What Next Generation Console Wars! which one would you like to have

[harriko 0]

well there are loads of rumours and announcements of the future next generation consoles. which one would you like to get? well to me im not really sure quite yet.. im ashamed about the playstation 3 turn off in the anouncement, the prototype looked like the orginal paystation 2 but given it loads of extra things and a curvey top. well bad bad thing about this idea is that you cant put anything like cd cases on your playstation anymore.. lol they just fall off! hm.. i wonder how they would do when piracy of games starts to shoot up like in the last few years of the playstation 2, playstation one, and especially the xbox. well i think the playstation 3 solved that problem, because of their new inventions of new storage media. i read about the "blue ray" it stores a hell of alot! 54 gigabytes of memory in a single disc! thats five times more than my harddisc memory on my computer. and imagine copying that much onto another cd. A DVD cd is long enough take about a couple of hours!what do you think about the next generation of console WARS!

[Brian1405241474 0]

It's hard to say. I've always been a Nintendo fan, but the GameCube couldn't really compare to the power of the xbox. But this new machine is looking really good and will still play GameCube games as well as the older N64, SNES, and NES games. So I could play Donkey Kong Country! My favorite game of all time.

[Mahanon 0]

Gee I don't really know which one will come out on top again I'm planning on bying a PS3 and a Nintendo Revolution for sure, and did anyone see the new design for the PS3 controller it's like a big silverr boomerang it looks a little difficult to control, why didn't they keep the original design of the controller, oh yeah and has anyone seen the Revolution yet, it's not two gamecubes duck-taped together is it...(just a joke) . And what of the Xbox are they going to be able to increase the owners of Xbox with this new version the 360 maybe if they get more games that have a large following.

[LikMeBalleFM 0]

I`m planning on getting both the PS3 and the Xbox360.

There is simply no other choice then that.

Oh yeah ....hey harriko i don`t think the blue ray

discs will be main format of the games ,I think the PS3

is just Blue ray COMPATIBLE thats all......at least for the moment .

And the blue ray laser was definitely not a "SONY" invention,

I beleive the original idea was from PHILIPS but developed

in co-op with a few other big names.

Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD) is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of leading consumer electronics and PC companies (including Apple, Dell, Hitachi, HP, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK and Thomson).

[foxtrot876 0]

I don't plan to get any the kinda of console I'm looking for is a console that just plays games, I don't need all this new internet crap and web cams and stuff if I wanted that I'd just buy a really nice computer. So I guess so far the nintendo console is looking the best, can't wait to play golden eye again with all my buddy's.

[Adam1405241495 0]

Hi guysMy choice would be PS3. I'm not a fanboy, but i would get it for the games. I love games like final fantasy, and metal gear, and gta. And these have been announced for the console. The graphics are mind blowing. The hardware is quite even this time around, when Xbox came out, it had better graphics hardware, and a HDD, and beat PS2 in graphics and such. But still, they each have their good points. PS3 with the 50+gig Blu rays can hold more, therefore storing large high res textures, and huge game areas will be easy. And the blu ray may only be on a sony console, as the version was part made by sony. Any way, i have to go...

[Tobias 0]

I'm not sure which new generation console I'd rather get. I know that I won't be getting a Nintendo Revolution though. But, both XBOX 360 and PS3 are going to have amazing graphics, huge hard drives, and good companies making them. But I'd have to debate on the games. I like HALO for XBOX, but I also like Grand Theft Auto for PlayStation. It may end up coming down to a money factor for me, if I've got a job and an income, then maybe both would be nice.

[rhodesian.dragon 0]

I will have to say that I will stick with Nintendo only because they have the rights to Zelda games and if Zelda ever goes to another game console I will follow that game to what ever console it goes to but I doubt that Nintendo will ever let Zelda leave....

[Sadas 0]

The best console ever is ...PC Upgrade anytime you want with newest technologies!Of course the most expensive too...

[enve19 0]

I'm really looking forward to the Xbox360 coming out.Ive heard a lot of good things about it, they have taken all the things that hackers found that you can do with the original xbox and incorporated it into the new one.Had heard on a cnn interview that it would allow you to record tv onto it , i cant see that happening with the ps3. Mind you i think the two consoles are going in different directions, ps3 sticiking to pure console gaming whereas the xbox360 going more into a multimedia console

[Zachary Aerogos 0]

Nintendo Revolution and PlayStation 3.Those two are definatly the ones to get.With Nintendo you get all nintendo games EVER made before hand!!!and with PS3 you get a cell processing unit that is way to amazing to pass up. Not to meantion it uses bluetooth so multiple players are up to 7!That is gonna be crazy

[LikMeBalleFM 0]

Has anyone read this yet?

"The Microsoft story!"

Src= "IGN.com"

 

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.

The Xbox 360 CPU architecture has three times the general purpose processing power of the Cell.

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) performance

The Xbox 360 GPU design is more flexible and it has more processing power than the PS3 GPU.

Memory System Bandwidth

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

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. Evenly distributing game code across eight processors is extremely difficult.

 

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. Evenly distributing game code across eight processors is extremely difficult.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

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.

[m3ch4 0]

Has anyone read this yet?

"The Microsoft story!"

Src= "IGN.com"

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

damn...I guess it's the ps3 that's more like a computer when get down to it =/

 

It's funny, sony's been in the video game business for longer then ms by...forever it seems. And yet, it looks like, atleast from this article, that Sony doesn't really know what they're doing and haven't learned anything from their past experiences with console systems. If they're putting together hardware that isn't appropriate for gaming...

 

but of course they may have their own system of programming that they've developed over the years that no one is really aware of.

 

Or they may just be dooping everybody and this isn't their real console.

 

LOL

[LikMeBalleFM 0]

.....but of course they may have their own system of programming that they've developed over the years that no one is really aware of.

 

Or they may just be dooping everybody and this isn't their real console.

 

LOL

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

LOL *sigh* HAHAHAhahaha

 

But about them having developed their own system of programming,

you might be right since the PS3 eventualy will be using the BlueRay Discs

[m3ch4 0]

Has anyone read this yet?

"The Microsoft story!"

Src= "IGN.com"

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

btw, do you have a link to this article? I can't seem to track it down =S