8600GT vs Xbox360GPU

[Freze]

A friend of mine and me were arguing about which GPU is technically superior, his 8600GT or the Xbox 360's GPU. What I mean is which has more raw power. This means, you can't say the Xbox360's just because it is more optimized. If both get the same level of optimization, which would be superior. I hope this is understandable...

Thanks in advance.

 

[MarcVenice]

360's GPU. Simply because the 8600gt is a piece of crap, total and utter crap.

 

[Aznguy1872]

I was just thinking about this today also. With BioShock coming out I was wondering does it look better on the 360 or on a computer with a 8800 GTX.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Originally posted by: MarcVenice
360's GPU. Simply because the 8600gt is a piece of crap, total and utter crap.

How is it total and utter crap?

 

[neothe0ne]

Originally posted by: MarcVenice
360's GPU. Simply because the 8600gt is a piece of crap, total and utter crap.

I wouldn't even call the FX5200 total and utter crap. The only (not extinct) thing that could possibly justify such a name is Intel Integrated graphics, as well as possibly NVIDIA's GeForce6100, at least as implemented in nForce 405 MCP61, where it really does perform like total and utter crap.

 

[GprophetB]

8600s are budget cards - so you get budget performance, however for a 100$ish card at the time i posted this response its a pretty good deal.

 

[Matt2]

Xenos (360 GPU) has more theoretical shader power.

 

[Freze]

I was just thinking about this today also. With BioShock coming out I was wondering does it look better on the 360 or on a computer with a 8800 GTX.

Its not a matter of which looks better, because even if the Xbox360 version of bioshock looks better, it is optimized, unlike the PC version, to the specific hardware. What we were arguing about was more theoretical, like: if you put the xbox 360's GPU on a PCI-express slot and stuck it in a computer would it be better or worse than a 8600GT, or the other way, if you were to make a gaming system identical the Xbox360, but with the GPU being a 8600GT what would be better.

 

[tuteja1986]

See you can't compared 360 gpu to a 8600gt :!

In 2 years from now , dev will not bother to tweak their game for 8600gt but they will have to for the 360 gpu. See PC GPU performance tweaking/tapping stops so quickly in its life cycle because they go on to tweak newer gpu but in the 360 case, they are tweaked for every last drop of processing juice that thing can give.

8600gt = one time whore
360 = Wife

 

[thilanliyan]

Originally posted by: tuteja1986
8600gt = one time whore
360 = Wife

Yeah I don't plan on keeping my 8800GTS much longer either
I'm gonna go for the hopefully better looking and better performing whore coming out in November (maybe??) and see if I can pimp out my GTS.

 

[hans007]

depends on how you look at this.

the xbox 360 gpu has 36 unified shaders and i think a 256bit bus. it also puts out more heat than the sun. its basically a x1900GT .

the 8600gt does not put out much heat, does full vc1 and h264 decompression etc. it is also way slower (i think more because of the memory bus than anything). a 8600GTS is actaully pretty close in speed to an x1900GT so i wouldnt say the 8600gt is THAT much slower than the xbox 360 gpu.

 

[MarcVenice]

The 8600gt is a total and utter piece of crap simply because it is advertized as a dx10 card but can't play dx10 games, and often similar priced dx9 cards will outperform the 8600gt in dx9 games.

 

[JPB]

I'm not real sure about the 360 GPU, but isnt it supposed to be like...an R600 ? With like unified shaders and such ?

I am pretty sure I have read this somewhere in an article. I think the article said something to the extent of, the Xbox 360 GPU is a preview to ATI's upcoming card the R600.

 

[RussianSensation]

Originally posted by: hans007
depends on how you look at this.

the xbox 360 gpu has 36 unified shaders and i think a 256bit bus. it also puts out more heat than the sun. its basically a x1900GT .

It has 48 unified shaders, not 36. Each of these shaders is comprised of 4 ALUs that can execute a single operation per cycle, so that each shader unit can execute four floating-point ops per cycle, giving 192 shader ops per clock cycle. You cannot compare these shaders to straight pipelines of X1900 derivatives. 360's gpu is based on R500 gpu which has nothing to do with R520/580 of X1900 series. Additionally, the gpu has eDRAM which allows it to have 4AA at supposedly minimal performance drop.

I am not understanding the argument about theoretical comparison between 8600GTS and what would 360's gpu perform like in a PC. Who cares about theoretical performance? Look at PS3 cell which was touted as way more powerful than 3 core Xbox360 PowerPC cpu. But in the real world unless you can utilize that power, it's theoretical peak is useless. Similarly, if 8600GTS cannot deliver equal performance in Oblivion, Bioshock, etc., for all we care it can be 5x more powerful but in the real world if it can't produce equal or superior image quality at playable framerates, it's inferior.

But if you really want to compare numbers, here are 2 key figures:

Shader Processing Power
8600GTS = 139.20 GFLOPS
360 = 240 GFLOPS (10 FLOPS x 48 shader pipelines x 500 MHz)

Pixel Fill Rate
8600GTS = 5.4 Gpixels/sec (675mhz gpu x 8ROPs)
360 = 4.0 Gpixels/sec (500mhz gpu x 8ROPs)

Source: Wikipedia.

Since games continue to be more and more shader intensive and the performance advantage of 8600GTS in texture fill-rate is not that significant, 360 gpu is more powerful --that is before you even consider the 4AA advantage offered by the eDRAM chip.

But let's forget the theoretical analysis above. If you had a chance to play Ace Combat 6 demo, DiRT, Gears of War, GRAW 2 or Fight Night on 360, you'd realize 8600GTS has no chance at all to match the graphics produced by the console.