Can we really judge a console's power on exclusive games or multiplaform games?

[zeldaring]

I was having a discussion about this on another board with a poster who says ps3 exclusive and specs prove that ps3 is more powerful then 360 i said that's subjective and it's hard to compare exclusives and best to compare multiplaform is a more fair comparison.

My main question can one that has descent knowedge about graphics tech look at 2 impressive looking games with different engines and factually tell which is more techically demanding and proves ps3 is more powerful, or is much better to look at multiplatform games and judge.

Last but not least which game isn't say a game like GTAV ps3/360 way more technically demanding then something like BOTW cause it has to stimulate a city and has to calaculate traffic, and is there a difference in the lighting model cause GTAV seems more accurate.

 

[Nesh]

It is difficult to compare but at the same time there is some point, but not necessarily an indication of which one is more powerful because aspects of their hardware are not apples to apples comparisons

For example the 360 hardware wasn't as suitable for complex deferred renderers as the PS3. So a game like Killzone 2 may probably have had some issues on the 360 if ported. On the other hand games like Ninja Gaiden 2 demonstrated the 360's ability to push out higher amount of objects on screen and transparencies. Therefore Ninja Gaiden 2 Sigma went through a lot of changes on PS3 thus in some areas it is not even the same game.

Similarly the Sega Saturn had issues with transparencies, and geometry output but it could do things with its VDP2 processor that the Playstation could never dream of. Panzer dragoon Zwei and Saga couldn't be reproduced faithfully on PS1 or even the N64. The N64 was theoretically more powerful, had higher res output and texture filtering but it's 64bit checklist wasn't offering any benefits outside of marketing, its memory design was so bad that textures were low res and super blurry and had a huge issue with draw distance. PS1 supposedly could output more polygons than the N64 and higher variety of textures but suffered from texture warping because it lacked a Z buffer and had a much low res output

 

[Karamazov]

i've always seen comparisons of games, multiplat or exclusive, as a good reference to show the strengths and weaknesses of consoles/hardware, and discuss.
But sadly it often ends up in platform wars.

I really like seeing ports of games on much weaker hardware, like the switch ports of Doom of The Witcher 3, and all the workarounds employed to get those games running at a playable state.

 

[techuse]

In practice, no. In theory, maybe?

If we had a given number of developers each spend the same amount of time and money to produce an exclusive with the same visual goal for each console we could compare the results across that sample. The developers could then provide a post-mortem discussing which hardware they feel is more performant. That would be quite the interesting experiment. Were I a billionaire I’d fund it myself.

Multiplatform titles and ports aren’t useful at all for hardware comparisons.

 

[davis.anthony]

Exclusives do give an idea of what machines can do when given sole attention from a developer, even GTA5 would have likely performed/looked better had it been exclusive to either PS3 or 360.

I've always thought multiplats give us a good idea of strengths and weaknesses of the development tools.

And exclusives give us a good idea of hardware strengths and weaknesses.

 

[zeldaring]

In practice, no. In theory, maybe?

If we had a given number of developers each spend the same amount of time and money to produce an exclusive with the same visual goal for each console we could compare the results across that sample. The developers could then provide a post-mortem discussing which hardware they feel is more performant. That would be quite the interesting experiment. Were I a billionaire I’d fund it myself.

Multiplatform titles and ports aren’t useful at all for hardware comparisons.

This doesn't make sense at all. multiplaform games give a much better understanding of the pros and weaknesses, this how PC gpu's are tested. Exlusives don't really give a chance for the hardware to run and compare against each other. Even with 360 vs ps3 multiplaform games made us understand the ps3 and 360 were very close power wise with one being very difficult to develope for. There are also many 3rd party games that used the ps3 to its fullest by the end of the gen.,a nd 360 was righ there.

Comparing exlusives usually end up in a console bias war. like every nintendo fan will claim xenoblade x or BOTW is more techinically impressive then every any open world 7th gen game, i'm not expert but i think this false, but it's always gonna be subjective , same for sony with ps3 every impressive won't run on 360. This is useless comarsion.

 

[zeldaring]

Exclusives do give an idea of what machines can do when given sole attention from a developer, even GTA5 would have likely performed/looked better had it been exclusive to either PS3 or 360.

I've always thought multiplats give us a good idea of strengths and weaknesses of the development tools.

And exclusives give us a good idea of hardware strengths and weaknesses.

Yes they do but no one can look at a exclusive and really know how well it will run on the other console, it's pure specualtion. multiplatform shows where the hardware has it shorts falls like wiiu having a weak cpu or ps3 split memory pool and pian in the ass to develope for.

 

[davis.anthony]

Yes they do but no one can look at a exclusive and really know how well it will run on the other console, it's pure specualtion.

In some cases you can.

A game like Zone Of The Enders 2 on PS2 would not run at 60fps on Xbox or GameCube.

It's just not something applicable to today's hardware as just so similar.

multiplatform shows where the hardware has it shorts falls like wiiu having a weak cpu or ps3 split memory pool and pian in the ass to develope for.

PS3 actually did really well with it's memory after developers wrapped their heads around it.

Wii U want really targeting PS3 and 360 software as Nintendo aren't interested.

 

[zeldaring]

In some cases you can.

A game like Zone Of The Enders 2 on PS2 would not run at 60fps on Xbox or GameCube.

It's just not something applicable to today's hardware as just so similar.



PS3 actually did really well with it's memory after developers wrapped their heads around it.

Wii U want really targeting PS3 and 360 software as Nintendo aren't interested.

Yea i'm not really talking that gen, that was when hardware was crazy foreign and games had a different look to each console.

Actually with wiiu multiplatform games told us the real specs because everyone thought the GPU was 2x when mulitplaform games were not showing while people oever hyped exlusives for wiiu, it also told the cpu was weak.

ps3 it took a whole generation i think multiplaform games told us early on if you want the system that runs the games better get a 360.

 

[davis.anthony]

Yea i'm not really talking that gen, that was when hardware was crazy foreign and games had a different look to each console.

After PS3 and 360 it became all to predictable about they would performance against each other as you just looked at the feature set and specs.

Actually with wiiu multiplatform games told us the real specs.

We knew the real specs, hardware specs don't change so this is a strange comment.

Because everyone thought the GPU was 2x

Compared to what? The GPU on Wii U doesn't have 2x GFLOPs compared to PS3 and 360 so assuming or expecting a 2x increase was/is silly.

when mulitplaform games were not showing while people oever hyped exlusives for wiiu,

Which exclusives?

it also told the cpu was weak.

We didn't need games to show us that, that was obvious just by looking at the specs.

ps3 it took a whole generation i think multiplaform games told us early on if you want the system that runs the games better get a 360

That wasn't the case for the latter half of that generation though as PS3 could be the better platform to play it on.

 

[zeldaring]

After PS3 and 360 it became all to predictable about they would performance against each other as you just looked at the feature set and specs.



We knew the real specs, hardware specs don't change so this is a strange comment.



Compared to what? The GPU on Wii U doesn't have 2x GFLOPs compared to PS3 and 360 so assuming or expecting a 2x increase was/is silly.



Which exclusives?



We didn't need games to show us that, that was obvious just by looking at the specs.



That wasn't the case for the latter half of that generation though as PS3 could be the better platform to play it on.

Were you around during the Wiiu? everyone assumed it was 352 gflops GPU and the bottle neck was the CPU, they kept on ignoring the multiplatform games calling them lazy. even DF came out with a aticle sayong with out a doubt it's 352 gflops after the leak.

As for ps3 that's false. red dead, cod games, skyrim and batman orgins ran much worse on ps3, they were pretty late in the gen.

 

[function]

Were you around during the Wiiu? everyone assumed it was 352 gflops GPU and the bottle neck was the CPU, they kept on ignoring the multiplatform games calling them lazy. even DF came out with a aticle sayong with out a doubt it's 352 gflops after the leak.

We here at B3D were discussing the detailed die shots of the WiiU GPU, and counted the number of physical shader units.

Those of us involved involved in that discussion new full well that the 352 GFLOPS thing was bollocks early on.

Here's an example from early 2014 (please excuse the 8 TMU's comment, I was mixing up the ROP count. It was 4 TMUs for 40 shaders, so 16 TMUs for the 160 shaders as we'd already established at that point).

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...estigation-rename.51528/page-287#post-1583632

As Shakira famously said, "the chips don't lie".

 

[function]

I was having a discussion about this on another board with a poster who says ps3 exclusive and specs prove that ps3 is more powerful then 360 i said that's subjective and it's hard to compare exclusives and best to compare multiplaform is a more fair comparison.

PS3 exclusives show you what the PS3 could do, but tell you nothing about what the 360 couldn't do.

Multiplatform is better, but it's still incomplete as a game may be built focusing more on exploiting one type of hardware (typically the lead platform), or may be sufficiently generic to fully exploit nothing. For none-lead platforms port priorities and budgets can also affect quality or performance. And yes, tools and APIs can make a real difference too.

I know someone that worked on a technically accomplished multiplat PS3/360 game (that pushed the CPU hard too). PS3 was lead platform, and their approach was to push the PS3 as hard as possible and not worry about the 360 version too much, because they were confident that performance wise whatever they got out of the PS3 they'd be able to get out of the 360 also. They were right - the final game ran well and looked great on both. Job done.

 

[davis.anthony]

Were you around during the Wiiu?

Yes.

everyone assumed it was 352 gflops GPU

I didn't assume that and loads of others didn't either.

and the bottle neck was the CPU

Anyone with a half decent brain would know that just by looking at the clock speed of the CPU.

, they kept on ignoring the multiplatform games calling them lazy.

That's their subjective opinion.

even DF came out with a aticle sayong with out a doubt it's 352 gflops after the leak.

So? DF aren't gospel truth and do get things wrong.

As for ps3 that's false. red dead, cod games, skyrim and batman orgins ran much worse on ps3, they were pretty late in the gen.

There are games that run and perform better on PS3 over 360, that is just a factual comment that I'm not going to spend my time trying to convince you.

 

[zeldaring]

PS3 exclusives show you what the PS3 could do, but tell you nothing about what the 360 couldn't do.

Multiplatform is better, but it's still incomplete as a game may be built focusing more on exploiting one type of hardware (typically the lead platform), or may be sufficiently generic to fully exploit nothing. For none-lead platforms port priorities and budgets can also affect quality or performance. And yes, tools and APIs can make a real difference too.

I know someone that worked on a technically accomplished multiplat PS3/360 game (that pushed the CPU hard too). PS3 was lead platform, and their approach was to push the PS3 as hard as possible and not worry about the 360 version too much, because they were confident that performance wise whatever they got out of the PS3 they'd be able to get out of the 360 also. They were right - the final game ran well and looked great on both. Job done.

Thanks for the very informative post, and yea you were right about the wiiu. of course fanboys completely spread misinfromation but even before that chipworks pic it was clear that the GPU was near 360 cause if it was double it would have eventually showed in at least one multiplatform game.

I agree. Multiplaform games at least 8-10 combined with specs are a much better at figuring out hardware power, and bottlenecks.

 

[zeldaring]

Thanks for the very informative post, and yea you were right about the wiiu. of course fanboys completely spread misinfromation but even before that chipworks pic it was clear that the GPU was near 360 cause if it was double it would have eventually showed in at least one multiplatform game.

I agree. Multiplaform games at least 8-10 combined with specs are a much better at figuring out hardware power, and bottlenecks.

They assumed the cpu was a bottleneck for the GPU which they thought was 352 gflops, but that never made sense. just because the cpu was weak didn't mean that some multplatform games could not get a bump in resolution, if the gpu was much stronger.

As for ps3 yea it ran some games better but for the most part 360 was on par or ran games better in signifant ways till 2012.

 

[Globalisateur]

I was having a discussion about this on another board with a poster who says ps3 exclusive and specs prove that ps3 is more powerful then 360 i said that's subjective and it's hard to compare exclusives and best to compare multiplaform is a more fair comparison.

My main question can one that has descent knowedge about graphics tech look at 2 impressive looking games with different engines and factually tell which is more techically demanding and proves ps3 is more powerful, or is much better to look at multiplatform games and judge.

Last but not least which game isn't say a game like GTAV ps3/360 way more technically demanding then something like BOTW cause it has to stimulate a city and has to calaculate traffic, and is there a difference in the lighting model cause GTAV seems more accurate.

That question has being settled by Kojima (known to heavily favor Playstation hardware) and his team on MGS5 running on both consoles, after years of development and likely polishing. X360 version easily outperforms PS3 version in that game. X360 was a true beast (as it released one year before PS3). For me that game settled the PS3 vs X360 case.

One could make the argument that Cerny was inspired by X360 hardware (not PS3 LOL) when he designed PS4.

 

[zeldaring]

That question has being settled by Kojima (known to heavily favor Playstation hardware) and his team on MGS5 running on both consoles, after years of development and likely polishing. X360 version easily outperforms PS3 version in that game. X360 was a true beast (as it released one year before PS3). For me that game settled the PS3 vs X360 case.

One could make the argument that Cerny was inspired by X360 hardware (not PS3 LOL) when he designed PS4.

Agreed you can't keep running most games better and not be the superior hardware overall.

 

[Remij]

It's..... complicated.

That's the answer.

 

[techuse]

This doesn't make sense at all. multiplaform games give a much better understanding of the pros and weaknesses, this how PC gpu's are tested. Exlusives don't really give a chance for the hardware to run and compare against each other. Even with 360 vs ps3 multiplaform games made us understand the ps3 and 360 were very close power wise with one being very difficult to develope for. There are also many 3rd party games that used the ps3 to its fullest by the end of the gen.,a nd 360 was righ there.

Comparing exlusives usually end up in a console bias war. like every nintendo fan will claim xenoblade x or BOTW is more techinically impressive then every any open world 7th gen game, i'm not expert but i think this false, but it's always gonna be subjective , same for sony with ps3 every impressive won't run on 360. This is useless comarsion.

Multiplatform games are designed around a lowest common denominator target with the goal of being “good enough to release” on as many platforms as possible. Exclusives are designed to maximize a single piece of hardware. Thats why, with the exception of games from a single developer, the best looking games on consoles are always exclusives.