Can somebody that knows allot about the technical specifications of video games consoles, electronics, hardware and software please help me analyze this article: PS3 vs. Xbox 360

http://dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=2

Separate the truth from the lies and explain what each numbers mean and which numbers are important to making great video games. Also please provide your source where you got your information from. Like a website, book, own knowledge.

Thanks in advance

Are you asking someone else to do an assignment of yours?

I had some friendly guy add me on yahoo last week.
Well he was friendly until I told him I wasn't prepared to do all his English coursework for him!!

Cheaky cunt had only looked for a native English speaker for that reason!

Sure I will do it for you.

The ps3 pwns 360, Blu-ray FTW

finished, sorry if its a bit too technical.

Assigment... no i just need someone that understands all that tech and explain what it means in normal people's english. Christmas is near and i haven't deceided which console to buy. i don't want to know which console is better because none is better they are all different.

I know people always say buy the console with the games you like, but the games i like have most gone multi-platform. There's only 1-2 exclusive games on the PS3 that i want and they are MGS4 n FF13. On the Xbox 360 Gears of War is great. Halo 3 is very good and can't wait for GTA IV.

With both consoles marketing plot saying that their product can do this and that have all this processing power and teardrops and whatever. Also with Sony coming out and saying games in 2008 and later will have 1080p and they have only really used 30% or whatever of the PS3 potiential.

Sorry for posting like 3-4 times well i had to post on each forum like - Sony and Xbox. I thought i would alot of opinions and answers.

Anyway i offended people then please by all means close all the other topics, but please keep this i think this is in the right forum section.

As far as the Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD i've heard from store mangers that i talk to that in the future all studio companies will release on Blu-Ray, even Paramount, but becasue of Microsoft giving out $100 million cheques they are requred to support only HD DVD.

So from that you can see my dilemma i don't want to a product and later become useless because the other consoles has the same game with the same or better quality.

misteromar mk4 said: Sure I will do it for you. The ps3 PWNS 360, Blu-ray FTW finished, sorry if its a bit too technical.

 I fixed it for you....everyone know PWN is spell in caps
where did u get your degree...a cerial box!!!

Each console has their ups and downs you cant really just say "YES ITS BETTER", it applies to your tastes, your needs and stuff like that, making a thread like this is only gonna make trolls flame this thread.

P.S why the hell did you post this thread over 4 times?

Basically the article is riddled with mistakes, just some quick examples:

> 360’s GPU is actually capable of 96 billion shader operations per second.

Microsoft doesn't claim this, ATi was talking about floating point ops possible to achieve with the GPU per cycle, shader ops per second are something different, it's 48 billion shader ops per second max.

> 115GFLOPS Theoretical Peak Performance for 360 CPU

With a normal measure of theorectial peak it's 77 GFlops, 115.2 figure is the theoretical peak if you include non-arithmetic instructions such as permute. These are not normally included in *any* measure of FLOPs. If you want to count non-arithemitic peak figures, the usable Cell components in the PS3 will get 268 Gflops (6 SPEs + PPE) - over twice that of the 360

> 218GFLOPS Theoretical Peak Performance for PS3 CPU.

Correct for 1 PPE + 7 SPEs (unlike the article claims this to refer to 8 SPEs). Of course the OS also uses up CPU cycles (like on Windows, like a Epic dev pointed out in an interview Windows/DirectX can use up 50% of available CPU cycles, this is the case for the PS3 as well as for the XBox 360, the PS3 has one SPE reserved for the OS, stuff the XBox 360 has to dedicate resources for on its 3 cores)

> The 360’s 12 DVD drive has a speed of 16.5 megabytes per second compared to the PS3’s 2X Blu-ray drive which has a speed of 8.7 megabytes per second.

The PS3 Blu-Ray drive achieves 9 MB/s. The XBox 360 x12 drive slows down to a x8 speed drive max like all 12x speed DVD drives for reading dual layer discs. As the Blu-Ray drive speed is sustained on average it loads faster than a 12x speed drive for dual layer discs. A DVD drive can read the outer tracks far more quickly than the inner tracks.

> Using a 1Kx1K matrix and 8 SPE they were able to achieve 73.4GFLOPS

That was a very early unoptimised test, later such tests showed the SPEs to achieve near 100% efficiency.

Please don't use that article as a source for anything, browse through Beyond 3D forum discussions, manufacturer drive specs, university research articles and such instead.

The 360 is a better game developers machine for techinical reasons, and the fact there are more of them out there make the financials work as well. Being able to develop a game with XNA (same programming interface for both Xbox and PCs) makes it faster and more capable for game developers to turn their designs into reality and get them to market faster.

@ 360Rocks

Which are?

The main benefit is that the development tools are similar to those on Windows and the Cell requires more game engine rewriting to achieve optimal results. Building a game from scratch, being equally ambitious (on the PS3 you can be more ambitious) is as good as equal in terms of difficulty (time and effort required).

For multiplatform devs leading on the PS3 makes sense, it would result in better PS3 as well as better XBox 360 games due to more cache friendly code. On the PS3 it's easier to track down inefficiencies.



XNA is good for hobby developers as it's easier to write a game for, but you won't be able to tap into the XBox 360's full potential (I also think XNA currently still just only supports one Xenon core).

XNA is a bit similar as compared to Amos and Blitz Basic for the Amiga 500 in terms of easier to develop for. Games can still be excellent, the worldwide smash hit Worms published by Team 17 was written in Blitz Basic for the Amiga 500 originally. Apart from not being able to achieve optimal performance it's not an option due to its platform specific nature if you want to port your game over to other platforms such as the Macintosh or Playstation 3.

Peter Molyneux (his company Lionhead Studios is now part of Microsoft):

"Is XNA just another hobbyist game programming tool, likes others including AMOS and STOS (for the Amiga and Atari ST), or more recently DarkBASIC? There is a range of opinions here. Peter Molyneux enthused to me about XNA, saying it is “a fast, efficient, better language” than earlier more compromised tools, and “built with ambition in mind,” so that XNA programmers can create the next Populous (the game which made Molyneux his fortune).

On the other hand, Molyneux undermined his evangelism by also stating that C++ remains the language of choice for professional development. If this is the case, then XNA will always be a hobbyist niche, which implies that serious students of game programming should not waste too much time on it."