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

MikeB on 16 September 2007

@ Untamoi

How many households actually have 7.1 or even 5.1 audio? I actually guess that a lot less than 1% have 7.1 sounds and 5.1 sounds are very rare too. I have 5.1 sound system (and happy with it) but I only know a couple other people who have that good audio. I don't know anyone who has 7.1 audio. Majority of households still only have stereo sound systems. Anyway, very few people even notices any difference between 5.1 and 7.1 audio. Some people THINK they notice some difference but if you have an actual blind test they wouldn't know which is 5.1 and which is 7.1 audio.


Yes, but why would you mind if the PS3 supports even higher quality sound? (5.1 is also supported) On the PS3 there's little reason to settle for less. A few years down the road and you may actually own an audio setup capable of 7.1 audio. Consumer electronics are constantly advancing, obviously the PS3 was designed with a longterm perspective. Most people today don't own a HDTV set, although all current PS3 games look good on a PAL TV eventually many people will upgrade to HDTVs over the coming years and can then enjoy the additional picture quality!

In the beginning when I owned an Amiga together with a monitor capable of only TV-like resolutions I took comfort in the fact that as soon as I bought a better monitor I had better resolutions available to me (especially in combination with the option of adding a graphics card).



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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MikeB on 16 September 2007

@ shams

Has there been ANY mention of the system resources that each OS gobbles up?


Yes, take a look at posting #35. But we don't know the most current figures, only that the PS3 is regularly evolving.



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

Entroper on 16 September 2007
shams said:

I haven't followed this thread to date - and have no time or intention to do so.

But two things caught my eye:

1/ I was pretty sure SPU 8 was *completely* disabled as part of the manufacturing process - to keep die sizes down, and the unit itself more stable (and less power drawing). I find it hard to believe that its there in some form of redundancy state.

2/ Has there been ANY mention of the system resources that each OS gobbles up? From what I understand the PS3 reserves at LEAST one of the SPUs - plus an arbitrary amount of general CPU cycles for the OS. And depending what is running, up to 60-100MB of system RAM?

(the 360 uses a fixed amount of 32MB of RAM, and minimal cycles while a game is running?)

 


1) SPE 8 is completely disabled, but it is not removed from the die.  When you make a wafer of chips, there are always defects.  Instead of simply discarding all chips that aren't 100% functional, they take the ones that have 7 out of the 8 SPEs working and disable the bad one.  That means they can produce more viable chips per wafer, which brings costs down.  It doesn't have any effect on the die size, and only a very minimal effect on the power draw.  It's possible that some, or even many, of the chips in PS3s would work fine if you could somehow enable the 8th SPE, but it's also certain that many of them would not work.  It's there on the die, but doesn't add redundancy or stability.



http://entroper.no-ip.org

MikeB on 16 September 2007

A current IMO a little short and non-technical PS3 review: here

Though I hope more people are going to check out Super Stardust HD (IMO beats Geometry wars hands down), it's one of the technically most impressive and addictive PS3 games currently available and I not saying that just because it's create by very talented former Amiga games developers! It's really cheap too!



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

leo-j on 16 September 2007

Developers all say it

Hardware was the ps3 is a much more powerful system than the xbox 360, and there is a long journey to bring its true potential.



 

mM
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MikeB on 16 September 2007

According to Insomniac, Ratchet and Clank Future support 15 languages, even with compression and taking out the localization the game wouldn´t fit on a DVD.



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

Final-Fan on 16 September 2007

MikeB, I want to hear your rebuttal, in detail, to this: 
 

fazz said:
-But according to for example memory experts Rambus the PS3 still has the Edge as the PS3 has a dedicated bus for its GPU while the 360’s GPU needs to share the bus with the CPU when accessing the RAM.

Rambus, the manufacturers of the PS3's XDR RAM. How un-biased... and still wrong. Obviously ignoring the 256GB/s of the eDRAm to the GPU, the bandwidth to the RAM is 22.4GB/s... exactly the same as the PS3. In that case, why we won't consider that the RSX has less RAM directly available? 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). And are we forgetting that the Xenos has the priority for RAM access on the 360?

-the RSX has the advantage of the Cell as its additional aid and higher bandwidths throughout the system

Covered above.

-The PS3 design seems less bottlenecked when compared to the Xbox 360’s design (about memory)

The PS3 is as bottlenecked as the 360. Why? You'll see: let's say that the RSX needs the other 192MB of available RAM that are sticked to the Cell, ok? Now, to write something on that RAM the RSX must go to the Cell first (write), those are 15GB/s, less than the VRAM... and now to read it, go (again) through the Cell... those are 20GB/s... what's the meaning of all this stuff? Higher latency, as the write and read are quite different speeds, and both are slower than the VRAM bandwidth. A bottleneck.


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.

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." - Sen. Pat Moynihan
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The old smileys: ; - ) : - ) : - ( : - P : - D : - # ( c ) ( k ) ( y ) If anyone knows the shortcut for , let me know!
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I have the most epic death scene ever in VGChartz Mafia.  Thanks WordsofWisdom! 

Final-Fan on 16 September 2007

On another note:

I was poking around the Internet for a diagram of the PS3 like the one at Wikipedia of the Xbox 360. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_hardware ) I didn't find it but I found this extremely interesting quote in a very technical article about the Cell:

Cell is a revolution, a completely new microprocessor architecture which, while it may take some time to get used to, promises a vast performance boost over today’s systems. GPUs can already run 10 times faster than desktop CPUs, Cell will not only bring similar performance but will do so for more applications and it’ll be easier to program.

Being produced in large volumes also means the Cell will be cheap. They will likely see wide spread not just in living rooms but but in the realm of industry and science as well. The embedded world is much, much larger than the PC world and often imposes stringent constraints on the components used, the same sort of constraints the Cell has been designed for.

Some have suggested that STI should have gone for a more conventional design such as three PowerPC 970s on a single chip. Such a design would not have addressed the power issues and would, as a result have to of been driven at a relatively low clock rate. Instead, by using simpler designs which use vectors the Cell designers have managed to fit 9 cores on a single chip at a higher clock speed, the potential performance is consequently considerably higher.

The Cell is a new architecture and will seem strange and alien to many used to rather more conventional desktop designs. In order to utilise it properly programers will have face new problems and devise new ways of solving them. It remains to be seen how much of the Cell’s potential can be achieved and how difficult it is to extract it, but it’s clear that STI are trying to make this as painless as possible.

Many people do not like change, to them Cell represents a threat. For others it represents an opportunity.


[edit:  my source is http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html ) 

 

I think that this perfectly explains why some developers seem to talk like 360 fanboys. They don't want to spend the effort on learning completely new architecture, but don't want to admit it to themselves, so they subconsciously rationalize that the Cell must be TEH SUXOR. The ones who are more daring are the ones excited about the possibilities presented while still cognizant of the extra effort that will be required.

 

But this does mean that effectively porting to and from the 360 and the PS3 is probably quite awkward. (No big surprise here coughMaddencough)



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.

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." - Sen. Pat Moynihan
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The old smileys: ; - ) : - ) : - ( : - P : - D : - # ( c ) ( k ) ( y ) If anyone knows the shortcut for , let me know!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I have the most epic death scene ever in VGChartz Mafia.  Thanks WordsofWisdom! 

MikeB on 16 September 2007
Final-Fan said:
MikeB, I want to hear your rebuttal, in detail, to this:  

I already replied above, you will have to go into details explaining exactly what points you still would like to see addressed. I thought I had already replied in detail to anything of relevance.



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

Lost tears of Kain on 16 September 2007
MikeB said:
@ Final-Fan

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.


I agree, the XBox 360 apart from build quality is still a quite capable console (IMO especially ATi did a great job!) and I expect it to take a while until it's full potential is reached. However my article was mainly in response to PS3 bashing.

Yes i agree here Mike, and im not going to argue tech crap.

But i rarely see people bashing the ps3 on technica standpoint (except the blue ray trojan horse move), people mostly bash it for its price and games, which i guess, the price is from the technical standpoint

There is no doubt the ps3 is superior, just you stated almost EVERYTHING that the ps3 is superior, i would of liked to hear how maybe how the 360 has better this blah blah etc



                 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.