Xbox 360 Specs updated at IGN, Faster Than PS3

[sim1]

I just have a question, why would Sony put out an inferior system 6months plus or minus after the Xbox is out?  They wouldn't.  They can always change something after the XBox comes out, so no one can make any assumptions.

Who says the PS3 is going to cost alot more than the XBox?  They both have the same amount of extras except PS3 has Blu ray and 3 more ports, and the XBox has  a Windows Media Center 2005 extension in it.  I can see a few dollars more, but I think Sony would keep the price the same as the XBox for marketing purposes.  However Microsoft might lower the price when PS3 comes out.  I can see it now "mommy mommy I wanna PS3"  "How much is it?" "$blah" "How much is that system" "$blah" "Honey your getting an Xbox"

585954248[/snapback]

LoL and I heard that MS will also release Halo 3 on the release day of PS3 :whistle:

[mufdvr3669]

I'm gonna buy both consoles and enjoy them both. I thought consoles were about the games and not which ones are more powerful thus making your e-penis's bigger.

[Tech Star]

.... I don't care go PS3!!!! But nice find though this will shack things up!

[Rahul]

i have been a sony fanboy for long , but now i feel apart from the gfx what is more attractive in a console right now is the availbility of good titles plus that media center functionality . ...........so here im making a switch over to 360 , glad its more powerful & hopefully more cheaper

[megamanXplosion]

Rahul, it's not more powerful. Read my [extremely long] post on the last page, it totally exposes all of the lies and misrepresentation of the facts. The PS3 will be more powerful.

[Tech Star]

Rahul, it's not more powerful. Read my [extremely long] post on the last page, it totally exposes all of the lies and misrepresentation of the facts. The PS3 will be more powerful.

585954419[/snapback]

Yes it is. Microsoft is all about lies and scams and money. Like the phone tech support you get charged per min. of talking to them!!! All they want is money!!! I don't hate Microsot I just hate the Xbox!!!

[Dark_INk]

Rahul, it's not more powerful. Read my [extremely long] post on the last page, it totally exposes all of the lies and misrepresentation of the facts. The PS3 will be more powerful.

585954419[/snapback]

at least orange sources his info.

(utilization issues? your gpu review's loaded bs.)

the xbx, as of now, is a better performing machine (not the most 'powerful' in all aspects)- the ps3 will only become 'king' if sony choses to implement changes. (which is likely.)

[Dark_INk]

Yes it is. Microsoft is all about lies and scams and money. Like the phone tech support you get charged per min. of talking to them!!! All they want is money!!! I don't hate Microsot I just hate the Xbox!!!

585954428[/snapback]

!!! !!! :ninja: !!! :ninja: !!!

( ;) )

[Express]

I am totally convinced that Xbox is the better system. Sony is just creating hype like they did for the PS2 launch. I will not be surprized that if the final specs will turn out to less than what they are claiming now -- they have a history of doing just that.

As far as BD-ROM is concerned its just that Read Only Memory -- Not write

The afforable consumer models next year or the year after will be just readers, the writable drives and disc will be too expensive for consumers atleast for the next two or three years. This happened it DVDs too. Blue ray is not an advantage.

[rishid]

I think one thing the Xbox has going for it, is Xbox Live. And that will be a huge factor.

But then again Sony hasn't released any information about their online service at all, so that is just another PR waiting to happen.

One nifty thing about the PS3 though is 7 wireless controllers + 1 wired and dual output.

Pretty sick, to be able to play 8 player games on 1 PS3.

[Dark_INk]

I think one thing the Xbox has going for it, is Xbox Live.  And that will be a huge factor.

But then again Sony hasn't released any information about their online service at all, so that is just another PR waiting to happen.

One nifty thing about the PS3 though is 7 wireless controllers + 1 wired and dual output.

Pretty sick, to be able to play 8 player games on 1 PS3.

585954514[/snapback]

yeah, eight players on one system is a pretty cool feature :)

[megamanXplosion]

at least orange sources his info.

Yes and even his sources say that it's a bunch of nonsense. The specs I pulled from several sites to check for their accuracy, and the implementation stuff was my general impression of how everything will work together.

not utilized all the time? your gpu review's loaded bs.

If you're going to say that my opinion is "loaded bs", I would expect that you have the courtesy to back up that assertion.

[eminem213486]

who needs 7 controllers when we call all be at our own house on LIVE. 7 controllers is just a havoc. imagine the split screen, lets get our 2 HDTvs togeher and hook em up. i like how sony imagines the world as everyone has money so spare.

and i thought 4 players at once was too much.. also bluetooth is not reliable, i can see you guys whining about the lags after the system comes out until sony tweaks with it. i also sense 360s controllers will have some sort of conflict with other 2.4ghz devices, even though its manufactured to detect an change channels it probably wont be perfect until testsed in all homes.

seriously everyone should just stop bitching, we will trully have to wait till both consoles are out to compare. of course well all get the 360 itll be out first. then we get tired of it and go to ps3. and or play both.

[theantidote]

No this is what Sony did earlier. They combined the specs of the logic and GPU while Microsoft showed them seperately. This is just to make it sound better, same reason they chose the name 360 over Xbox 2 because stupid consumers will think the Xbox 2 is inferior to the PS3 because 2>3.

[jerry]

Yes and even his sources say that it's a bunch of nonsense. The specs I pulled from several sites to check for their accuracy, and the implementation stuff was my general impression of how everything will work together.

585954542[/snapback]

So thats a pretty big IMHO there. :whistle:

[casao]

Can we please pause this arguement? You're not gonna change each other's minds, and the fanboys will remain standboys. If you truly believe you're right, let them say what they want, you'll know.

And then in a year or so, when the consoles are actually out, you can argue till your face turns blue, when it's something more than the word of Microsoft vs the word of Sony, neither of which being particularly trust-worthy companies in my opinion.

[Trav3133]

uhh oo, someones been caught with their pants down.

[deiong15]

hmm ok xbox 360 is built with ibm's powerpc. and the cell is built by sony, ibm and tashiba and all three are on record claiming that the cell is 3 times faster then any cpu in exsistance taht includes teh powerpc processor which xbox 360 next is using. so then teh fan boys say well its gpu ati has a gpu so fast its and ive heard this lol 20 years ahead of its time lol. well granted teh gpu does help games a whole crap load but take a 250 mhz pc with teh best ati card and see hwo fast that pos playes the new high end games. then take a top notch 64 bit machien adn throw in hell ill make it easy a geforce 3 mx card and itll still sail faster then that old and moldey pos 250 mhz pc. and nvidia's gpu for ps3 is not a old pos . well in teh end well fidn out this next spring. i knwo ill be buyign both systems . but any educated person will know that the ps3 will be faster then xbox. even if its a little it still will be faster. though i doubt its by a little ;)

[fuBar.]

hmm ok xbox 360 is built with ibm's powerpc. and the cell is built by sony, ibm and tashiba and all three are on record claiming that the cell is 3 times faster then any cpu in exsistance taht includes teh powerpc processor which xbox 360 next is using. so then teh fan boys say well its gpu ati has a gpu so fast its and ive heard this lol 20 years ahead of its time lol. well granted teh gpu does help games a whole crap load but take a 250 mhz pc with teh best ati card and see hwo fast that pos playes the new high end games. then take a top notch 64 bit machien adn throw in hell ill make it easy a geforce 3 mx card and itll still sail faster then that old and moldey pos 250 mhz pc. and nvidia's gpu for ps3 is not a old pos . well in teh end well fidn out this next spring. i knwo ill be buyign both systems . but any educated person will know that the ps3 will be faster then xbox. even if its a little it still will be faster. though i doubt its by a little ;)

585954632[/snapback]

Go back to ESL.

[theantidote]

[lotus22]

but any educated person will know that the ps3 will be faster then xbox.

Not from what I just read.

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p3.html

Edited May 22, 2005 by lotus22

[Tomi]

A lot of that comparison is just marketing fluff (you don't honestly believe that the Microsoft employee posted that without having it go through their PR department, do you?). A lot of the information is misrepresented, and some of it is completely hidden just to make themselves look better.

The first bit of mental manipulation is the main system bandwidth figures. The very impressive speed of the memory that the Microsoft employee spouted IS true; however, that memory is only used for anti-aliasing (which is why there's only 10mb of it), IS not the main system bandwidth, and it means practically nothing in terms of overall performance. The memory which is actually used to power the games is 512mb of GDDR3 @ 700mhz which is shared between the processors and the GPU. The playstation 3, on the other hand, has 256mb of XDR @ 2.6ghz dedicated to processing and 256mb of GDDR3 @ 700mhz for the GPU. This means that the PS3 has MORE system bandwidth than the xbox 360, AND it doesn't bog down the GPU by constantly requesting information. While the article may say "The memory system bandwidth in Xbox 360 exceeds the PS3's by five times", that is complete and utter hogwash. The PS3's memory system bandwidth actually exceeds the Xbox 360's by 1.5x, if not 2x.

The next bit of manipulation is about the floating point units. I'm sorry but 10%-15% is waaaay too low to actually be accurate. If they're talking about first-person shooters where the screen consists of a tiny room then perhaps 10%-15% would be accurate, but throw a concept like Black & White 2 (whole island, thousands of villagers, hundreds of buildings, thousands of trees, thousands of grass models across the whole island, etc.) out and the figure will be a LOT higher. As the Microsoft employee himself stated, this is where PS3's main advantage is (3x more floating point operations), and coupling this fact with the BD-ROM drives that can hold 50+ gigabytes of data, we're talking MASSIVE landscapes and the percentage the Microsoft employee spouted is no longer true. The 7 SPDs will make a big difference in performance, nowhere near as minor as the article tried to claim. Even though most games will not take advantage of this fact (most will be racing games, football games, etc), I do hope to be playing something more than first-person shooters where I'm always in a small room shooting at things jumping at me.

And while we're still on the subject of floating point operations, streaming calculations DO require fast access to the RAM (these are usually used for artificial intelligence, path finding, etc. which is VERY common, especially in games like B&W2). While DSPs may be ill-suited for this task, you have to remember that they have 256mb of XDR @ 2.6ghz at their disposal while the xbox 360 has ~256mb of GDDR3 @ 700mhz, which means that the general purpose processors, that the xbox 360 has, will eat their dust. Code branching is another important factor in path finding algorithms and such, and the Xbox appears to have the advantage here but you have to remember that heavy usage of path finding algorithms usually means that there's a large amount of objects using those paths and moving down them, which is where the streaming floating point operations kick in. Once again, the Xbox 360 bites the dust.

Another misrepresentation of the facts is about the GPU. The Xbox 360 GPU is impressive all by itself. Just thinking 500mhz operation, 512mb of GDDR3 @ 700mhz, 10mb of EDRAM (frequency? I don't know), the unified 48-shader architecture, etc. It's a monster of a card all by itself. However, there are many drawbacks to it's implementation in the Xbox 360. First and foremost, about half of the memory will not be utilized by the GPU but rather the processors. Because the amount of memory at it's disposal is only ~256mb, the unified 48 shaders will be doing absolutely nothing most of the time (which is probably the main reason why they unified the vertex and pixel shaders, to try to increase the utilization of the pipelines). The EDRAM will make a very positive, and very noticable, difference because it will allow 4x anti-aliasing at High-definition resolutions with no performance penalty. There is another important detail to mention, the 1080i rendering technique, but more on that later.

Now, to put the GPU comparison into perspective. The PS3 GPU will have 256mb of GDDR3 @ 700mhz, about the same as the xbox 360 GPU (but remember, the PS3 GPU doesn't share it's bandwidth with the processors!), but will be better utilized by the graphics card. The PS3 GPU doesn't have as many rendering pipelines as the xbox 360 GPU, but that's okay because they will be fully utilized whereas the xbox 360 GPU's won't be. The PS3 GPU also runs at a clock speed of 550mhz, which is 50mhz more which means that it will be communicating with the memory and doing calculations at a faster rate. I'd say that the 50mhz more will be used for anti-aliasing purposes, considering that the PS3 doesn't have the 10mb of EDRAM that the xbox 360 has. Remember how I said the xbox 360 uses the 1080i rendering technique? The PS3 uses the 1080p rendering technique. The difference is that the xbox 360 uses an interlaced rendering method which works similarly to nvidia SLI, at TV resolutions this is entirely unnecessary and requires the GPU to constantly figure out where geometry will be before it can even begin rendering it. Take a look at the benchmarks for SLI setups at 1024x768, no performance gain at all, all this will do is create a bottleneck to the rendering process. The PS3 uses a progressive rendering technique which is more common to single-GPU configurations and will result in better rendering performance which means that more of the GPU clocks will be used for anti-aliasing and such. Altogether, when put into perspective, the xbox 360 GPU and the PS3 GPU are practically equal in real-life performance.

Now backing away from the GPU-specifics, I think it's important to further examine how the CPU(s) and GPU will work together. Because the PS3 appears to be significantly faster at calculations, it is only logical to assume that the GPU will get usable data faster than the xbox 360's GPU. This should result in even more clock cycles being used to render a scene than that of the xbox 360, which should result in much better looking graphics.

And like the article said, hardware performance itself is only a fraction of what makes a great gaming console. That is absolutely true, and since he brought that up I feel it's only natural that I talk about it. The Xbox 360 has a 12x dual-layer DVD-ROM drive while the PS3 has a dual-layer BD-ROM drive (I can't find any information about the speed of it). This is an important factor to consider because the BD-ROM drive can hold 50+ gigabytes of data, that's more than 5x the capacity of the disks that are used by the xbox 360. This should result in games not being cut short because of capacity limitations (or forcing the user to constantly switch disks.) This means that you can expect PS3 games to be more vocal in their story-lines, more videos to finish off action sequences, etc. I've always been a fan of RPGs and the fact that the PS3 will allow me to hear the story, instead of reading it, makes me a very happy camper. I remember when I first played Final Fantasy X on the PS2, that was an excellent game as far as the implementation of the story goes because I got to actual see and hear the story and not just read about it. I'm sorry but I don't want to read the story, I want to engage myself in the story, and the PS3 will bring me leaps and bounds closer to being fully immersed in the role-playing experience. The BD-ROM drive is also impressive in another way, there will be less loading time. Even if the drive is at 4x reading speed, it will still pull data quicker than the Xbox 360 which means I'll spend less time waiting and more time playing.

Anyways, I'm done talking about this. I'll just put my conclusion in plain English/ The Microsoft employee is a liar, the Microsoft PR department are liars, and the PS3 will totally destroy the xbox 360 in real-world performance comparisons and possibly in real games as well. And to finish this post up, "the proof is in the pudding".

[Edit]

Wow this is a long post! Sorry for punishing everyone with it, but I just get tired of hearing marketing b.s. :whistle:

585954017[/snapback]

Excellent post, megaman. :) I'm glad someone's finally seen past the bs. :)

[spenser.d]

A lot of that comparison is just marketing fluff (you don't honestly believe that the Microsoft employee posted that without having it go through their PR department, do you?). A lot of the information is misrepresented, and some of it is completely hidden just to make themselves look better.

...not quoting all that...

Anyways, I'm done talking about this. I'll just put my conclusion in plain English/ The Microsoft employee is a liar, the Microsoft PR department are liars, and the PS3 will totally destroy the xbox 360 in real-world performance comparisons and possibly in real games as well. And to finish this post up, "the proof is in the pudding".

585954017[/snapback]

How in the hell can you even say all that crap. How do you know any of it not having a hands on with either console. The only people we really have a right ot believe about any of the specs are MS, Sony, and Nintendo, because they are the one's who created the consoles, and this is what they do. Microsoft is a leading computer giant. They know wtf they are talking about, and they built their console, so i plan to believe what they say about it. When Sony puts out something like this, then you'll be able to compare.

I think all 3 consoles will be really good. Personally I'm getting the X360 because i think MS is doing the right thing with creativity and the online community. Plus the games kick ass, and we probably will get a Halo 3. Playstation isnt a bad console, but i dont like Sony as a company, and i'm going to be starting college so i really wont have the money for it. Plus i dont think i like as many games in the PS library. I think Revolution actually has a thing going for it in being able to download their entire back catalogue of games. But i probably wont be getting Revo because I got GC and it has a few good games, but not enough...it disappointed me.

-Spenser

[Tomi]

How in the hell can you even say all that crap.  How do you know any of it not having a hands on with either console.  The only people we really have a right ot believe about any of the specs are MS, Sony, and Nintendo, because they are the one's who created the consoles, and this is what they do.  Microsoft is a leading computer giant.  They know wtf they are talking about, and they built their console, so i plan to believe what they say about it.  When Sony puts out something like this, then you'll be able to compare.

585954697[/snapback]

He's referenced a multiple sources for information like he said in one of his replies. He know's what he's talking about obviously, but I'll let him speak for himself. ;)

[Andrew Lyle Global Moderator]

i am NOT being a microsoft fanboy.. but according to these charts xbox 360 wins in 7/9 comparison charts... to see more, please click here. i just wanted to show a few examples.. of total pwnage over PS3.