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Forums - Gaming Discussion - My XBox 360 vs PS3 comparison (mostly technical)

Lost tears of Kain on 16 September 2007
Final-Fan said:
Well, MikeB might be a raging fanboy, but his numbers do seem good to me. Fazz's objections about the bandwidth of the XDR memory in the PS3 do not concur with the Internet research I have done. I am far from an expert on this subject, but I need a better explanation than Fazz provided before I am convinced that the PS3's memory architecture is not superior.

I don't see why 360 fans need to be ashamed that a console $200 cheaper and a year older than the PS3 is not as powerful.

Well i have no problem admitting it, it should be more powerful, but it is not more powerful all around, in some areas it is weaker, but mike b pretty much said it was inferior in every way, stating even the controller was inferior because it was heavier......, and xbox live was also inferior, in all pretty much he stated nothing in which the 360 is superior, and in some ways it is.

Example would be that the cpu on the ps3 is stronger but the GPU is weaker then the 360s GPU, but he didnt stat that did he....

 



                 With regard to Call of Duty 4 having an ultra short single player campaign, I guess it may well have been due to the size limitations of DVD on the XBox 360, one of various limitations multi-platform game designers will have to take into consideration-Mike B   

Proud supporter of all 3 console companys

Proud owner of 360wii and DS/psp              

Game trailers-Halo 3 only dissapointed the people who wanted to be dissapointed.

Bet with Harvey Birdman that Lost Odyssey will sell more then Blue dragon did.
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Final-Fan on 16 September 2007
Lost tears of Kain said:
Final-Fan said:
Well, MikeB might be a raging fanboy, but his numbers do seem good to me. Fazz's objections about the bandwidth of the XDR memory in the PS3 do not concur with the Internet research I have done. I am far from an expert on this subject, but I need a better explanation than Fazz provided before I am convinced that the PS3's memory architecture is not superior.

I don't see why 360 fans need to be ashamed that a console $200 cheaper and a year older than the PS3 is not as powerful.

Well i have no problem admitting it, it should be more powerful, but it is not more powerful all around, in some areas it is weaker, but mike b pretty much said it was inferior in every way, stating even the controller was inferior because it was heavier......, and xbox live was also inferior, in all pretty much he stated nothing in which the 360 is superior, and in some ways it is.

Example would be that the cpu on the ps3 is stronger but the GPU is weaker then the 360s GPU, but he didnt stat that did he....

 


Here's the thing:  Every time MikeB got to state an opinion, he worshiped the PS3.  Everything from the controller to the color was superior in his eyes.  But it is to his credit that he is able to mostly put away his fanboy worship when discussing actual numbers.  If you compare the introduction to the other sections of his post, I think you'll agree.  The times when he goes away from the numbers into his own (or his girlfriend's) opinion, the added pro-PS3 slant is quite clear, which is probably what made you notice it.  

As for the GPUs, if you look at that section, he did sort of admit that the Xenon was a better piece of hardware, but also argued that, considering the entire architecture each one was put into, the RSX is able to match it. 



Tag (courtesy of fkusumot): "Please feel free -- nay, I encourage you -- to offer rebuttal."
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My advice to fanboys: Brag about stuff that's true, not about stuff that's false. Predict stuff that's likely, not stuff that's unlikely. You will be happier, and we will be happier.

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I have the most epic death scene ever in VGChartz Mafia.  Thanks WordsofWisdom! 

MikeB on 16 September 2007

@ selnor

1. It doesnt matter how fast a processer is. If your ram is not up to the job.
With the 360 the develoer can use it how they want. I.e select how much to use for what. The PS3's is dedicated, its already set. They have to use it how it is. Information for the cpu comes from the ram!


Yes, RAM and bandwidth are crucial. The PS3 design has a significant advantage here.

2. The graphics chip in the 360 is far more future proof as it can do some modules that are only available in DX10. The PS3's cant do these. And never will be able to.


The PS3 does not use DirectX 10 at all and the differences with DX9 are marginable.

3. SPE's are foe floating point work. They are not used in games. Mainly for Multimedia stuff.


Multimedia and Games often have much in common. And yes the SPEs are very useful for game development if you (re)write your code specifically for them.

4. And BLU RAY. Games dont need it, it is a con. Hell look at Mass Effect!


Why?



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

MikeB on 16 September 2007

@ selnor

Just add that even if developers have used SPE's in their PS3 games, maybe thats the cause of major framerate problems in nearly all PS3 games.


LOL, you're serious? Using the SPEs just takes workload off the PPE and RSX, so there's more headroom for them to concentrate on other things.



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

MikeB on 16 September 2007

@ Lost tears of Kain

Mike, its easily known that ps3 is "little bit more powerful then the 360" in some areas, but your technical crap, is just showing off how much you love the ps3.


I would say it's quite a bit more powerful technically, however the XBox 360 has the short term advantage of having more in common with PCs, so it takes less effort to port or efficiently cross develop for both platforms.

I see myself more like a technology enthusiast. IMO Sony has made many good decision from a technology perspective, I am not saying this benefits the costs of production or makes development so much easier. But competent developers can push the hardware much further with less restraint and sacrifices. Of course this takes some time to fully manifest itself, as is the case with any innovative approach to new technology. This was the case with regard to for example the Amiga as well (at a time PCs and Macs were single tasking and most often monochrome systems, the Amiga could perform pre-emptive multitasking and could show pictures with up to 4096 colors simultaneously, most multimedia and gaming advantages took a few year to fully manifest themselves).



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

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fkusumot on 16 September 2007

So PS3 > X360? Is that your final answer?


I Blame Wii Fit!

MikeB on 16 September 2007

@ erikguy

The 8th SPE in the PS3 is NOT disabled by default. It is a REDUNDANCY backup which means it is REDUNDANTLY checking the work of the other processors in case an error is made. It would then fix the error and send the data along to the next channel.


The SPEs are often referred to as a system on a chip, one of these "systems" on the PS3 is allowed to be defunct and won't matter to the rest of the platform (doesn't mean one SPE has to be broken though).

The 360's triple core Power PC processor: each core is HYPER-THREADED essentially giving you 6 CPUs.


Not really, it's still just one triple core,CPU. Multithreading is a similar in concept to preemptive multitasking (being able to shedule more than one task, on modern CPUs switching between tasks so quickly the user experience is that multiple programs are running simultaneously on just one single core processor), but is implemented at the thread level of execution in modern processors. Execution perfomance is still divided over simultanously running threads.



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

MikeB on 16 September 2007

@ Hockeymac18

Anyways, I think you should read Fazz's post on page 1 and come back and give a proper logical (key word here) response (if you actually have one).


OK, I will have a look seeing if I truly missed something of importance.



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

MikeB on 16 September 2007

@ fazz


That's theoretical, the actual bandwidth that can be achieved AT MAX is 204GB/s.


From the (in parts outdated) article:

"Since each snooped address request can potentially transfer up to 128B, the theoretical peak data bandwidth on the EIB at 3.2GHz is 128Bx1.6GHz = 204.8GB/s. "

Still the 300+ GB/s EIB bandwith I stated is correct. Compare bandwidth to a highway where wider highways would mean more bandwith. The data being transferred being cars. If this was a one way highway 204.8GB/s bandwidth would be 100% efficiency, however the Cell is a complex chip with multiple highways also connected to other chips like the RSX (which can use the XDR memory through the Cell). In the case of car traffic, you could pretty much be certain the highways have enough lanes to prevent traffic bottlenecks.

So at least this points to the Cell not being bottlenecked in terms of available internal bandwidth (looking solely at the Cell's elements by themselves), that's the point I was trying to make with regard to the section of my post you are replying to.

You are using the Cell's strictly theoretical figures under perfect conditon performance figures versus supposed real world Xenon numbers. How is that fair? The Cell can do around 200GFLOPS using ALL 8 SPU's+PPE+Matrix Multiplication at max.


With the 200+ GFlops testing by IBM they only measured the power of 8 SPEs, they didn't measure PPE/VMX performance. Achieving roughly 98% efficiency.

The 76.8 GFlops for the Xenon is its peak performance. I know of no tests which proved any real world data.

Obviously ignoring the 256GB/s of the eDRAm to the GPU


It's 32 GB/s, take a look at the diagram in the original post.

the bandwidth to the RAM is 22.4GB/s


The bandwidth is shared with the CPU, like already pointed out in the original post. The PS3 has dedicated buses.

As to access the other 256MB of XDR the GPU must go through a 20GB/s read and 15GB/s write bandwidth to the Cell to have access to it (latency).


For most stuff, the memory directly connected to the RSX will be used, but there is enough bandwidth to use the XDR memory as well. I've heard of developers using the XDR as additional texture memory as it not only increases texture memory it also increases texture bandwidth. The latency will increase but RSX this isn't a big problem for GPUs and RSX has bigger than usual caches anyway.

I've also heard of developers writing compressed textures directly from the SPEs to the RSX, this bypasses memory altogether so so effectively reduces latency while increasing bandwidth.



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

selnor on 16 September 2007
MikeB said:
@ selnor

1. It doesnt matter how fast a processer is. If your ram is not up to the job.
With the 360 the develoer can use it how they want. I.e select how much to use for what. The PS3's is dedicated, its already set. They have to use it how it is. Information for the cpu comes from the ram!


Yes, RAM and bandwidth are crucial. The PS3 design has a significant advantage here.

2. The graphics chip in the 360 is far more future proof as it can do some modules that are only available in DX10. The PS3's cant do these. And never will be able to.


The PS3 does not use DirectX 10 at all and the differences with DX9 are marginable.

3. SPE's are foe floating point work. They are not used in games. Mainly for Multimedia stuff.


Multimedia and Games often have much in common. And yes the SPEs are very useful for game development if you (re)write your code specifically for them.

4. And BLU RAY. Games dont need it, it is a con. Hell look at Mass Effect!


Why?

 

OMG!

 

Are you serious.

It's been known from day one of release that PS3's memory is quite a mistake.

Listen PS3 is a gr8 console, but all in all theres not much difference.

Read this article before you say anymore. everyone else should to.

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-348-1.htm

And Isaid Mass Effect because it's currently one of the biggest games and looks absolutely stunning. but it fits on 1 disc.