Hey all,
First off this is my first created thread on VGChartz so I hope you all go easy on me.
I'm a third year electrical engineering student at the University of Waterloo and I really am a computer hardware enthusiast but I must admit that there's still a HUGE amount for me to learn before I can even begin to make claims. I'd like to learn what you guys think (especially the more tech savvy amongst you).
Anyways, I was just sitting here and thinking of upgrading my PC and I started thinking about the differences in the 360's and PS3's tech. Now I've read that each Xenon core is actually of a similar architecture to the Cell's PPU. Of course the Cell also has 7 SPU's for an immense amount of parallel processing capability while the 360's CPU is good for general processing instructions. It's up for debate which is more powerful for gaming but the general consensus on tech savvy websites seems to lean towards the Cell's immense amount of "raw power" as it has shown off in more recent games with a ton of scripted events, fairly good AI, well implemented physics systems, etc. all at once, as well as things like Folding@Home. It's also capable of doing some pre-processing for the RSX if I've read and understood correctly, taking a load off of the RSX's work - reducing what most consider to be the bottleneck of the PS3's graphical prowess (that and the memory).
Now when I started thinking about all that I remembered that the 360's GPU (the Xenos) has a unified shading architecture. Essentially what this means is that all the hardware pipes can be used for shading or texturing. This differs from the RSX's dedicated pipes. Here's where I'd like you to shine some knowledge upon me. I started thinking that this would allow the 360's GPU to have more efficient utilization of its hardware and be capable of running at maximum efficiency and lower wait times for instructions as any instruction can be thrown at any free pipe unlike the RSX where instructions would have to wait for a certain type of hardware pipe in order to perform that instruction. I couldn't find much information on how this dual process natured Xenos architecture affected the processing times of individual tasks or anything. Would anyone know anything about that kind of stuff?
Also, would this "efficiency of processing" sort of make up for the Cell + RSX piggybacking processing style?
I love games and I love tech and I would love to learn a lot about both and be a bigger part of this community. VGChartz rules!
