does anyone actually know what the fuck any of that glops shit means or are you all just pretending to be smart?

thats an actual question, does anyone know?

@ everyone, It's not here to say the PS3 is not powerful because it is. It's to show you can blindly believe companies when they attempt to sell their product. But IBM have no reason to lie. I'm really showing that those who said all along that there wont be a difference between the 2 are so much more right than anyone saying one is more powerful than the other.

Because looking at the systems as a whole show they are very very close. The only thing I would say is that M$ are getting results like Gears 1, Gears 2, ME and Bioshock with half the dev time of KZ2, GT5, MGS4.

coolestguyever:

That's my entire point. None of us fully understand what any of this means.

And given that the people that do know what they're talking are saying that the PS3 is more powerful, I'm inclined to believe them instead.

umm, excuse me but umm. yeah that's just ignorance. It almost seem proud of it.

As for you last comment above. Also please don't place your ignorance as a common thing it's not. I'm not you please don't assume that I'm like you. "none of us" understand the OP original post. I do understand. It wasn't that hard to understand.

Selnors right anway. Stop buying hype and just buy what you want. Don't bother throwing around number from a company. No company is going into an industry and saying "we are number 2. Go use our compitors". Everyone only plays up it's most peak numbers and silently leaves out it's weakneses.

Flops are floating point operations. a Float in simple terms is a computer numerical  used to record decimal point values. Something required for high precision mathematics. From there on you just need to understand the refernce for  mega(1024), Giga(1024m) and Tera.

also more ram is always better. it reduces read times from the drive

O seinor.. your directx 10 part about the 360 is from 2006 and completly bs.. http://www.joystiq.com/2006/08/24/xbox-360-cant-run-directx-10-confirms-ati/

 LOL. Read the article in the link you posted. IT states currently isnt able to. And now read what I posted. It has the ability to. Your article does not say anything about it cant via software upgrade through a game disc. Must you really twist what is common knowledge?

A: There are things one platform cannot do and the other can.

Note 1: The Xbox 360 sucks doing deferred rendering, the PS3 is quite good at it.

Note 2: GT5 doesn't have many particle effects, not a strength of the PS3.

Note 3: The Xbox 360 can implement MSAA at least twice as efficiently as the PS3.

B. There are some assumptions that shouldn't fly.

Note 1: Unreal Engine 3 isn't fully optimised for the Xbox 360, it uses deferred rendering in some parts which is not ideal and it doesn't make use of the Xbox 360s ED-Ram like a custom engine would. So no Gears of War 2 isn't the peak of Xbox performance.

Note 2: There are very few exclusive titles which use a custom engine on the Xbox 360, so comparing custom engine games to games which are built off UE3 isn't representitive of the complete Xbox 360 performance. Nor could you point to a game which has been given such focus on visuals that has been developed over 4 years on the Xbox 360 platform.

Note 3: That the peak of performance has been reached on either platform. It hasn't obviously.

C. There are definate areas which promise marked improvements of games on both systems.

Note 1: The PS3s Cell is the obvious choice, but lesser appreciated would be the streaming and design work of games like Uncharted, getting games to run off the HDD and make better use of it.

Note 2: The Xbox 360 tessellation engine has "just" been unlocked to developers. This promises to reduce ram usage, increase the complexity of models and animations possible on the console and possibly reduce space by both allowing for better "real time cutscenes" and with a little procedural generation of terrain features. This is similar to a lot of the RSX -> Cell optimizations on the PS3. I won't go into detail here because it gets complicated.

 I have for everything apart from the 360 GFLOPs. IBM website doesnt state the 360 theoretical peak. Although all sites around web state it as this.

nice article, well linked and put together. and epic themselves said in game informer mag, that they believe their is still room for improvement in graphics on the 360 and they themselves havent peaked on the 360 just yet. either way both systems will deliver great games and great looking ones, so each side can enjoy some quality looking games. i think gears 3 is the best looking game on the 360 and overall this gen, but i firmly believe that heavy rain will take the crown in 09.

A floating point number is (essentially) a number that is represented in scientific notation "on" a microprocessor ...

A FLOP is a floating point operation which is (essentially) an addition, subtraction, multiplication, division or comparison operation (equal, not equal, less than, greater than, etc.) that is performed by the CPU. (There are dozens of other potential operations on modern CISC processors but that is another story)

When people talk about peak GFLOPs they are (typically) refering to the maximum number of floating point operations that can be performed by a processor which (typically) means that they are performing the simplest operation, using a single precision floating point number, over and over again without ever reading from memory. This is (generally) a bad indication of performance because real world applications tend to use double precision floating point numbers with a variety of different floating point operations (including the more complicated and time consuming operations) and they read from memory quite heavily.

The limitations of peak theoritical and real world FLOPS is one of the reasons you will very rarely see them used as benchmarks is serious discussions about the performance of a system. In fact, the number of FPS that a system could run Quake 3: Arena would still be far more meaningful than its GFLOPs performance even though most modern hardware could run it at far higher than 1080p at a framerate exceeding 500FPS.