My XBox 360 vs PS3 comparison (mostly technical)

[sieanr]

- The Cell is connected directly to the much faster XDR RAM.

Could you tell me how much faster the XDR is than GDDR3? I'd just like to know if you know what you're talking about. Not to mention XDR latency is only on par with GDDR3.

Besides, the XDR offers about 14% more bandwidth than the GDDR3 bank in the PS3, not significant enough to warrant a "much faster" imho.

Considering the CPU and GPU share the same bus, any bandwidth the CPU uses limits the bandwidth available to the GPU. So for example if the CPU is using 10 GB per second, there´s only 12.4 GB per second bandwidth left for the GPU.

True. However, the EDRAM takes a significant amount of strain off the GDDR, more or less enought to make up for bandwidth lost due to the CPU using the RAM as well.

- The RSX is directly connected to the GDDR3 memory, but is allowed to access the faster XDR ram through the Cell's EIB as well. I guess the later option will not be used much, 256 MB should in normal situations be sufficient. Also the default harddrive could function as a provider of virtual memory, if somehow 512 MB of system RAM wouldn´t be enough (a PS3 advantage, because of the default harddrive), but I guess if using the Blu-Ray drive to stream data (so smaller parts of game data needs to be loaded into memory) the harddrive could rather serve for caching.

Too bad the RSX has just a 128bit bus to memory.

Practically speaking, the HD would only be used to stream textures as its just to slow to be virtual texture ram. This is something that can be done from disk. Not to mention 12xDVD average read speeds are faster than Bluray.

For the RSX to access the cell, it must go through to memory controllers and two serial busses. That incures one hell of a latency penalty.

It would be like including the 300GB per second EIB internal CPU bandwidth which also connects the SPEs to their local memory stores.

Actually, that picture doesn't incllude the cross type EIB connector in the Xenon.

Speaking of which, a funny thing about the Cell is that Ring Connector. See, the ring connector isn't as fast as the Cross type connector in the Xenos or Core 2 Due, not to mention it has a latency penalty - especially if you start operating near peak transfer rates.

IMO both images have been abused by XBox 360 fans far too often.

Just incase you dont get it, thats the point.

Both sides had stupid specs they hoist up to claim one system is superior to the other. A good example of this is how you mentioned floating point performance. FP has very little impact on the performance of a console.

PS3 vs XBox 360 / Review by a music producer:

LOL

source plz (for latency in PS3 AND 360, showing that RSX is significantly worse -- and it has to be trustworthy numbers)

This will be a bitch to find, but common sense will tell you going trough two memory controllers adds a lot of latency.

But funny you ask for me to source things while MikeBs claims go unsourced.

Platform propaganda and misinformation is nothing new, in the distant past PC MSDOS owners and even some PC stores spokespersons claimed that the Amiga was only useful for playing games.

Many stated a GUI is for someone who cannot use the CLI (The Amiga both had a GUI as well as a far more powerful CLI). Many more simultaneous colors (4096 on Amiga, 2 on PC and Mac) were mainly useful for games and some very specialized uses. Of course today we know companies like NASA used them for telemetry, Disney used the machine to animate the Lion King, Dinosaur and many others, Terminator 2 morphing was done on the Amiga, Babylon 5 and Seaquest special effects were done on Amiga, US and Israeli Air Force used them to train pilots using Amiga based flight simulators. The Amiga for quite a while had the most advanced fully multitasking office applications (copy and pasting images from a paint program or maybe a colorful spreadsheet pie chart into a word processor was all already possible in the 80s) and most advanced and multi-functional artistic programs, visual as well audio related ones (no wonder as the Amiga offered advanced stereo sound while the Mac was silent and PCs could only beep), etc. But still the Amiga was never that great of a success in the States (in Europe the platform did much better, with marketshares in some well educated countries like Sweden up to 90%!). Main reasons I think, mass PC advertising and mass misinformation.

I really hope some of the PS3's potential will not be wasted due to similar misinformation campaigns, the whole internet seems filled by PS3 misinformation and IMO pretty much faked reports of Doom and Gloom...

I thought this thread was about the performance of nearly dead consoles, not dead systems no one cares about.

But hey, good thing Sony has never waged a misinformation campaign with the PS3s spes. AMIRITE?