arstechnica part 2 : inside the xbox 360
- Thread starter jvd
- Start date
Is MS stupid? The alpha dev kits use ppc 970's but the final dev kit will use the in order xcpu. Which means the final dev kit will most likely run slower than the alphas. This more like a downgrade than a upgrade. How can the developers expect the final dev kit to to run faster?
Maybe if you had some statistics indicating how much of a drop they will get you would be validated in your questions. But I don't think I've seen anyone give real, documented data on the topic.bbot said:
If people think it's going to be that bad, maybe they should look at Kameo's thousands of enemies, Oblivion's Radiant AI or Call of Duty's particle effects. All the hand waving stops when actual games show what can be accomplished.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
These articles were interesting, but there's still too many assumptions and too much speculation.
If I were making some speculative assumptions of my own I would say that Cell is twice the CPU that Xenon is but slightly harder to program. That the Xenos and RSX are comparable GPUs, but the eDRAM on the Xenos gives it an advantage in alleviating some bandwidth. Both systems will be .75 to 1.33 as powerful as one another depending on the game when coded by competent developers.
I would expect the PS3 to be roughly 1.5 times as powerful as the Xenon late in the console lifecycle, mainly once devs are really able to exploit the Cell architecture to the fullest. Nevertheless, MS built a really nice system considering their time frame and they have succeeded in making the graphics battle irrelevant.
This is all just speculation and opinion of course, but why not?
If I were making some speculative assumptions of my own I would say that Cell is twice the CPU that Xenon is but slightly harder to program. That the Xenos and RSX are comparable GPUs, but the eDRAM on the Xenos gives it an advantage in alleviating some bandwidth. Both systems will be .75 to 1.33 as powerful as one another depending on the game when coded by competent developers.
I would expect the PS3 to be roughly 1.5 times as powerful as the Xenon late in the console lifecycle, mainly once devs are really able to exploit the Cell architecture to the fullest. Nevertheless, MS built a really nice system considering their time frame and they have succeeded in making the graphics battle irrelevant.
This is all just speculation and opinion of course, but why not?
And what proof do you have that those things will be degraded in the final game? None. In fact, Rare even stated they wanted to double the number of guys they were rendering in the E3 build. Sounds like the AI and physics code is really horrible with the upgrade, alright.bbot said:
PC-Engine said:Crazyace said:PC-Engine said:
But the 970's do have 2 integer, 2 fpu, and 2 loadstore units - they help a bit
Does it have a VMX unit or and dot product instruction?
The PPC970 doesn't have the VMX128 unit. Only the standard VMX units and is capable of single cycle dot products with FMADD.
Jaws said:PC-Engine said:Crazyace said:PC-Engine said:
But the 970's do have 2 integer, 2 fpu, and 2 loadstore units - they help a bit
Does it have a VMX unit or and dot product instruction?
The PPC970 doesn't have the VMX128 unit. Only the standard VMX units and is capable of single cycle dot products with FMADD.
Sure if you need to do 4 in parallel.
Dot Products are probably the singe most common Math op in 3D and you don't always want 4 of them at the same time.
