PS3 more powerful then the 360?

[LordTheNightKnight]

fazz said:

Darc Requiem said:

Kyros said:
"Again would you really be surprise if the PS3 was more powerful?"

Since both systems have opened their specs it is pretty easy to say which is more powerful.

The 360 has a graphics card that has some nice tricks up its sleeve although in normal situations it is not that much more impressive than the PS3 one.

The 360 has unified memory which seems to make developing somewhat easier. Also its OS is a bit smaller so it has slightly more memory.

If you want to program in normal threads the 360 is easier to develop for since you can use the CPU as a standard 3-core CPU a model many developers and dev tools are comfortable with.

The 360 has faster data access, data transfer rate from their DVD player

The PS3 has faster memory an on-die memory controller and can push data faster through the system.

The PS3 Cell is much, much more powerful if specifically programmed for. if physics, ai, etc. do no use all SPEs the architecture is flexible enough to use Cell SPEs for advanced shading

The PS3 has up to 5-times more space on the BluRay disc.

The PS3 always has a HD disc on which developers can depend.

So in the end both have some advantages: If you program single-threaded both are almost the same. The 360 has some advantages that make it easier to program and it has proven that games that are programmed for it are better than the PS3 port.

When developers start to press the last performance drops out of the system the PS3 has more room for improvement. Much more storage and the awesome Cell processor (which destroys any Intel CPU for some tasks that are suited to it) and an open architecture.

I have yet to see detailed specs on the RSX. The fact that Sony hasn't released them speaks volumes.

 

They don't need to. When they say "based on nVidia's G70" they actually mean "an unmodified 90nm G70". If you remember G70's release back in 2005, they said that it was as powerful as two GeForce 6800s and that it had 302 million transistors... exactly same thing said by Sony when they announced the PS3. They just ported it to 90nm process, pasted the VRAM on the package of the die (to reduce costs by making a smaller motherboard) and, consequently, cutting the GPU's bandwidth in half to 128 bit.

On-Topic: I would say that PS3 is marginally more powerful than the 360, but that's hampered by it's hard programming curve.

PS: @outlawrun: Joke post right? The one about PS2 being more powerful than GC... I give you a 6/10 because it's not even funny :)

I actually looked up a few things. The PS2 does have greater rendering than the GC, but its experimental design saw some unintentional snags that didn't hamper the GC's conventional design.

Both systems have extensive rendering, but the GC used pre-built rending in the GPU (Hardware Rendering), while the PS2 used manually coded rendering from games, that the vector units in the Emotion Engine converted to data. Theoretically, this would have given the PS2 the best rendering, as it would do anything the developers wanted, while the GC, and even Xbox and Dreamcast, were stuck with what they had.

The snag is that it turns out the GPU doesn't necessarily recognize what isn't built into it, so the PS2 does not recognize texture compression. It may not seem like much, but imagine a system that never recognized JPEGs? You'd ether have to clog up the system with bitmaps, or 16-bit PNGs, or you'd have to sacrife detail to fit in GIfs and 4-bit & b-bit PNGs. Well textures pretty much work like that. 

So the PS2 is as strong as the other systems, but it just can't show all that strength off.

BTW, the result of that snag is that just about every system has texture compression built into the GPU, even the PSP (which is why the graphics are so good with the CPU cap off), and even the DS.