Xbox 360 Specs updated at IGN, Faster Than PS3

[megamanXplosion]

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.

I used the specs that Microsoft and Sony put out. I didn't just make the numbers up, if that's what you're implying.

They know wtf they are talking about, and they built their console, so i plan to believe what they say about it.

They do know what they're doing, I never said they were stupid (if I have to repeat this again I'm going to scream). Sony has been stealing their thunder and they want to get it back long enough for the console to release and sell good. This is what people call "hype". The comparison wasn't really a comparison (the main system bandwidth lie should point that out very quickly), it was just a bunch of hype and manipulation to help them sell their console when it's released.

When Sony puts out something like this, then you'll be able to compare.

I don't need to know what Sony thinks about the situation, they will do the same thing and release a bunch of marketing hype before they release their console and all the PS3 fanboys will do their oooh's and awww's just like the xbox 360 fans here, it's all marketing hype. Only the understanding of the specs and the architecture of each console will reveal the facts.

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.

I think all 3 will be good as well. I don't really know what console I will buy at this point in time, though the Nintendo Revolution and PS3 are fairly high on my list.

From what I heard you will be able to download NES, SNES, and N64 games on the Revolution and it will be backwards compatible with the Gamecube as well. I will be able to have Metroid 1, Metroid 2, Super Metroid, Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2, and Metroid Prime 3 all on the same console! Oh, and don't forget the Megaman series! As an avid Metroid and Megaman series fan, this will definately be a major selling point for me. I never wanted to get rid of my Super Nintendo, the Revolution will finally give me a reason to. Oh, and I agree with you about the Gamecube, I was disappointed with it as well. I would've never bought the gamecube if it weren't for the Metroid games...

The PS3's performance is the most impressive and depending on the range of games when it's released, I might get it. Backwards compatibility on the playstation is also an important feature for me, there's a LOT of PS1 and PS2 games I love. I also like the fact that they include an extra SPE (where floating point calculations occur) for redundancy, it seems like they're combating the undependability that plagued their previous consoles. From what I've seen so far, the PS3 will be one reliable-monster of a console. I've also heard that PS3 might use openGL (I don't think this has been confirmed yet), I've been learning openGL and game programming for a while now and it would be interesting to try and get my own games running on the PS3. That would be the kind of thing to make an indie game developer cry of joy.

The Xbox 360 isn't as impressive performance-wise as the PS3, but it already has a lot of good games going for it. I also like the way they're approaching interoperability with many different devices and can hook up to the PC. Backwards compatibility isn't as important to me as the other consoles because there weren't many games for the original xbox that I truly enjoyed and was xbox-only, though it's still good to have. I think that the XNA development must be easy to use considering how many games are coming out with the launch of the xbox 360 in comparison to the original xbox. Hopefully they will keep up this good pace and provide a much better range of games than their previous console.

As for online play between the consoles, it makes no difference to me. I really don't care for online games. Online capabilities will be nice to have for downloading purposes, but I don't intend on using it for gameplay.

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.

Please read my post a page back. It's only "total pwnage" because the numbers were manipulated.

[Edit]

Could you please put those graph images on their own line? It's stretching the page...

Edited May 22, 2005 by megamanXplosion

[AlphaPrime]

Good posts megamanXplosion. :) I think this sums it up best here:

Factor5 working exclusively with PS3 - Reason? Performance

Companies will always twist facts and manipulate them for their advantage and to make their competitors look worse. Developers are the ones who know which console is faster or is easier to develop for, and it looks as if the PS3 is faster. It doesn't matter to me as I'll be getting both (or all three, once they drop in price).

[1759]

These Xbox360 vs. PS3 threads are as stupid as Mac vs. PC threads (and I find it odd that some people actually defending MS, look at all the marketing crap MS has spewed over the years about Windows). Sony is no better, except they're more hardware-oriented, while MS is software.

What is hard to understand that all these companies will put out press releases that use fuzzy math to try and up the other guy. It's like when HD manufacturers say you're getting a 250 GB drive, until you read the small print.

IMO, all of these systems will have similar specs, the only thing that will matter in the end are the games. Polygon counts, floating point precision, and memory bandwidth don't mean jack if the games suck.

[megamanXplosion]

Glad you enjoyed them Mojo :)

That's a pretty good article you've linked to (even if it you have to go through a myriad of links to actually get to the article, hehe). Factor5 is fairly vendor-neutral, so it's interesting to hear their opinion on the matter.

[ANova]

Well atleast the Xbox fanboys arent resorting to personal attacks.

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Maybe that's because it's primarily the xbox fanboys who start these x360 vs PS3 threads? I mean this is a MS fansite afterall, that is how it started. Is it really beyond you that maybe, just maybe the majority of the users belong to the MS (and subsequently xbox) fanclub?

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.

The sad thing is fanboys will always remain standboys, no matter how much factual evidence you throw in their faces. It's like religion, you can't prove any of it, yet people believe it so much that some are willing to die in order to preserve their beliefs. This is a bit of an extreme obviously but lies on the same premise.

Edited May 23, 2005 by ANova

[Argote]

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:

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Well instead of bringing us marketing BS you brought us Ill-informed fanboy BS

You say the PS3 RAM is running @ 2.6ghz like its 3.5X faster than the GDDR3 @ 700 Mhz the XB360 CPU uses... well first of all it has a narrower bus and then it has higher latencies... so they're comparable.

Also you mention BlueRay will have an effect in games.... It'll be irrelevant for all but movies... even the biggest PC games (games that already use high res textures and high quality audio) fit in a DVD... more space is unnecesary.

Also the thing you said about the pipes doing nothing because of the "limited amount of RAM" is utter BS... shader instrucions are often cycled through the pipeline which wouldn't require constan RAM buffer access... also the "extra 50mhz" would hardly be able to make 4xMSAA unnoticeable.

So next time you give us info about something try to do some research first

[Argote]

I also like the fact that they include an extra SPE (where floating point calculations occur) for redundancy, it seems like they're combating the undependability that plagued their previous consoles. From what I've seen so far, the PS3 will be one reliable-monster of a console.

585954893[/snapback]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA LOL :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :whistle: :whistle: :whistle: the "redundant" core won't be there if another one fails (which would be pretty ****** up just to have one of the processor's units just fail like that), it'll be deactivated permanently... this is done to get better yields at the fabs

The Xbox 360 isn't as impressive performance-wise as the PS3

585954893[/snapback]

You are correct there... it is even more impressive

[megamanXplosion]

You say the PS3 RAM is running @ 2.6ghz like its 3.5X faster than the GDDR3 @ 700 Mhz the XB360 CPU uses... well first of all it has a narrower bus and then it has higher latencies... so they're comparable.

Where are you pulling this 3.5x faster comment? It sounds like you're just making up arguments because I certainly didn't say that. I simply stated the Mhz and didn't imply anything by it.

It appears that my memory failed me slightly when I wrote that post. It actually runs at 3.2ghz (400mhz octal-pumped), I have no idea why I was thinking 2.6ghz, lol. Anyways... when push comes to shove, XDR is the superior memory by a large margin. GPU manufacturers are trying to make deals with Rambus to incorporate XDR into their next generation of GPUs instead of GDDR3 and they're even saying that it will give GDDR4 a run for its money. If you disagree then take your argument up with the GPU manufacturers ;)

Also you mention BlueRay will have an effect in games.... It'll be irrelevant for all but movies... even the biggest PC games (games that already use high res textures and high quality audio) fit in a DVD... more space is unnecesary.

It's not irrelevant. You're comparing current generation PC games to super computers here (the PS3 is actually listed in the top 100 list of super computers, btw) which gives the developers a LOT more leg room. Game models of current PC games will likely only be 1/5 the size of the console counterparts (the Doom3 models are severely smaller than the detailed meshes they used to generate the Normal maps for lighting, trying to work around limitations in processing power and capacity limitations); textures are practically always compressed and that results in a loss of quality. Audio is typically compressed by a large margin too, unless they have a really small soundtrack (which hopefully won't be the case for the next-generation consoles, especially the RPGs that take weeks and weeks to finish.) 50+ gigabytes of storage may be unnecessary, but dual-layer DVDs don't improve the current situation much.

The BD-ROM discs will bring many performance enhancements over dual-layer DVD-ROMs. First and foremost, the data is more compact on the disc so it will require less spinning to read the data. The compactness of the data will result in much better reading performance (less loading time), less heat, and less wear-n-tear. Another performance enhancement would be to move the data to the edge of the disc, the outer edge of the disc can be read faster than the inside of the disc at the same rotational speed. There are several playstation 1 games that employed this method (and I'm sure PS2 games did too); if you pop the CD into the computer it will show around 650mb of data but they are copies floating around the Internet at only 100mb of size without any compression or loss of data; most of the data on the disc are just billions of 0's to push the data to the edge of the disc.

Also the thing you said about the pipes doing nothing because of the "limited amount of RAM" is utter BS... shader instrucions are often cycled through the pipeline which wouldn't require constan RAM buffer access... also the "extra 50mhz" would hardly be able to make 4xMSAA unnoticeable.

And a lot of instructions will be used to communicate with the processors (which results from the processors being RAM-starved), which results in less instructions being used for shaders. Thus, there will be less utilization of shaders and will probably match the PS3's shader capabilities.

And I never said that the 50mhz would do anti-aliasing without a noticable performance hit, I simply said that it would go toward that process. You also seemed to have missed the part where I detailed how the PS3 GPU would send data to the GPU faster than the Xbox 360 would, which results in even more clock cycles being used for anti-aliasing; and the progressive rendering technique is also faster (and gives higher resolutions, btw) so less clock cycles are spent on figuring where the geometry in the scene is and instead could be put to better use.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA LOL      the "redundant" core won't be there if another one fails (which would be pretty ****** up just to have one of the processor's units just fail like that), it'll be deactivated permanently... this is done to get better yields at the fabs

Ah, you're right about that, I stand corrected. I thought they meant redundancy as in a back-up, not a "incase that wasn't enough power" SPE (though with 1.8 freaking teraflops of processing power, I don't really see the need for it now). I guess I've spent too much time in reading the Cisco academy program's materials, redundancy actually makes sense when Cisco uses it :rolleyes:

[slik da relic]

it doesnt matter which machine u choose, most of us r gonna buy the one we like anyway. otherwise we wouldnt have 2 ps1s and 3 ps2s in the house. whether it has overheating problems, poorer graphics, etc. the mainstream public is who they r after. not us. they know we're gonna buy the system already. maybe even both. thats why numbers, graphics, and price is important. to the "mainstream", xbox "360" and ps3 means they r equal. if the graphics r sharp and clear, they r happy. they dont recognize clipping, pop up or a few jagged edges (anti aliasing) like we do. so then, it comes down to the price, i think $349 is the cutoff point. cant go higher than that. and sometimes the built in features, depending what they r. some friends i know arent on xbox live, but they use the dvd player. but the mainstream is the majority in the whole mix. if they depended on just the hardcore audience, they wouldnt sell a console after the 1st 2 weeks of launch.

da relic