MikeB on 16 December 2007
@ gorgepir
The unified shader architecture of the Xenos GPU will offer an advantage in the majority of games today where we aren’t very geometry limited
Not really, the Xenos GPU only can do:
Xenos can do 48*2*500*10^6 = 48 bilions shading ops per second in total.
For these shader ops the devs can choose if they will be used for either pixel shading or vertex shading.
RSX can do 48 billion shading ops fully dedicated to just pixel shading, in addition it has 8 vertex units. 74.8 billion shader ops per second in total (excluding the Cell).
The RSX is more powerful than the Xenos and as you can see its unified shader approach is overhyped (if compared to the RSX) as you will not dedicate all shaders to do just pixel shading and so will not be able to match the RSX' max potential.
Having said that, the Xenos is an excellent GPU by ATi considering it was in mass production at a cheap price in 2005.
The free 4X AA support offered by Xenos is also extremely useful in a console, especially when hooked up to a large TV.
If it was really "free", high profile first party XBox 360 exclusives like Forza 2 and Halo 3 wouldn't have had no AA at all.
Working higher resolutions it's easier to do AA on the PS3 in combination with other enhancements.
Heavenly Sword does FP16 HDR, 4x MSAA at 720p, to quote a Heavenly Sword dev:
"As a result I think the most common implementation of HDR on XBOX 360 will be the lower FP10 (as Xenos does not support blending in FP16)."
"Ironincally for the X360 fanboys its even more relevant on X360... X360 sucks at FP16 HDR, particular because of the tiling (64 bit framebuffers use twice as many tiles)."
