My XBox 360 vs PS3 comparison (mostly technical)

[goddog]

where do you get the media going out and bashing the ps3, the only place i see that is online, and especially when being compared to the wii.

I do remember good morning America however telling us “do not buy the xbox 360” this was due to rrod this summer, did not effect sales though.

Your point about world wide sales… well you have japan, the ps3 is being out sold in the European region and the American region. Also consider that the ps3 was majorly over tracked last month, and has been for 2 prior months. The 360 was minorly under tracked.

As for theoretical peak potential, it will never be reached on either system, it is also looking like the PS3 real world potential is going to be lower % of peak.

Being a mac user form the power pc era, I do know that if they work at it they can get very close to full use of theoretical processing power, the big problem is NIETHER console has enough ram to do it. The xbox 360 would need up to 4 gig of ram, and the ps3 twice that, look at theoretical bandwidth max you listed.

In either case, we have no idea right now which console has the higher real world performance wait 3 years to see this

Also a problem with splitting ram, when a cpu has to share ram from two different types it has to lean on the controller bus, this lowers bandwidth to that of the slowest part, so if the ps3 uses the slower ram for the cpu, the other ram will run at a slower clock. This is why real computers do not barrow ram form the graphics card, it slows every thing down.

So your conclusion there is wrong, if the cpu uses the slower ram, the xbox would at worst tie, simply because it is using less recourses to move data through to the cpu.

For example in console history look at the sega Saturn, it had the higher theoretical performance, and higher ram performance. Unfortunately the Saturn never even got close to its full use. you can wiki that to read about it.

Back to theoretical peak, even more than ram its in the programmers hands. They have to use the spe, and use the ram layout to their advantage. Multi parallel coding is hard, using ppe’s is much harder. A tech like spe, that is in powerpc past is altivec, this if programmed right gave power pc chips 2 to 4 times the performance of chips with out it at the same clock. You can see this in photoshop on the mac cs2 and before, and to a better extent in final cut. With out using this feature much like the spe’s the processor would have a much lower achievement rate of theoretical max potential.

To illustrate, my tower a g5 dual 2 with 6 gig of ram that is 4 years old, can out perform, in photoshop and video rendering a 2.4 intel core 2 extreme with 2 gig of ram.