer to leave this to the experts on B3D. More than enough devs there to help clear this all up in the coming months.

We're not gonna decide this debate for some months, so let's settle in and let it come to us. Much of it has to do with the devs leaking info, or Nvidia/ATI revealing more about their chips. Some interesting stuff could go on with the eDRAM for the 360, especially if that 256GB/s isn't just "effective" bandwidth as someone mentioned earlier today. We'll see. PEACE.

EDIT: Speak of the devil, that crude block diagram from the presentation was capped:

Being discussed at B3D: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22991&sid=29d91e91090cd4e591f8d3635631fd43

Looks like 16 pipes from that diagram too. :?

 

[NohWun]

Looks like 16 pipes from that diagram too. :?

Nope, I see 8 vector ALUs and 8 scalar functional units.
Or to be more precise, I see 4 of each that are pipelined into 4 more of each.
That would indicate a width of 4, but with 2 steps per pipe getting done each cycle.
Of course, the diagram could be a meaningless marketroid diagram as well.

But like I said, makes little difference to you or me.

 

[kaching]

Ok I'm not a tech-wiz but this is what I see. As far as raw horsepower, the PS3 is capable of twice the calculations the Xbox can do. However a large portion of that comes from the CPU, and if we are to believe what a lot of people are saying that the GPU will bottleneck the PS3's CPU, much the same way the PS2 was, then a lot of that CPU power won't translate into that much more power for the PS3. ...<snip>

What does this mean? More geometry, more characters for PS3..."but pretty-ness" will be pretty much equal.

Overall the PS3 has the edge, with it being 1.5-2 times as powerfull as the Xbox. This results in an equal to smaller difference than the Xbox and PS2.

It's more than a little disingenuous to liken the potential gap to nothing more than the difference between the PS2 and Xbox, where the size of the gap was measured in a few gigaflops, rather than tens of gigaflops like seems to be the case between X360 and PS3. The implication that you seem to be trying to make here is that you can't do much of significance with tens of gigaflops of spare processing power. Even if it can't be applied directly to the "pretty-ness" of the game, there shouldn't be any loss for ways to apply that spare power to help expand the game experience. This is a topic about general system performance, not just visual performance.

it doesn't take a techie to know that the PS3 won't be twice or thrice as powerful as the Xbox 360. like i said. it doesn't have twice/thrice the ram at twice/thrice the speed. it doesn't have twice/thrice the power of GPU. it doesn't have twice/thrice the bandwidth. even if the CPU can realize twice the power in FPU, that doesn't make the whole system 2-3 times as powerful on a whole. you can't isolate out one thing in the hardware as 2x more power and just extend it to everything else. it doesn't work that way.

By the same token, you can't simply say everything has to be 2x more powerful for the system overall to be twice as powerful as its competitor. If you double the power of the CPU, double the power of the GPU, put in twice as much memory and make it twice as fast, wouldn't there be a cumulative effect here that would push the overall modifier well above 2x ? Is it really a direct correlation like this? Can you really say that 2x memory bandwidth would exactly match the needs of a fully utilized 2x CPU or GPU, for example?

I dunno, your logic seems flawed in the same fashion that sometimes gets people thinking that if a cake takes 1 hour to bake to perfection at 350 degrees, it can be done in half that time if you jack the temperature to 700 degrees...