XB 360 vs PS3 ...but long term.

Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2005 11:41 am

Another typical argument, but currently Xbox is out ontop & the PS2 in my book has been left for dust.

How does everyone see it panning out in 2-3 yrs down the line when it comes to the two new consoles longetivity? ....fight to the end, or will one leave the other for dust?

Likely the 360 will be easier to mod? ..will Blu-Ray on PS3 steal the show later on with bigger, more vast epic titles? ....next gen games for PC making appearances on the 360....etc

Sorry if it's a boring argument / question , but how do you see this panning out a couple of years down the line?

Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2005 3:43 pm

I think 360 is going to blow PS3 out of the water. The thing about MS is that they know how to market, even if Xbox 360 were crap (And it's not) MS could market that thing so that even people who know better would still buy it. Sony, on the other hand, isn't that great at markeing (At least in America) so the places with the most spare cash will likely buy the 360.

Kai Admirer Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 324

markesting is what killed the dreamcast.... when that came out, who knew the graphics were so damn good?

I didn't, not untill i got one from my cuzin for x-mas... i was amazed.

Team XLink Moderator Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 1536

there are few other threads about the difference between console etc..

but IMO (In My Opinion) the difference (or advantage) about them are

Xbox 360 = Software Dev kit, LIVE and the modding community (not piracy Evil or Very Mad

) (approx life till 2007 - 2008)

PS3 = Hardware Power, Popularity with the PlayStation/Sony "brand" serious. Blu-ray. wider/more 3rd party Development companies. (approx life till 2009 - 2011)

Revolution= Nintendo Fans, Shigeru Miyamoto, The tread mark games. No-one this time will copy their controller Razz

(approx life till 2008 - 2010)

Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2005 9:39 pm

redwolf @ Sat Jun 04, 2005 8:54 pm wrote:

there are few other threads about the difference between console etc..

but IMO (In My Opinion) the difference (or advantage) about them are

Xbox 360 = Software Dev kit, LIVE and the modding community (not piracy Evil or Very Mad

) (approx life till 2007 - 2008)

PS3 = Hardware Power, Popularity with the PlayStation/Sony "brand" serious. Blu-ray. wider/more 3rd party Development companies. (approx life till 2009 - 2011)

Revolution= Nintendo Fans, Shigeru Miyamoto, The tread mark games. No-one this time will copy their controller Razz

(approx life till 2008 - 2010)

the thing that i hate about PS2 is ALL of there games are third party. whcih can be good but 80% of PS2 games are made by EA but EA make utter shite games that are just a cash in for EA and PS2. However microsoft AND nintendo spend time making there games and they are usually pretty good.

Also i dont think blue ray are going to make games bigger becuase games will take longer to make if they were huge or bigger than XBOX 360 but seeing as EA (and other 3rd party developers) make games for all consoles they wont bother to extend the games.

For example look at the NFS games today and BURNOUT games that are out on all consoles there is NO difference whatsoever in gameplay and most of the time graphics. (apart from the graphics look shinier on xbox-this is hardly gonna make people think OH WOW LETS GET A PS3 RATHER THAN AN XBOX 360 BECAUSE THE GRAPHICS LOOK 1% BETTER)

Kai Enthusiast Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 200

well when all comes down to it graphics do not make the game fun

gameplay does so whatever console as the gameplay I am their

but as I been saying for awhile I would take the US console over a japanese console ne day...

cause if you think about how much wear and tear the PS2 can go thought

it just comes down to what console will have a good life span

yes the xbox when it was launched had a crappy dvd-drive in it but did they fix this yes they did...

not to sure if they did with the PS2 but I have heard alot of storys of them messing up alot plus their no dvd player that just messes it up even more

Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2005 5:17 pm

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.

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.

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.

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 360 GPU should also contribute to overall rendering performance.

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.

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.

Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2005 9:49 pm

Awesome break down that Bullseye, thanks for your help ...that's the kind of thing I was thinking about, proof is in the pudding it seems.

Thx man

- D -

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 8:35 am

Nice! But you put the conclusion in twice Wink

.

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 10:09 am

yeah xbox is better for hardcore first person shooters, not an offence to ps2ers ps2 is better for like rpgs and stuff they both have thier weaknesses

Kai Beginner Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 1 Location: Mexico

jesus christ! thanks a lot for that post.. im amazed!

so, of course, xbox is a lot better than ps3... i just knew it.

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 11:16 am

hmm nice to see that he just posted a comparison by a microsoft representative. I hope you heard that. ITS JUST MS PR!

Honestly alot of the comparisons in that are crap. i do believe that the xbox360 will be at least on par with the ps3 as i feel there is a reason aprt from the final hardware specs not being finalised yet that they havent released anything substantial.
They seem to talk alot about PS3 being next gen while the xbox is evolutionary. bullshit id like to see what they are doing that is so different. if they have great ideas why dont they just tell us. fuck their bloody marketing.

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 6:15 pm

redwolf @ Sat Jun 04, 2005 8:54 pm wrote:

Xbox 360 = Software Dev kit, LIVE and the modding community (not piracy Evil or Very Mad

) (approx life till 2007 - 2008)

PS3 = Hardware Power, Popularity with the PlayStation/Sony "brand" serious. Blu-ray. wider/more 3rd party Development companies. (approx life till 2009 - 2011)

Revolution= Nintendo Fans, Shigeru Miyamoto, The tread mark games. No-one this time will copy their controller Razz

(approx life till 2008 - 2010)

how in the world do you come up with numbers like that? do you have some inside scoop you're not sharing or something? o_0

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 6:39 pm

I think the xbox 360 will win this generation, if not then Nintendo should come out on top as Sony may be falling into the trap of becoming complacent.Sure the Blu ray drive will be HD DVD enabled as well and offer the possibilty of playing blu ray and hd movies as well as their games but their online service will be woefully under equiped by the looks of things and Nintendo and Microsoft seem to be pouring alot of effort and resources into this area, this after sales support and energy should ensure customers will be constantly surprised and excited by the 360 whereas the ps3 could really become stale very quickly and rely on big releases constantly, this does not sell hardware constantly and I feel MS will be able to sell the console very consistently by adding new levels and additions to your current collection on a regular basis as happpens with MMorpg's.

I also think the power of the 360 will be used more and more and it will really start to show it's power under the hood as developers get to grips with the final dev kits which should be arriving with the very,very soon, I mean the stuff we are seeing at the moment was produced on G5's and using one processor and not even having the final graphics GPU hardware, can you imagine what they can do with the final box???The mind truly boggles and Microsoft will be so far ahead of PS3 in software developemnt terms by the launch of the ps3 that it will be comparable to the gap between the xbox and the ps2, Sony will be the one's playing catch up this time and this is not an enviable position as many devs will simply choose the hardware which is installed in millions of homes already and this is not comparable to the dreamcast situation as Microsoft is coming off the back of an incredibly successful peice of hardware in the West and we all know how the Japanese love new and powerful stuff.Maybe they will fail to make any impact in Japan, but I can see them being installed in many million of homes in the US and europe before the PS3 launches and this could be the most imprtant part of this bloody battle to come, their hardware is also more attractive to developers too as it contains hardware which is familiar, the cell is an entirely new prospect.

I'm probably ranting by now, but I really do feel Microsoft has the upper hand here and Sony seems to be ill prepared this time, both online and hardware wise.

Team XLink Moderator Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 1536

lldatzll @ Thu Jun 09, 2005 6:15 pm wrote:

how in the world do you come up with numbers like that? do you have some inside scoop you're not sharing or something? o_0

haha

na it's just bit of guess work. been playing games and buying consoles for long a$$ time. So from experience and with bit of guess work from the consoles popularity & hardware power, they are just my predictions. They are more or less same every generation. And this gen X360, PS3 or Revolution has nothing that impressive that haven't done before.

just saw this in x-s

Quote:

In a new interview with Japanese news site Impress PC Watch, Ken Kutaragi took once again a swipe at the Xbox 360 by saying that Microsoft is going after the PS2 with the Xbox 360.

"This time, Microsoft has stated clearly it is going after the PlayStation. However, they are not going after the PlayStation 3, but the PlayStation 2. Because they looked at 2, the Xbox 360 became what it is." said Kutaragi.
"The PS1 was misunderstood in the same way," said the father of the PlayStation. "Even after we said that the PS1 was able to perform 3D calculations while the 3D0 could not, people still insisted both [consoles] had CD-ROM drives and 3D graphics."

had to laugh at that. "Microsoft is going after the PS2 with the Xbox 360" wtf?!?!? Sony won 3rd generation in a row already.. Surprised

i really hope that was just marketing strategy from Ken. Razz

Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 5:58 am

Quote:

"Even after we said that the PS1 was able to perform 3D calculations while the 3D0 could not, people still insisted both [consoles] had CD-ROM drives and 3D graphics."

I think the 3D0 COULD do 3D graphics, even though the hardware wasn't built to do 3D maths.

That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. It's like this: The PSP can do 3D maths while the GBA can't. But people insist that there exists a 3D graphics engine for the GBA. But we all know that the videos and screenshots and code and technical data can't be true, because the GBA doesn't natively support 3D mathematics.

Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2005 2:48 am

Kutaragi san is definetly starting to grasp at straws with this one, and trying to hype the PS3 in the same way he hyped the ps2 against the dreamcast by trying to say that the xbox 360 is vastly inferior to the ps3, in the same way he mocked the dreamcast in the lead up to the ps2 launch, we all know how that turned out and we should all be careful not to believe the hype again.

Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2005 3:53 am

i just think this is more evidence that sony are worried. i dont think ive heard microsoft put down the ps3 once yet. whereis all sony seem to be able to do is mock the 360 saying its not really next gen.
really......... well if that isnt next gen show us what is and if the ps3 is going to do it.
but yeah i think microsoft are very sure of themselves at the moment. the incredible amount of marketing hype is just showing this. and they really have taken it to the mainstream, many ppl probably havent even heard of ps3 except for the fanboys. note i say fanboys but take it with a grain of salt Wink