360's GPU undercredited?

[Deneidez]

Squilliam said:

Soleron said:
The Xenos is based on ATI's R600 architecture, which is substantially newer than Nvidia's G70. Nvidia's next-gen chip, the G80, was the one which competed with R600 on the desktop and that has unified shaders too.

Incidentally the Wii graphics chip is a heavily optimised R300 which is years old.

So, yes, the Xenos is more powerful and flexible. A potential "PS4" would use a graphics chip with unified shaders, since both ATI and Nvidia use them and they are the only choices at the momemt. Unless we get Intel's Larrabee.

How can it be a R300 when its features aren't similar at all to the R300? I can't remember the details, but my vague memory tells me they haven't got much in common.

@Thread:

Lets see:

The Xenos has better shaders and shader architecture. It can run more complicated shaders more efficiently, it has a unified shader architecture, it can run 3 different threads at once IIRC, it can write directly to the L2 cache of the Xenon CPU, it has 2* the MSAA sampling rate of the RSX, high memory bandwidth, doesn't pay the memory cost of MSAA writebacks to main memory, massive fillrate, it can perform some GPGPU tasks for the CPU as well, (Saw a mention somewhere in a MS doc), has a built in tessellator (Not really used unfortunately as its kinda limited). Thats about all I can think of, theres probably quite a few more.

Xenos also has daughter die, which is used to crunch some pixel shader stuff. Thats where the 'free' AA comes. :P

Thanks to the daughter die, the Xenos can do 4x FSAA, z-buffering, and alpha blending with no appreciable performance penalty on the GPU.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_hardware