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HappySqurriel on 18 February 2008
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MikeB said:
HappySqurriel said:
MikeB said:

@ HappySqurriel

First off, can you show anything that can demonstrate that the PS3 can produce noticeably better graphics, AI or physics than the XBox 360 in real world performance?


Once you have your physics engine running on the Cell's SPEs it will run circles around an equivalent engine using the 360's Xenon.

Currently Uncharted is a good PS3 game with regard to visuals, but that's only Naughty Dog's first effort. Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction is also a good showcase with regard to things happening on screen with high quality at an impressive 60 FPS. But the technical gap between Resistance 1 and 2 is expected to be huge, this due to nearly all legacy code being moved from the PPE onto the Cell SPEs.


So, in other words you have nothing which can demonstrate that the PS3 can produce noticeably better graphics, AI or physics?


LittleBigPlanet is a nice showcase for the PS3, most PS3 games so far have been 360 ports and the Xenon isn't well equipped for Physics like the Cell is and overall the 360 is designed too differently to get really good results with ports, including Physics code. Some interesting quotes:

Tom's Hardware:

"PhysX is the best thing that can be utilized on a pathetically under-performing [Xbox 360] PowerPC processor"

Note that the Xenon CPU at its core isn't that bad, but the shared L2 cache (by all 3 cores) and shared slower higher latency main memory (shared with the GPU) is bottlenecking potential (which in RAW numbers would else be 77 GFlops vs 218 GFlops for the Cell, the Xenon bottleneck comes into play when using multiple cores, 3 cores don't translate in 3 times the performance by far). Low latency is very important for CPUs, hence the low latency 3.2 Ghz XDR memory and SPE's high speed dedicated local memory stores combined with the Cell's high internal bandwidth are of such importance.

Ubisoft Montreal tech director, Dominic Guay:

"We were positively surprised by how efficient the SPUs (the Cell processing units) were to do such things as run our vegetation simulation, our animations or our physics systems."

Just for 3rd party reference contrasting.


If the Wii can produce a game like Bloom Blox ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=TpMkCF3AdMY ) which has dozens of objects which are fully controlled by a physics engine; considering there are more objects being impacted by the physics engine on Bloom Blox that Little Big Planet, I see nothing that would suggest that Little Big Planet is beyond the abilities of the XBox 360.

By the way PhysX =/= Physics ... The PhysX physics API may have been built with certain assumptions that make it particularly poorly suted to the Xeon processor; this (of course) does not mean that you can not produce a highly optimized physics engine for the XBox 360. Regardless, the fundimental question you seem to constantly dodge is not whether the PS3 can provide an improvement, but whether it can produce a dramatic and noticeable improvement. As I pointed out earlier, Bloom Blox, Elebits and Super Mario Galaxy are fairly good showcases of in game physics useage and yet are produced on the "underpowered" Wii; being that no one disputes that the XBox 360 should be several times as powerful as the Wii, don't you think that a major physic showcase could be produced on the XBox 360?