Fishie said:
Mifely said:
The 360's GPU has a small edge in performance over the PS3's, as I understand it, but this doesn't usually show through in games, nor does the different memory architecture, as 360 apps tend to either split the 360's memory down the middle, making the architecture effectively the same as the PS3, or they use more memory for the CPU/app, and less for graphics.
The only real potential (note that this rarely means "realized", except for occasional exclusive titles) difference between the two platforms is this: The SPUs can act as "GPU helpers", and very powerful ones at that. In addition, there's a CPU side of graphics that the... uninformed.. tend to discount. Namely, animation performance -- blending animations is a colossal amount of work for a processor to do, and this is exactly the kind of thing the Cell excels at. It doesn't matter how many polygons you can push to the screen, if your animation blending was too slow to handle a large blend stack, or you only have a few animated characters onscreen at once. The PS3 blows the socks off the 360 in this dept -- but you'll never see cross-platform games perform differently due to this fact (except *maybe* team sports titles, eventually...), because the game needs to be designed fundamentally different to take advantage of it. As an example, you design your game to have 10 characters onscreeen at once... or 50. One way shows the power of the Cell, and causes you to lose a heckuva lot of money on your 360 port, and the other way makes both versions less impressive, but allows you to design the game to focus on the less impressive design.
You'll only ever see the difference in the exclusives, and even then not a signifigant number of them. Platform focus is why 1st/2nd party exclusives (like Uncharted, Heavenly Sword, MGS4, etc.) look so good compared to cross-platform games. As a general rule, the PS3's platform exclusives will tend to outdo the 360s, because it is, indeed, more capable -- it has much more disc space, and your game design can focus on things that the 360 cannot handle.
Games like Heavenly Sword used very early versions of PS3 middleware, I would wager, but you can still see a bazillion characters onscreen, animating in the very first scene of the game. The 360 would have to make due with billboarded characters, or by instancing rendered meshes, post-skinning (a la Dynasty Warriors -- the characters would number greatly, but they'd all be in the same animation state, or small subset of states). On the PS3, every guy can be animating in his own way, thanks to the Cell.
In my opinion, most users aren't going to notice such a thing, unless the game design somehow really takes this advantage in stride. Not many games do, or probably ever will. If they do, they'll be pretty impressive, though. |
Seriously, where do you guys get this crap?
Even if what you said would be true it would mean that in a game with lets say 100 NPC`s onscreen all going trough unique motion that the data would have to be loaded for every single one of those chara`s independant from the others(instead of just using distancing and crowd physics).
Data for a hundred characters loaded individually?
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Fishie, usually game characters all share the same animation data. The work that bogs the processors down is called animation blending. Taking data from a "run" animation and a "jog" animation, and blending them together based upon a characters forward movement speed, for example, to give a smooth transition from one animation to the next in the game. This is a lot of work, especially if your character's skeleton has a large number of nodes ("bones"), and its something that the Cell's SPUs are *really* quick at. Each Cell is individually a LOT faster than any of the 360 cores at this, as a matter of fact. While the 360's cores tend to yield a general performance improvement over the PS3's PPU dual-thread core for more abstract programming (like game logic), those same cores also need to tackle tough math work like animation blending, which the PS3 SPUs absolutely slaughter the performance of the 360 cores at. Unless you design the game around advantages like this one, or the fact that the SPUs can pump info right to the PS3 GPU (like do the work of skinning vertices based on the bone transforms, rather than delaying the GPU with that task... again a lot of work which scales with the number of skinned meshes you are rendering each frame), you're not going to see much of a difference between the two platforms.
If you *do* design your game to take those advantages into consideration, the PS3 is going to look better, no question. No many games, and especially no cross-platform games, will ever be designed around the features of only one console, for obvious reasons. The PS3 excels at the mathematics work behind the polygon pushing... so you might see, as a major "graphics" difference, characters in PS3 games using alot of face viseme blending, for nice looking facial animations and voice matching, whereas the 360 version would have to do with just a couple "pre-recorded" facial morphs. The difference would be subtle (except in cases where your game has VO matching for multiplayer, perhaps), so calling this a difference is something of a stretch, and you'll NEVER see it in a static screenshot. All that extra mathematical horsepower of the PS3 does have its uses, but they aren't showstoppers, unless the game is designed to take advantage of it -- like has 50 characters onscreen at once in a MMO, where everyone is blending different animations from their shared set, and thus looking different, etc.
In short, the PS3 is "better", but only if you consider things in motion to be something you're looking for, as far as graphics go... Higher character bone counts, more interesting characters onscreen at once, more subtle animations of the face, hands, etc., better looking hair... and so on. Otherwise, they are effectively identical.
