Xbox 360 Vs. PS3: Graphics RAM battle?

[prankstare]

Originally Posted by ViN86

5 years from now we will have the next generation of consoles and it won't matter.

I don't think it will be this close. Think it'll take some more years until next gen-consoles come out.

Originally Posted by prankstare

I don't think it will be this close. Think it'll take some more years until next gen-consoles come out.

No it wont, it would be already 10 years into the console life span...

[prankstare]

Originally Posted by |MaguS|

No it wont, it would be already 10 years into the console life span...

Well thought!

[Lyme]

I remember this conversation from a while back.. deja-vu?

Anyhow, as someone who is firmly in the 360 camp and has chosen it as my platform of choice between the two, I can state hands down that overall the PS3 has better hardware. However, and this is a big however, both the decisions on design and architecture are non-standard, strange, and arguably flawed.

Ken Kutaragi, said "PlayStation 3 is intentionally difficult to program for in order to ensure that the console meets its promised ten year life cycle.". Which in essence boils down to the realization that 'yes', Sony did intentionally do strange things to enforce a longer learning curve to eek out all the power of the system. To add insult to injury, Sony's development suite, compared to industry standards, is primitive and cobbled together.

Comparatively, MS made the 360 very straightforward and easy to understand. Then to entice developers, they provided some of the best developer tools and tightly integrated them. Lets face it, Visual Studio is a programmers wet dream compared to GCC.

Back to hardware and design decisions,
CPU: The CPU of the PS3 is overall more powerful, and we go 'but' again, but the arrangement is one 'full' core with a number of slimmed down cores (spe)s. Which has forced developers to adapt to the unique arrangement of non-heterogeneous core processing, and typically works itself out in a command and control arrangement. While the 360 has a triple 'full' core design with no slimmed down cores. This is a typical heterogeneous core design which is easily identified and understood across industry. It doesn't help that the sole ps3 full core is only as powerful as one of the 360 full cores. However those SPEs can pack a punch, and really excel at SIMD type instructions (like matrix transforms). In short, the CELL is more powerful but only if you devote extra care and time to the design of your code, while the 360 cpu simply performs.

GPU & Memory: It has been rumored that at one time Sony was originally going to ship the PS3 with two CELL chips, one for processing, the other for graphics, but discovered that developing a graphics API was quite a bit more difficult than expected (Reminds me of Intel) and scrambled to find a GPU to use. Regardless of if this is true or not, the addition of the nVidia GPU seems to most to be a last minute decision. The raw performance of the PS3 GPU on it's own is somewhat less than what is found in the 360, but with the assistance of the CELL SPEs it can outperform what the 360 has to offer. With a well designed system this would not be a issue, but Sony opted for a non-unified memory model. As is the norm with most games, the graphics are the bulk of the content. Just look at almost any game on a pc and you'll see that the executable (the code) is very small compared to all the "art". Because of this non-unified model, the GPU can only directly use textures and models that are in graphics memory, everything else has to be copied in as needed be it on disk/disc or in system ram, pulling from these places incurs a performance penalty. While conversely, the GPU on the 360 can pull "art" from potentially twice the amount of ram without penalty. This forces PS3 developers to have to pay extra attention/effort to managing their graphic assets.

Media: One of the best and more contentious choices Sony made was to include a blu-ray drive in the PS3. While this offers significantly more storage than the 360 dvd9 format drives (near 5x the capacity), the blu-ray drive is also significantly slower than a dvd drive. To offset this, many PS3 developers copy a lot of assets to the PS3 hard drive which makes initial load times longer but follow on load times quicker. The 360 due to the optional hard drive will stream the data from the dvd drive.

Scaling: As strange as it sounds, the scaler is unarguably one of the only parts of the PS3 that is worse than on the 360. In general the scaler on the 360 will scale virtually from any resolution to any resolution, making it easy as pie for a developer to target any resolution on a output device that someone may have the 360 hooked up to, plus it does a pretty darn smack up job at it. The PS3 on the other hand doesn't have a dedicated scaler, and uses some creative methods to rescale the output to fixed resolutions. For the most part people have simply become used to this limitation and live with it.

In summary, the ps3 is more powerful but at a development cost. If the last few years have shown us, the additional development cost to tease out this additional performance is generally only done by first party studios, while the tight budgets of 3rd party studios prefer the 360 because of the low development cost for virtually the same effect.

[jlippo]

Originally Posted by Lyme

Because of this non-unified model, the GPU can only directly use textures and models that are in graphics memory, everything else has to be copied in as needed be it on disk/disc or in system ram, pulling from these places incurs a performance penalty.

Um.
RSX can read and write with quite nice speed from/to main memory.
Cell can read very slowly Graphics memory, this means RSX is usually used for data transfer between memory pools.

[CaptnStubing]

When I am sitting down playing a game I don't think about which is better because for the most part they are close to each other. Only nerds will jump up and down and trumpet their favorite fap machine.

[ArcadeMachine15]

All i can see here is fans of either one of the consoles... Let me get this out for all of you, xbox 360 has more ram, NOT a lot but if i read correctly there is 128 mb's of more ram on the xbox dedicated to graphics. The ps3 has less memory because of its blue ray disks witch are capable of preforming better picture. People were saying the ps3 has a better cpu. That's if you were comparing the ps3 to the old xbox 360, the new slim one has a superior cpu with the gpu built in to it to form one. that leads up to less failure rates and better performance and as we all know none of the new slims fail like the old xbox's failed design. Now ps3 on the other hand it has great graphics but not the good games people buy the xbox to play and most people don't know this but the ps3 eats up internet memory FAST and the xbox barley eats up any and that's one of the reasons xbox make you pay for live, and all the extra features, protection and updates. But the ps3 is also lacking the party or whatever you would like to call it, they have chat but you cant talk to more than one person if i read correctly and the xbox only had chat in 2007 till it updated to the 8 way chat known as parties, So the ps3 is looking like a downfall in every way but the blueray that preforms better picture but i read up if your playing a games that are on both consoles the xbox looks better so only ps3 exclusives look the best. And if i saw right the ps3 has been using the same controller design for 12 years.... And i saw there was a pc guy in here.. common gaming pc's cost 1500$ why would you even go there.

[H3avyM3tal]

Seriously?

(the internetz make me show my inner troll)

[Ninja Prime]

[jlippo]

Well, what an interesting thread resurrection..

[Europianist]

Originally Posted by Lyme

I remember this conversation from a while back.. deja-vu?

Anyhow, as someone who is firmly in the 360 camp and has chosen it as my platform of choice between the two, I can state hands down that overall the PS3 has better hardware. However, and this is a big however, both the decisions on design and architecture are non-standard, strange, and arguably flawed.

Ken Kutaragi, said "PlayStation 3 is intentionally difficult to program for in order to ensure that the console meets its promised ten year life cycle.". Which in essence boils down to the realization that 'yes', Sony did intentionally do strange things to enforce a longer learning curve to eek out all the power of the system. To add insult to injury, Sony's development suite, compared to industry standards, is primitive and cobbled together.

Comparatively, MS made the 360 very straightforward and easy to understand. Then to entice developers, they provided some of the best developer tools and tightly integrated them. Lets face it, Visual Studio is a programmers wet dream compared to GCC.

Back to hardware and design decisions,
CPU: The CPU of the PS3 is overall more powerful, and we go 'but' again, but the arrangement is one 'full' core with a number of slimmed down cores (spe)s. Which has forced developers to adapt to the unique arrangement of non-heterogeneous core processing, and typically works itself out in a command and control arrangement. While the 360 has a triple 'full' core design with no slimmed down cores. This is a typical heterogeneous core design which is easily identified and understood across industry. It doesn't help that the sole ps3 full core is only as powerful as one of the 360 full cores. However those SPEs can pack a punch, and really excel at SIMD type instructions (like matrix transforms). In short, the CELL is more powerful but only if you devote extra care and time to the design of your code, while the 360 cpu simply performs.

GPU & Memory: It has been rumored that at one time Sony was originally going to ship the PS3 with two CELL chips, one for processing, the other for graphics, but discovered that developing a graphics API was quite a bit more difficult than expected (Reminds me of Intel) and scrambled to find a GPU to use. Regardless of if this is true or not, the addition of the nVidia GPU seems to most to be a last minute decision. The raw performance of the PS3 GPU on it's own is somewhat less than what is found in the 360, but with the assistance of the CELL SPEs it can outperform what the 360 has to offer. With a well designed system this would not be a issue, but Sony opted for a non-unified memory model. As is the norm with most games, the graphics are the bulk of the content. Just look at almost any game on a pc and you'll see that the executable (the code) is very small compared to all the "art". Because of this non-unified model, the GPU can only directly use textures and models that are in graphics memory, everything else has to be copied in as needed be it on disk/disc or in system ram, pulling from these places incurs a performance penalty. While conversely, the GPU on the 360 can pull "art" from potentially twice the amount of ram without penalty. This forces PS3 developers to have to pay extra attention/effort to managing their graphic assets.

Media: One of the best and more contentious choices Sony made was to include a blu-ray drive in the PS3. While this offers significantly more storage than the 360 dvd9 format drives (near 5x the capacity), the blu-ray drive is also significantly slower than a dvd drive. To offset this, many PS3 developers copy a lot of assets to the PS3 hard drive which makes initial load times longer but follow on load times quicker. The 360 due to the optional hard drive will stream the data from the dvd drive.

Scaling: As strange as it sounds, the scaler is unarguably one of the only parts of the PS3 that is worse than on the 360. In general the scaler on the 360 will scale virtually from any resolution to any resolution, making it easy as pie for a developer to target any resolution on a output device that someone may have the 360 hooked up to, plus it does a pretty darn smack up job at it. The PS3 on the other hand doesn't have a dedicated scaler, and uses some creative methods to rescale the output to fixed resolutions. For the most part people have simply become used to this limitation and live with it.

In summary, the ps3 is more powerful but at a development cost. If the last few years have shown us, the additional development cost to tease out this additional performance is generally only done by first party studios, while the tight budgets of 3rd party studios prefer the 360 because of the low development cost for virtually the same effect.

The Xbox 360's CPU is actually theoretically powerful but it has low real performance because of the slow cache. The vmx 128 registers were powerful and it has 3 cores, but the slow caching kills it.

2 cells would not have been a good idea, especially if they both couldn't do graphics and if they didn't have some texture units. OTOH an iGPU is a waste of die space and tdp because Haswell could instead have more avx2 units per core (or 8 cores instead of 4) and standard DDR4 support ( they would need to keep the TMDS and probably some texture units as well). The scatter/gather instructions and FMA will help a lot with things like rasterization. It's a shame that intel is going to just continue trying to improve the iGPU.