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HappySqurriel on 21 February 2008
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MikeB said:
HappySqurriel said:

For the most part, the difference between a PS2/XBox/Gamecube game and a PS3/XBox 360 game (in terms of graphics) is the advanced shader effects. In order to support the exact same shader effects at 1080p rather than 1080i/720p you need (roughly) twice the processing power in your shader hardware on your GPU.

Realistically, the PS3 and XBox 360 can not support 1080p at 60fps without a noticeable downgrade in the quality of effects which are being used; being that many of the best looking games on either platform are 720p at 30fps, by moving to 1080p at 60fps the games would probably have been reduced to similar effects as the Wii currently produces (on 480p at 30fps).


Yes with regard to the 360, but the PS3 is different due to its Cell processor. The Cell is very suitable for adding all kinds of effects, taking workload off the GPU and can even be used as additional pixel shaders.

The 360's ideal rendering resolution is 600p with AA as this perfectly fits the EDRAM memory (highest FPS output). If you want to do HDR, AA usually need to be dropped to achieve good framerates due to tiling.

The PS3 Cell/RSX approach is very different. The RSX is able to handle more shader ops per second than the Xenos, 96 (Xenos) vs 136 shader (RSX) ops per clock. In addition the Cell can do a lot of other stuff previously workload performed by graphic chips (freeing up workload for the GPU to do other stuff).

Some perspectives by a Heavenly Sword coder (Heavenly Sword is a 1st generation PS3 title which uses (NAO32) HDR, 8xAF and 4x MSAA at 720p):

http://pixelstoomany.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/why-gpus-are-not-so-good-at-post-processing-images/

Some additional comments from the devs behind Motorstorm:

"If by cooperative rendering you're referring to SPUs supporting the RSX, I strongly believe that this approach will become far more widespread. In addition to reducing the vertex load on the RSX through the use of culling and vertex pre-processing, this approach also provides an efficient mechanism to introduce procedural geometry.

Historically, CPUs have provided course grain scene culling using view frustums, occlusion planes, portal visibility and BSP-trees with GPUs left to perform fine grain rejection using guard band clipping, occlusion and backface culling. While such features improve fragment performance, they don't reduce vertex processing overhead.

The leap in performance provided by Cell gives us the bandwidth to significantly reduce RSX time spent processing vertices that don't contribute to the final scene. The favoured approach is to use SPUs to generate minimal scene/instance specific index and vertex buffers from compressed data."


You're an idiot that doesn't know what he is talking about (as usual) ...

You can off load clipping and culling processes to the CPU in order to render less polygons and to limit the overall strain on the GPU, but when it comes down to your shaders you are limited to the shader hardware that your GPU has. Both the XBox 360 and PS3 have 48 shader pipelines with the XBox 360 having a more flexable architecture.