Topic: Revolution vs XBOX360 vs PS3

[nolimit19]

I'm talking specs here. and for the record, i really dont know anything on this topic, and wanted some feedback. how do the computer nerds think the rev stands up to the other 2 consoles powerwise. all i have heard people say is power does matter blablabla...but honestly, from what we know so far, how will these 3 consoles compare powerwise?  

[ta7mike]

You'd prob better off posting this in an 360 or PS3 forum, cause that's what matters most to those guys...also so little is know about IBM's Broadway, and ATI's technology.. that a comparison at this point wouldn't be fair.  

[RABicle]

We can't compare Revolution yet because we have nothing to work with. PS3 wipes the floor with Xbox 404 on floating point performance alone. I'm going out on a limb but I'll say that Revolution should be comparable with PS3. Possibly the reason Iwata wont reveal the specs is because IBM are still finalising the chip, opefully to make it slightly faster than Cell (PS3.)

[KDR_11k]

PS3 won't wipe the floor with the XB if you present it with non-vectorizable math. The XB has three times the all-purpose cores and although they are in-order, using three of them might partially offset the performance loss due to in-order execution since you have three cores that likely won't stall all at once (plus HT could further reduce the issue). With the PS3 there is only one core and when that stalls the whole thing stalls. Since that core also has to supply the data to the SPUs the stalling might result in the SPUs running out of data and a systemwide stall while everything waits for the PPE to swallow that one instruction.

Of course I'm expecting Nintendo not to go with an in-order processor since that enforces more optimization resulting in higher costs.

[nolimit19]

a little too technical, but i get the jist of it.

[Galford]

The PS3 and the XBox360 have totally different architectures.  
To expand on what KDR said, the SPEs in Cell ar very simple, they are great at math
and nothing else.  

As Ars-Technica, Anandtech and others haved pointed out, the SPEs on Cell have a Pentium 4-like penalty when code screws up.  Which means unless you have a super-kick arse compiler or hand code the assembly language yourself, you aren't remotely going to get the performance that Sony advertises out of Cell.

[niniendowarrior]

Honestly, I think PS 3 is still the machine to beat... I'm not buying it though.  Xbox 360 is going to be a very good multimedia appliance and the PS 3 is going to be about games, the games that are known to come out on Sony's flagship and nowhere else...

and I have had rants on GC before... but seeing what Rev is about... I'm having my reservations... I want to see more of what it's all about.  Go Revolution!

[Caillan]

Yeah, we can't judge the PS3 either until we start seeing gameplay shots/movies. The XBox 360 was pretty underwhelming, but since they're launching so soon, those demos were probably rushed. We'll see in a few months.

[Galford]

Here's one thing to remember about the PS3, most of what was shown was either a tech demo or pre-rendered footage.  Neither of these reflect actual gameplay footage.  Sony is the master of hype, remember the "Emotion Engine"...

Most of what MS has shown was in game footage produced on alpha-development kits.  Most of what MS has shown will look better when November 2005 comes.  When in-game footage of PS3 games start coming in, expect them to look much worse then what Sony has already shown.

[PugGTI]

heheh... toooo true galford.
although...

Quote
To expand on what KDR said, the SPEs in Cell ar very simple, they are great at math and nothing else.

ITS ALL ABOUT THE NUMBER CRUNCHING!
It can't just display an object on screen at someones whim! It has to go through countless calculations OF NUMBERS to turn the dots on your screen into a mix of only three colours.  

[tpfkanep]

Good goddess! Not another vs thread a-la PS2 vs GC vs XB? This is so premature ans immature, nolimit19. No wait, there is... no limit...

[tpfkanep]

Quote
Originally posted by: PugGTI
heheh... toooo true galford.
although...

Quote
To expand on what KDR said, the SPEs in Cell ar very simple, they are great at math and nothing else.

ITS ALL ABOUT THE NUMBER CRUNCHING!
It can't just display an object on screen at someones whim! It has to go through countless calculations OF NUMBERS to turn the dots on your screen into a mix of only three colours.

Erm... does one not have to take the whole system's architecture into consideration when trying to find out what is the most efficient way to display and process the info on screen? It's no use having fast processors, number cruncgers, whatever and your system has bottlenecks... in some component/bus/memory system/gfx sub-system.

[KDR_11k]

Of course computing is math. The problem is that the SPU is optimized for vector math which is fairly straight-forward, throw more complex stuff at it (such as, oh, say, branching logic like it happens within gameplay and AI code) and it will run at very low efficiency or even require PPE interaction (SPUs can't shovel around data between RAMs, they might even fail at doing this stuff at all). That's the reason we don't use our graphics cards for game logic, because that kind of stuff is heavy on the branching and strongly interdependant and vector processors are made for batch math, e.g. you have an array of 100 000 vectors that needs to be rotated by 3 degrees around the X axis and scaled by a factor of .3. That's a static dataset with few operations executed on lots of data. When you have an AI, objects that perform a bunch of calculations and then branches into different paths depending on the outcome you have varying operation sets and probably variable data as well. The XBox 360 has a set of SPEs as well (though they differ from Cell SPUs, the Cell has one SPE and seven SPUs) so it can probably handle vector math well enough but the Cell has only one PPE and I doubt that's gonna cut it.

Sure, physics is the main load in games (ignoring graphics because those are mostly handled by the GPU) but modern RTSes manage to overload my Athlon 64 3000+ simply with AI calculations. That's going to be a problem. Remember, AI is the kind of stuff you'd never want to see near an in-order processor and the A64 does out-of-order execution, the performance is going to be MUCH worse on the XB360 and PS3. The Rev will most likely be out-of-order and single core because that's what game programmers want. A single core can still give a lot of performance, especially since oooE seems to increase speed by a factor of 10 (according to some GDC dev) so that 2 GHz CPU might actually outperform the Cell and XBCPU in actual use. Of course that's just a guess and since this part of the CPU performance doesn't give visual improvements (gamelogic will run faster, graphics not) people might consider the Rev weaker because they canot see the power it provides. 500 2k poly characters with dumb AI vs. 500 1k poly characters with decent AI will make people believe the 2k but dumb characters are the result of better hardware.

[Galford]

Yes KDR, you're last article summed up nicely some of the differences between Cell and the Xenon CPU.

tpfkanep, you said something about overall architecture, from what I can tell, the XBox360 is going to be easier to get results out of and more flexible then the PS3.

Here why(my opinion)...

512MB UMA
Unified Shader Architecture
10 MB of on-chip embedded DRAM
Same ISA for all CPU cores

Granted once the PS3 is maxed out, it will look better then the Xbox360, but it's gonna be a while before anyone does that.

[couchmonkey]

I still run into people who say the PS2 will look better than the other systems if programmers ever max it out, so I wouldn't even totally bet on the PS3 doing that. Although it stands a much better chance since it won't be running on tech that's a year older than the Xbox 360.

Personally, I think it's going to be less important than ever.   Quite a few people are already underwhelmed by Xbox 360 footage, and while I'm sure a lot of it is going to improve before launch, I have to wonder, if the leap from this generation to next generation isn't even that impressive, than how is anyone going to notice the graphical differences between the three next-generation systems?  I'm sure super-geeks will notice, but mostly it won't matter.

I caught a bit of Sony and Microsoft's press conferences, and I was very interested to see a demo in one of them where they were showing how awesome more levels of raytracing (or something similar) is because as you turned up the brightness on the lights, everything would get grainy and washed-out with only one "pass" (I know, I'm not being very technical or accurate).  Anyway, what I think was really interesting about it is how the companies are actually trying to train us to see the differences in graphical power between current generation systems and next-generation systems.  Rare posted some comparison shots of Kameo on it's site, showing the Xbox version and the new version, and it's the same thing: the game definitely looks a lot better, but it's hard to notice until they clearly demonstrate it to you.  This gen, we're going to have to be shown how the graphics are improved, whereas in previous generations it was obvious.

[Dryden]

Quote
Personally, I think it's going to be less important than ever. Quite a few people are already underwhelmed by Xbox 360 footage, and while I'm sure a lot of it is going to improve before launch, I have to wonder, if the leap from this generation to next generation isn't even that impressive, than how is anyone going to notice the graphical differences between the three next-generation systems? I'm sure super-geeks will notice, but mostly it won't matter.

Agreed.

This launch, unlike any before it, will not be so heavilly biased about graphic improvements.  But I won't go so far to say that raw power isn't important.  What about AI advancements?  NPCs on screen?  Human players in one arena?

If the Xbox 360 offers me Splinter Cell with 50 players on a single map, and the PS3 offers 100, with no other differences... Or if the Revolution army in Call of Duty has 2000 soldiers, and the PS3 can only support 1000... or if the complex AI on one system can't be processed without sacrificing available power...

Number crunching is going to be important if one company can take advantage of the scale on their platform.

[Galford]

It's gonna be awhile before we notice a major difference in graphics.  I was just reading EGM(the one with the Zelda cover) and they briefly talked about the new Tomb Raider.  At one point in the article it was mentioned that the new Laura model would have twice the polys as the Laura from Angel of Darkness.  When the magazine put the two models side by side, I honestly couldn't tell the difference that double the polys would make.

[KDR_11k]

couchmonkey: You mean HDR, High Dynamic Range. That means the colors are computed with higher precision and overbrighting should become less of an issue (many games nowadays have characters that glow completely white when exposed to light). It's a step up in defeating the artificial look of realtime graphics because overbrighting looks completely fake.

Galford: Developers so far have been stating the PS3 is easier to develop for. From the programmer's point of view, the X360 has threee independent processors while the PS3 has only one plus a few special task things. Apparently Sony has abstracted the SPUs away in the SDK so you just write normal code and the compiler figures out where to run it. The SPUs don't seem much different from the SSE and Altivec units found in home computers (well, in terms of usage) and the X360 has similar units on its cores (i.e. 3 vector processing units + GPU in addition to the 3 "CPUs").

[ThePerm]

honestly nintendo reovlution could have the best specs and nintendo wouldnt say. As far as the board being tiny..nec made an incredable board for gcn...most of the space in gcn was taken up by the damn optical drive

[jasonditz]

Quote
Originally posted by: Galford
It's gonna be awhile before we notice a major difference in graphics.  I was just reading EGM(the one with the Zelda cover) and they briefly talked about the new Tomb Raider.  At one point in the article it was mentioned that the new Laura model would have twice the polys as the Laura from Angel of Darkness.  When the magazine put the two models side by side, I honestly couldn't tell the difference that double the polys would make.

Except that they wrote "twice the polys" so you've got graphics mongers who claim they can tell the difference even if they can't. That's part of the problem... better graphics are getting less and less impressive.

I can definately notice the difference visually between, say, RE4 for the Cube and Code Veronica for the DC. But you know... I don't think it adds much to the experience anymore. The Dreamcast I think finally got to the point where the graphics are "fine" as far as i'm concerned. The only reason I bought the Cube was because Sega stopped supporting the DC and Nintendo had Super Monkey Ball.

And again, I can see the difference between what Sony and Microsoft are hyping for the nextgen and what most Cube titles look like... but I think its going to matter even less to me. I'd be fine if every game in perpetuity looked as good as RE4 or the new Zelda...  

[Dirk Temporo]

I agree that better graphics are getting less and less impressive, but even so. The mainstream and casual gamers will tend towards the system with the best graphics just because they're stupid, and just want to be able to say "I have the system with the best graphics." People like that hardly give a crap about the games, they just want the best graphics, even if they can't tell the difference. That's why I'm worried.

[Galford]

KDR: I've read some of those articles myself.  I'd really like to know if their BSing or are MS's alpha kits really that bad?  It could be the fact that the PS3 is easier to program when compared to the PS2.

[jasonditz]

Like they did with the Sega Master System, the Intellivision, the N64, etc.

[WuTangTurtle]

I wouldn't really worry too much.

After playing xbox 360 and seeing PS3 video showing during E3, I can say that the xbox 360 is not a huge difference and Nintendo should have no problem doing what they are able to do.  PS3 on the other hand they have some insane physics and etc.

Now if you compare say PSP's "coded arms" vs DS's "Metroid Prime Hunters" you could see a big difference in both gameplay and graphics.  Coded Arms had all the Graphics hands down, but Metroid Prime Hunters had all the gameplay and then some.

[KDR_11k]

Galford: Dunno but considering they haven't even shipped out proper X360 hardware yet but are expecting to launch within maybe 6 months the whole thing seems rather rushed. Sure, MS got XNA and DirectX but that doesn't seem to help anyone.