an for people that think IM just pro Playstation 3 and trying to tear down the xbox360
Im not What i am trying to do is tear down these misconception's both side's have against the other:
The 360’s GPU can produce up to 500 million triangles per second. Given that a triangle has three edges, for practical purposes this means the GPU can produce approximately 1.5 billion vertices per second. (In comparison, the ATI X1900 XTX processes only 1.3 billion vertices per second and runs at nearly double the clock speed.) For antialiasing, the 360 GPU pounds out a pixel fillrate of 16 gigasamples per second, using 4X MSAA (Multi-Sampling Anti-Aliasing). Of course, the big claim to fame of the 360’s GPU is the stunning 48 billion shader operations per second, thanks to its innovative use of Unified Shader Architecture.
make no mistake about that is one bad mofo of a graphic's card
Why is that figure so impressive? For the uninitiated, shader operations are the core of what makes a rendered graphic look the way it does. There are two separate types of shaders that are used in gaming graphics: vertex shaders and pixel shaders. Vertex shaders impact the values of the lines that make up a polygon. They are what determine how realistic animation of polygons and wireframe models will look: the swagger of a walking character, for instance, or the rolling tread of a tank as it crushes an android skull laid to waste on a charred battleground.
Pixel shaders, on the other hand, are what determine how realistic that charred battlefield will look or the color of the dents in the tank. They alter the pixel’s color and brightness, altering the overall tone, texture, and shape of a “skin” once it’s applied to the wireframe. These shaders allow developers to create materials and surfaces that no longer look like, say, the main characters in Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing” video. That is, they enable developers to create games with textures and environments that much more closely resemble reality.
Each of these graphics processing functions are called and executed on a per-pixel or per-vertex basis as they pass through the pipeline. Until recently, graphics processors handled each type of shader individually with dedicated units for each. Developers used low-level assembly languages to talk directly to the chip for instructions on how to handle the shaders, or they used APIs such as OpenGL or DirectX. Unified Shader Architecture changes all that by handling both shader types at the hardware level in the same instruction process. This means that the GPU can make use of the common pieces of each type of shader while making direct calls and relaying specific instructions to the shader itself. This decreases the actual size of the instruction sets and combines common instructions for two shader types into one when applicable. This is how the 360’s GPU quickly and efficiently handles shader operations. 48 billion shader operations per second, in fact.
which by the way is what one function of the Cell processor can do for the RSX.
now the Cell is by no mean's faster at that then xbox360's GPU, but it does'nt need to be.
How Does It Stack Up?
It’s tempting to compare the GPU inside the Xbox 360 to today’s high-dollar, high-performance video cards, and some who do might scoff a little. The latest graphic cards from Nvidia and ATI, such as Nvidia’s GeForce 7800 GTX and ATI’s Radeon X1900 series, are—on paper—superior GPUs. They tout processor speeds of 550 to 625MHz and memory clock speeds of 1,500MHz and above. In terms of raw horsepower, these cards are indeed brutes. Of course, if there’s one thing we’ve all learned about clock speeds in the great processor wars between Intel and AMD, it’s that raw speed hardly translates into a real measure of processing power.
It’s not hyperbole to say that video memory bandwidth is one of the most important (if not the most important) parts of processing and rendering graphic elements. This is simply because bandwidth and speed determine how rapidly instructions can be transferred, processed, and returned to the system. Thus it’s in direct control of overall graphics performance for a system.
To improve video memory bandwidth, graphics card manufacturers have resorted to the typical methods of boosting speed, such as creating wider bitpaths (512MB nowadays) or boosting core clock speed. These techniques have placed performance in the range of 40 to 50GBps at peak range, which is respectable when compared with other graphics processors. However, these figures still fall short of the Xbox 360’s 256GBps.
Yes, you read that right: 256GBps memory bandwidth. It’s utterly stunning, and it’s thanks to the chip’s embedded 10MB of eDRAM.
No currently available video card makes use of embedded DRAM. And even if one was available, it’ll be at least the end of 2006 before they’ll be of any use. That’s when Windows Vista comes out, meaning that the operating systems they’re gaming on can’t make use of Vista’s WGF (Windows Graphics Foundation) 2.0 features. This speed of instruction handling combined with Unified Shading Architecture not only makes the GPU inside the Xbox 360 the current graphics powerhouse, it also means it’ll stay that way for a number of years.
And even when current PC-based GPUs start catching up, it’s going to be extremely expensive to match the performance of this dedicated gaming platform. At the time of this writing, the top-level cards by ATI and Nvidia described in this article are retailing for around $560 apiece, and that’s without Unified Shading Architecture support or eDRAM. And of course, there are other aspects of the system to consider, such as the fact that the CPU and memory were custom-built for dedicated gaming performance.
ATI and Microsoft have truly built something special in the Xbox360’s GPU. It’s astounding to see a chip with such power run at such an efficient clock speed and generate as little heat as it does, while at the same time making use of never-before-seen technology that will surely be replicated in graphics cards and consoles for years to come. It’s comforting to know that the Xbox 360 will continue to produce visually stunning and smooth graphics well into the foreseeable future.
http://www.smartcomputing.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles/archive/r1003/77r03/77r03.asp
once again the RSX is not just a 780 GTX
Jen-Hsun Huang already stated that the 7800 gtx will be slower then the RSX but when the PS3 is launched thier will be a faster desktop chip then the RSX.
BOTH THE XBOX360 AND THE PS3 has custom designed graphic's system's in their machine's