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crumas2 on 22 February 2008
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MikeB said:
Entroper said:
MikeB said:
@ Entroper

There is always an advantage to unified shaders.


Unified shaders is an advantage, but not an advantage over the PS3. If you have 50 people who can either be a doctor or a dentist, does not mean there's advantage over having 100 people, 50 of them only being able to be a doctor and 50 people only able to be a dentist. You get more work done in the latter case. The RSX/Cell vs Xenos/Xenon is like such a situation.

Except it isn't 50+50 vs. 50, it's 48+8 vs. 48. :P And I never claimed Xenos was faster! I claimed the difference is less than the specs would indicate at face value.


And then there's also the Cell. The SPEs are way more flexible compared to current vertex shader engines. A SPE can create or destroy vertices, assemble primitives, and so on. Cell + RSX (bandwidth, etc) > Xenon + Xenos

From an older study:

"This paper studies a deferred pixel shading algorithm implemented on a Cell-based computer entertainment system. The pixel shader runs on the Synergistic Processing Units (SPUs) of the Cell and works concurrently with the GPU to render images. The system's unified memory architecture allows the Cell and GPU to exchange data through shared textures. The SPUs use the Cell DMA list capability to gather irregular fine-grained fragments of texture data generated by the GPU. They return resultant shadow textures the same way. The shading computation ran at up to 85 Hz at HDTV 720p resolution on 5 SPUs and generated 30.72 gigaops of performance. This is comparable to the performance of the algorithm running on a state of the art high end GPU. These results indicate that a hybrid solution in which the Cell and GPU work together can produce higher performance than either device working alone."


I wouldn't argue that the PS3 isn't more powerful on paper than the 360.  The question is, how much more powerful, and how accessible is that power.  The PS3 has been on the market for more than a year, now, and yet very few games on the PS3 look better than what's available on the 360.  What good is a better engine if it's too expensive/difficult to take advantage of it?

Instead of trying to beat that PS3-power horse into the ground, perhaps you could spend more time helping to spread useful info to correct some of the misunderstanding in the posts in this thread, such as:

1. Why you don't need Blu-ray to display at 1080p in a game

2. Why 1080p does actually refer to 1920x1080 progressive scan instead of just any old resolution with 1080 lines

I know you know all that stuff and could help those guys out by explaining it.