Gamer4eva said: Wow, this topic has gone from the 360 to the PS3. Again ill ask the orginal question. Has the 360 reached it's limit?

 

No, there are still great cames to come.

 

If you mean graphically then i would say both the PS3 and 360 have reached their limits.

Squilliam wrote:

If you followed the discussion you would know I stated MGS4 can be done on the 360, but with sacrifices and workarounds.

Agreed but he Cell is well implemented into the PS3 design, with high bandwidth between it and the RSX and low latency XDR Ram.

If the Xenon and Xenos were better implemented into the 360 design there would have been more potential.

Wrong, for processing integer maths the Cell's integer performance is comparable to its FP performance.

Yes in terms of spec and being able to upgrade it's for sure. But a Windows PC also demands more RAM for non gaming purposes. Vista sucks with low RAM, it drains a lot of resources (RAM as well as CPU cycles). A console can be more efficient and software will be better optimised for it. Combined with modern streaming methods, hundreds of megabytes of RAM is huge for a console, especially in combination with a harddrive.

Not easy, but the PS3 is capable. Let's wait what the Crytek guys come up with themelves. Far Cray 2 for the 360 and PS3 already looks promising.

MikeB said: HappySqurriel said: NJ5 said: MikeB said: (...) The Cell provides more perfomance than ordinary PC CPUs can deliver with regard to gaming (...)   Which ordinary CPUs might those be? Do you also belong to the "MGS4 has better graphics than Crysis" club?   Don't bother, MikeB favours hypothetical scenerios where the Cell processor breaks moore's law because in certain benchmarks it outperforms 8 year old PowerPC based processors 20 to 1. The fact that a PC can run the same game as the PS3, with higher quality textures, higher detailed models, at a (dramatically) higher resolution, and with 4 times the framerate will not make him concede that the PC is dramatically more powerful than the PS3.   Moore's law just regards the amount of chip transistors. It's not an exact scientific "law" and mass R&D could easily break this "law" or you can just make bigger chips.

Thank you for demonstrating your lack of understanding ...

You can't really double the size of a chip and retain a marketable consumer processor. The first problem with this approach is that it is impossible to produce a wafer that is error free, and by doubling the size of a process you more than double the cost because your yeild per wafer is much lower than 1/2.

The second problem is that the available processing power on a chip is directly related to the number of transistors on the chip times the clock speed of the chip; and this is also directly proportionate to the ammount of energy used by the chip, and the ammount of heat given off by the chip. This means that when you double the chip size you either have to run it at a lower speed (eliminating the benefit of the larger size) or use some sort of advanced cooling method (potentially at high expense) to prevent the chip from overheating.

Now, if you don't understand what this means, two well designed chips produced with similar manufacturing process' that have similar energy usage tend to have similar theoritical performance. Certainly, processors that are designed to take advantage of specific traits of a task (like GPUs) can outperform other processors in those tasks when those other processors were not designed to handle those tasks; but this doesn't mean that one processor is more powerful than the other.

New CPUs have more transistors than the cell processor, run at higher clock rates, use a smaller manufacturing process, and in both theoritical and real world performance shatter the Cell processor. This is an unquestionable fact ... The Cell processor may be one of the most powerful processors ever put into a gaming console, but it is far from being one of the most powerful processors on the market.

MikeB said: Squilliam wrote: You're also in the "Xbox360 can't handle a MGS4 port club as well"? If you followed the discussion you would know I stated MGS4 can be done on the 360, but with sacrifices and workarounds. Another thing, the Cell CPU is nothing on its own. Sure you can consider it a "platform advantage". So in saying that, consider the X86 architecture vs the PS3. Agreed but he Cell is well implemented into the PS3 design, with high bandwidth between it and the RSX and low latency XDR Ram. Agree 100% If the Xenon and Xenos were better implemented into the 360 design there would have been more potential. Actually the Xenos is implemented brilliantly, sure it could do with more ED ram so they don't have to do tiling, but its brilliant. Xenon less so but thats made up for with the ease of development. If we swapped Xenos for RSX, you'd be jumping for joy at the implications. It was designed from the ground up to be a Console GPU so with its ED RAM and programable shaders it makes me smile just thinking about the possibilities. A truely exciting combination at that. Xenos+Cell and I would pick that (with apropriate changes given architectures of course) Lair for instance would have been smooth. It just makes sense, think about it... with developers already implementing the new SPE friendly code, they could have had more flexibility in tapping those extra GPU cycles if needed as well. Integer code - PC smacks the PS3 so hard it never gets up again. One punch knockout. Wrong, for processing integer maths the Cell's integer performance is comparable to its FP performance. Actually correct. But in saying that, the Cell does the same to a Core2 Quad in terms of floating point performance as they have different design goals. Out of order execution - the X86-64 cpu breaks apart the code to execute in the most efficient way it can then it reassembles the code back into order. A laymans definition. The Cell PPU is only equivelent to about a 1.6ghz G5 and the Core2 is much better than the powerpc line - otherwise why would apple have gone all intel for instance? Intel is an Integer powerhouse because thats whats required to run general purpose software. You can't run an operating system on partial precision even with double precision you'd get more crashes than a spyware infested Windows Me machine. Ram? PC wins. Yes in terms of spec and being able to upgrade it's for sure. But a Windows PC also demands more RAM for non gaming purposes. Vista sucks with low RAM, it drains a lot of resources (RAM as well as CPU cycles). A console can be more efficient and software will be better optimised for it. Combined with modern streaming methods, hundreds of megabytes of RAM is huge for a console, especially in combination with a harddrive. 256mb system ram! Less if you take operating system into account. A standard PC is expected to have 1gb of ram for running XP and a game, and since XP uses less than 200mb it still leaves 3/4 of a gigabyte on the typical low end gaming pc. 3 times what is available on the PS3. Don't forget also that all PCs have hard drives too and the software to cache on that harddrive is more mature than on the PS3 most likely. Crysis port - Wow thats a lot of nerve. Its one of the most ram/CPU/GPU intensive games out there and you call it an easy port? I call it your easy delusion. Not easy, but the PS3 is capable. Let's wait what the Crytek guys come up with themelves. Far Cray 2 for the 360 and PS3 already looks promising. Crysis was never designed for the possibility of a Console port. If so it wouldn't have such rediculous requirements. Ram Ram Ram. Its a huge problem for a game designed to run properly on 2gb of ram.

Your method of quoting is prettier than mine.

 

The 360 hardware isn't even close to be tapped out at this point. Almost all games (perhaps all games?) on the 360 are using only 1 of the 3 CPU cores. Yes, this doesn't mean only 1/3 of the potential of the CPU is tapped, but someone willing to do heavy lifting with a game that uses all 3 cores could still do some amazing things. Remember, making leaves on the tree move in independent directions, casting realistic shadows, etc., are very CPU front loaded... the GPU just renders the result.

@ HappySquirrel

Nothing in your post refutes what I said.

Yes and no, performance also comes from CPU design efficiency and some CPUs have transistors dedicated to non-performance critical components and legacy bagage.

Squilliam wrote:

Agreed, IMO the idea is OK but could have been so much better with enough eDRam.



No. Don't get me wrong ATi's graphics chip is good for a console, I have said so many times in the past. It just wouldn't fit well within the PS3 architecture and methology.

eDRam was a good choice for the PS2.



Flexible shaders is a nice feature, but if another chip can perform well more shader ops in total it provides no real benefit in comparison.



No. It takes time to optimise for the SPEs. 10 MB eDRam would pose quite a bottleneck.



A new XBox powered by the Cell and using Blu-Ray would be extremely promising. Just make it sturdy enough this time, the more Cell hardware out there the better.

@Mike - Nononononononno

Edram wouldn't be a bottleneck it would fit snugly in the render pipeline of the current PS3. The problem with the RSX is that there wasn't enough time put into designing it for the system. Its a great chip, just a little rushed IMO.

Furthermore programable shaders + greater performance fits nicely anywhere - especially with the Cell, considering flexibility is one of the great advantages of the Cell. It just carries that advantage further down the pipeline to the GPU. I certainly wouldn't baulk at the developers being able to do MORE with the system under another hypothetical situation. Furthermore it'd make it easier to program for considering the greater power, flexibility and more modern architecture.

The perfect PS4 IMO? 4 PPU+8 SPE with powerful double precision + tweaks to allow more code to run efficiently on them and downstream from that a direct X 11 GPU with full CUDA support to run single precision physics code and anything else developers dare to throw at them alongside the usual rendering.

A flexible beast from the East that could obliterate (nicely) any code thrown at it and beg for more.

@ Squilliam

136 shader ops per cycle (RSX) vs 96 shader ops per cycle (Xenos, flexible). I will take the RSX despite not being as flexible. Of course it would be better if the RSX had flexible shaders, but the Xenos with its flexible shaders is not better with regard to potentials at all.

IMO the RSX has been well designed to fit the PS3 architecture, designed to take advantage of Cell strongpoints (Cell and RSX communication), large enough cache to take advantage of twice the bandwidth (compared to the 360) by using XDR and GDDR3 simultaneously.

AFAIK Mike, Sony intended to run graphics from the Cell, they changed their minds at some point in the piece and instead went with a traditional architecture. What seems strange is that the PS3 was released right before Nvidia released their awesome g80 architecture. They must have known it was in development... these chips take years to develop.

Lastly, if the RSX is so strong then why is the 360 keeping up so well? Its pretty common knowledge in real world scenarios the Xenos is the superior architecture, and that its the main reason why its difficult to see much if any difference between the PS3 and the Xbox360 currently.