Xbox 360 vs. PS3

[imported_Noob]

Which has faster hardware? I know that Xbox 360's triple core CPU dominates. But in terms of the videocard, etc. I can't tell which is better.

 

[veloc1ty]

wait till they run tests and it actually comes out.

 

[RussianSensation]

Originally posted by: Noob
Whihc has faster hardware? I know that Xbox 360's triple core CPU dominates.

You do? based on what?

You cant compare neither cpus nor gpus of both systems unless standardized tests exist. In this case the way the games look is the best way to judge both systems.

My car has 190hp yours has 300hp, whose is faster? The 2nd, until you find out the first car is Lotus Elise and the 2nd is Mustang GT and the 1st is now faster. You have to consider how easy it is for developers to push the system near its limits, the efficiency per clock cycle, specific strengths for gaming in both architectures. This is pretty complicated stuff. Even if you have 1000x faster system but developers have a hard time extracting its value, all that power is wasted (ie. PS2). Most importantly, specs are misleading, and are there as a marketing attention grabber (PS2 wasnt 10x more powerful than a PC). People will say PS3 is 10, 100, 1000x faster than PS2. Will the games on it look even 10x better (a conservative figure given the power of the system provided)? Not a chance for any of these systems. We have no idea what 48 unified shaders means. Does it mean 24x2? 32 pipes and 16 vertex? 48 = can interchange at any time?

 

[bandit390]

Has anyone seen the confirmed prices on these?

 

[bjc112]

My car has 190hp yours has 300hp, whose is faster? The 2nd, until you find out the first car is Lotus Elise and the 2nd is Mustang GT and the 1st is now faster. You have to consider how easy it is for developers to push the system near its limits, the efficiency per clock cycle, specific strengths for gaming in both architectures.

Good point.

 

[imported_Noob]

Originally posted by: bandit390
Has anyone seen the confirmed prices on these?

I think $300 w/o an HDD and $500 w/ an HDD.

 

[PerfeK]

That's an expensive hard drive. It better ship with a 3TB Raptor.

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Round one of the marketing FUD goes to Microsoft (challenger) by a nose due to their MTV charade. Late in the round Sony came out swinging with a 2.6 Teraflop Marketing FUD roundhouse that staggered the challenger but the challengers early knockdown of the champ by a powerful Road Rules and Frodo jab gives the challenger round one by a score of 10 to 9.

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: PerfeK
That's an expensive hard drive. It better ship with a 3TB Raptor.

$200 for a 3TB Raptor, I'll scrape up the money for that!

 

[imported_Noob]

The HDD is 20GB. But you can buy an external too, as well as flash drives.

 

[firefaux]

apparently, the ps3 has more raw power while xbox has better dev support. but none of that really matters. what matters are the games that will come out for it and if the developers will utilize the hardware to its fullest extent.

 

[PurdueRy]

What no revolution talk? lol

IMO it is the best LOOKING of the next gen consoles, I am not one for over the top designs.

Not a lot of news from that ground lately, maybe as E3 goes on.

As of right now the general concensus is that PS3 is faster however who knows considering Sony's history of exaggerating the numbers.

From E3

"The new playstation is 51 times faster than the fastest P4" Or something along those lines...right....

 

[piasabird]

Depends if the XBOX or the PS2/3 games are more interesting to you. Purchase based on the game availability.

 

[obeseotron]

Even though no one has really seen anything yet, it would be hard not to interpret the ps3 specs as more impressive. IBM is doing everyone's chips and im pretty sure they'd tell you the cell is a more advanced design than the 3 g5's strapped together that power the 360, or whatever lower cost solution nintendo chooses. 360's memory bandwidth is shared, ps3's isn't. we'll have to see about the gpu's, but nvidia has 6 extra months compared to ati, which should further tip the balance in ps3's favor. PS3 looks more powerful in every way, but the genesis and ps2 were hugely successful with much inferior hardware, and with the increasing use of middleware and the cost of development there will probably be a lot of games made to the lowest common denominator (the way all of EA's games are designed for the PS2 and then touched up slightly for xbox) I also think the 360 looks like crap and like the way the ps3 looks.

For the record tho, unless there's a new GTA ps3 exclusive, Halo 3 will probably trump all that hardware advantage.

 

[MobiusPizza]

I believe that the Cell processor of PS3 is more powerful than the tricore of Xbox360
However... I don't really know about the NVidia VS ATi department.
The PS3 screenshot impressive me more so far

 

[GTaudiophile]

Anand said we'd hear more about ATI's XB360 GPU "later this week" so maybe that will shed some light on this debate.

But be prepared to watch Anand "boo-hoo" ATI's latest compared to the almighty RSX and G70, soon to be crowned the GPU kings! And then he'll probably 1) Go on to question ATI's ability to supply an adequate number of GPUs this Fall, and 2) conveniently forget to mention that what Sony/nVidia did this week was the largest, year-in-advance paper launch in all of history!

(Note: Yes, I am an ATI fanboi and do not presume to be the objective owner of the Internet's #1 hardware review web site.)

 

[Chadder007]

Also Nintendo's Revolution is going to have 4 cores instead of XBox 360's 3 cores. But they will be running just a tad slower at 2.6 ghz or something like that instead of XBox 360's 3.4ghz. Nintendo will also have the better video card between XBox 360 and the Revolution. But the PS3 is said to surpase both of them on video processor power.

 

[Gurck]

Awesome, just what we need, another xbox2/ps3 thread, thanks OP. The other 4533292435 threads on it just weren't cool enough, I'm glad you made this one.

 

[Excelsior]

Well Gurck, it gives you yet another chance to have fun arguing about how consoles are holding back the PC market, you should be happy.

 

[Gurck]

Nah, I've said my piece & feel no need to repeat myself endlessly. Unlike the OP, who apparently won't be happy until every thread here is console-related.

Btw, love the sig, but could you put "- Gurck" after it? The way it is now it's a bit unclear that I'm the author of that insightful & truthful comment.

 

[imported_shaw]

Rather then copy and pasting the same stuff over and over again, I'll just copy and paste a piece for you from JonesCK1 from IGN.

PS3 has 1 Cell processor at 3.2Ghz. The cell is a multi-core processor, but its cores are different from a conventional processor. Than main core is similar to a powerpc but not a full fledged one(PPE) but it also has 7 SPEs which are different and much smaller. Each one is much weaker but the 7 combined can do wonders.

X360 has 3 Full fledged PowerPC cores at 3.2Ghz each, they are symetrically placed meaning that each one can be programmed to handle seperate tasks independantly.

PS3 will use an nVidia GPU and X360 will use an ATI GPU. Both companies are providing future generation products and are considered to be very similar in power. Check out Anantech for benchmarks on competing ATI and Nvidia GPUs. nVidia has an advantage in OpenGL and ATI has an advantage in DirectX games.

ATI will be incorporating 10MB of NECs embedded Dram which will be what future GPUs (2007) will be implementing. This gives a great advantage as the bandwidth to this ram is extremely fast at 256 GB/s. Also since MS and ATI have partnered for this, they have incorportated the future feature set of the next version of DirectX which is called Windows Graphics foundation. WGF 1.1 will be out for the next GPUs, but the GPU in X360 uses WGF 2.0 which has Model Shader 4.0 (Remember the big deal nvidia made about 3.0 ) Model Shader 4.0 unifies vertex and Pixel shaders and allows them to communicate with one another.

You can learn about the UNIFIED SHADER ARCHITECTURE HERE

Finally the Ram: PS3 512MB total, X360 522MB total

PS3s main memory uses 256MB of XDR ram which is clocked faster at 3.2 GHZ but with a smaller BUS (remember that the efficiency of the ram is CLOCK X BUS)

XDR uses a 64-bit bus: 8 x 3.2Ghz = 25.6 GB/s BWidth
GDDR3 uses a 256-bit bus: 32 x 700Mhz = 22.4 GB/s BW

As you can see, both rams are very close with XDR having just a slight edge, but then PS3 doesn't have the 10MB of Embedded Dram @ 256GB/s that both the XCPU and XGPU have access to.

The other half (256MB) of ram in the PS3 is equal to Xbox 360s main memory rated at 22.4 GB/s bandwidth

What will determine who wins the battle will be who wins out of ATI vs nVidia.

ATI has showed their cards releasing the 48 paralell pipeline spec. nVidia refused to disclosed their pipeline spec but GameSpot has indicated that it might be only 24 texture pipelines. (That explains it )

Will the advantage of having MS 4.0 (Unified Shader Model) and 10MB of NEC's Embedded DRAMmake the difference for future Xbox 360 games the same way they've exploited normal mapping for this generation? That remains to be seen. If the Unified shader and embedded Dram blows up in future GPUs, this could be MS trojan horse in Xbox 360.

I agree with about 90% of what he said, but it leaning on the Xbox360 side of things. Both consoles are good consoles, I'll be getting both.

 

[jagr10]

Won't the games for both basically be the same? I mean there are only a few games exclusive to each system that are worth buying. Other than that, most games will be made pretty much the same for both systems. The specs are pretty similar too except one uses ATI and the other uses Nvidia.

Why don't they just build a hybrid model?

 

[firefaux]

you cant really make a reasonable judgement on the gpu until you see a game that has been made for both platforms. only then can you make an apples to apples comparison.

 

[Oyeve]

PS3 for me. Better exclusive titles IMO, plus full backward compatibility for PS1 and PS2, not an emulation of "hot titles" that the Xbox 360 just threw in a coupla days ago. Never was a fan of the games on the Xbox. Both systems should be great tho.