Which gaming system should I purchase?

[Waphlez]

Yea seriously, the PS3 uses the RSX which is based on the nvidia G70 architecture (or the 7800 cards). The 360's Xenon, or the R500, is based off the R520 and is a mic between the X1900 or R580. The xenon is much more efficient, G70 is old hardware. This goes the same to your cell argument:

You can't compare cross-platform games, for the PS3, the games are not optimized to use the cell. For the 360, the games are not optimized to use Xenon; and this article brings up a good point:

bit-tech.net | Interview: ATI and the Xbox 360

The PS3 does appear to have a huge amount of CPU power with the seven Cell cores. The problem they have is that CPU power isn't really what developer's need – the bottleneck is really the graphics. Everybody is going multi-threaded and multi-core – the Xbox 360 has three PowerPC cores, AMD and Intel both have dual-core chips, so everyone is having to learn how to write this stuff. But writing multi-threaded apps for two or three cores is difficult. Doing it for seven separate cores, when the main core has a slightly different feature-set from the other six, is very, very difficult.

Being a tech forum I think we all can agree that a computer using an 8800 using a slower processor would still out perform a computer using a faster processor but with a 7900.

Today's games depend mostly on GPU power, not CPU; and yes the Cell does help render, but that is a poor system of doing things. You don't want to force rendering between the two like that. It should be placed on the GPU so the cpu can be used more for other things. Most programmers know how to work with the common type of CPUs, like the multi-core 360 processor, the cell's SPE system is more complicated, and a lot of their developers need to be trained to use it, increasing development time and costs.

You say Assassin's Creed is being "dumbed down" for the 360. The fact is, when a game goes cross-platform, it is always "dumbed down" no matter what. The 2 systems are very different, and sacrifices must be made. If a 360 based game went to the PS3 as well, it too would be less quality. That is why exclusives are better quality.

 

[TheEnd187]

why compare the 8800vs7900? it would be more fair if it was a 7950vsx1950, you kinda went overboard with the comparison

 

[killians45]

Yes, the cell CAN in fact be used for GPU processes. However, they are not DESIGNED for it what-so-ever. The original intent of the cell was to also take over as the GPU but they found that to be impractical and as a result had the current GPU added shortly before release, THAT is why it is not as powerful. Had they planed the GPU in the beginning it would of been an amazing system, but they dropped the ball there. So the problem they now are facing is a bottle neck in certain bandwidth areas. Again, this is NOT fan boyism this is just a fact of the architecture of t he PS3. I like the PS3, and if it was cheaper would get one (but having a family kind of limits your expenses, oh well... can't have everything) so as a result I can't afford one yet.Anyhow, it is a true fact that the GPU on the 360 offers much more detail and can scale the AA and res with no hit to performance because of it's eDRAM instruction sets that allows for a much larger bandwidth that the PS3 is capable of. Everyone is so focused in speed and memory, when the real problem of the PS3 comes down to two things: difficult to program for (say all you want, it wont get THAT much easier) and a problem in bottle necking. I wish they HAD solved that problem because man... this maching would of been absolutelty amazing, but alas

 

[Waphlez]

why compare the 8800vs7900? it would be more fair if it was a 7950vsx1950, you kinda went overboard with the comparison

It was an analogy, not to be taken in scale, a faster GPU with a slower processor will out perform a slower GPU and a faster GPU usually stands true, unless the hardware is so far apart you can't compare.

The problem with the cell, is that it is a HUGE powerhouse with theoretical benchmarks, but in terms of real-world performance it just can't compare.

Theoretically SLI was supposed to be very efficient down the road, they were boasting that it had the potential to get 80-100 percent performance boost from the two GPUs in ALL games. We know that the average is anywhere between 30-45%, very few games get more than a 60% increase. Splitting the rendering between a GPU and a CPU makes it even less efficient, they use different architectures. That is why nvidia didn't make support for different GPUs to be used in SLI (like a 7900GT and a 7800GTX), it isn't practical and a lot of games wouldn't take it very well.

The cell is sort of like a Ferrari, sure it can go 165+ MPH with no problem, but in the real-world you are limited to 55-75 MPH speed limits. The cell has a theoretical performance measured at somewhere between 1.8 - 2 TFLOPs, does it compare to real-world testing? no.

The reason why 3dMark is so popular is because it isn't all theoretical BS, it's based off of tests which are very similar to real-world game rendering.

 

[killians45]

That is also another reason why showing performance in floating points is useless. The FP calcs doesn't show any true performance.

 

[Waphlez]

Also another note, the RSX can not run a game in HDR with Anti-Aliasing, it's just not possible since it uses the G70 architecture. The xenon, being based mostly off of the X1900 cards, can. That is why Oblivion on the 360 has HDR and 4xAA. and the PS3 only has HDR.

 

[TheEnd187]

still looks better on the ps3 even after the patch for 360 is applied

 

[Brinson]

still looks better on the ps3 even after the patch for 360 is applied

Yeah, and the 3 people who played it on the ps3 were impressed.

Why is it so much fun to mess with fanboys?

 

[TheEnd187]

yeah there are only 3 ps3 owners in the world, good one.

HALO SUCKS

PS3FTW!!!
360FTL

 

[Waphlez]

still looks better on the ps3 even after the patch for 360 is applied

Matter of opinion, and PS3 got more attention from the team, they made a lot of changes to the engine directly on the disk, some dinky patch loaded on a hard drive can only do so much. The patch got nowhere near the development time the PS3 version did. Besides, PC graphics pwn all.