If you’re one of the sad people who will be camping out at your favourite store awaiting a console that they won’t even have (hell, people who’ve preordered aren’t even getting them), you can be safe in the knowledge that you are buying a machine which will no longer be (*ahem*) anywhere near cutting-edge in six months’ time. Sorry MS fanboys, but the PS3 will be more than twice as powerful as the X360 and Sony will probably not deliberately engineer a shortage
Correction: Well, nearly a year after this post and I have been proved wrong.
I’m not an MS fanboy (and won’t be buying a 360 anytime soon) but:
1. PS3 is not twice as powerful as 360 (based on their specs). In some ways it is more powerful, in other ways it’s a lot less powerful. Saying one is more powerful than the others is comparing apples and oranges, from 100 yards, and doesn’t paint a fair picture either way.
2. Sony not engineer a shortage? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Obviously you’ve never worked in games retail, where everyone knows Sony have engineered shortages at every hardware and major software launch as well as every major holiday season.
Neither console is looking particularly great. Surprisingly, the massively underpowered (any way you look at it) Revolution is looking like the best of the next gen for sheer innovation. More on that some time this month over on my site.
I must agree with gary, my project at the moment involves a deep look at system architectures and I have studied both the x360 and ps3. The 360 is a more straightforward architecture, and without extreme changes in the way game studios code up thier games the ps3 would perform at a rate much less than anything currently claimed, and certainly does not dwarf the 360 in anything.
Er.. yes it is. Xbox 360 processor: 1.08 teraflops. PS3 processor: 2.something teraflops. In other words the PS3 processor is twice as powerful, which is what I said. FLOPS is one of the few objective ways of measuring a system’s performance (as opposed to clock speed, which from the Pentium v Athlon debate means jack shit, or how shiny the graphics look)
Actually, you said “but the PS3 will be more than twice as powerful as the X360″. A system is more than just a processor, a hell of a lot more. The PS3’s downfall is going to be the cell architecture, together the cells are powerful, but on thier own they are terrible little shites - hence my saying that the PS3 performance will be terrible, unless game developers change to an extremely multithreaded design. It just so happens current game dev is not as multithreaded as one may think, usually there are only a few - resource control, renderer, gamecode, if you are very lucky you may squeeze out one more. How many cells are in the PS3? 7-8? half the ‘peak’ performance gone some may say. This is why the xbox360 wins in my book, each ppc core can actually perform well on their own, the only flaw in the 360 architecture I can see is that there is only 1mb l2 cache shared between a max of 6 hardware threads. Compared to the ps3 thats just the top of the iceberg.
Since the Xbox 360 is also multicore (don’t know about the revolution, but the ‘remote control’ makes it irrelevant) developers will have to learn multi-threading to make best use of either of the next generation consoles.
Indeed. The issue I’m getting at, is that while just utilising 1 core of the x360 (2 threads) you can still get a huge amount of performace. But for the cell to get it’s performance means you need to utilise pretty much all of them, and game developers are really going to have to change attitudes. Most of the current crop of launch date x360 games are only using 1 core for the game, and another for resource loading - it still has huge potential for the future.
Yeah but that’s the case for most new consoles - just compare the graphics of Gran Turismo 4 with those of some of the PS2’s launch games. Also, the fact that the Cell is so much more powerful means that to get an equivalent performance to the X360’s PowerPC you wouldn’t have to use all of them (although using 8 cores instead of 16 is probably small consolation to developers) - and when developers finally do learn to code properly for both consoles, the PS3 will be much better than the X360.
Sigh. You don’t understand my argument, and I cant really be arsed explaining it all again
While it’s probably not wise to go into this much more given that you’ve missed the point Colin is making, it’s important to note that floating point performance, while important, is not the be and end all of console performance while running game code (leaving aside the fact that both quoted figures are skewed since MS and Sony decided to include GPU speed in that as well as CPU).
For gaming there are two equally important measures, if not more so: 1) system bandwidth, and 2) shader throughput.
On both of those measures, the 360 soundly whoops the PS3 (by a factor of 6 and 3 respectively).
Taking everytng together and thinking specifically about games, there’s really nothing in it.
Further reading: Edge, issue 152.
Ah… hang on a minute. Sorry, completely misunderstood what Colin was saying (thought you were arguing about the numbers themselves, in fact you were arguing that the numbers [FLOPS in this case] aren’t a particularly good way of measuring performance). *shuts up*