[Consolidate] PS3 vs 360 hardware, what we know

[gongo]

Before turning your backs on this thread with fanboy issues...think for a moment, there have been open discussions of other consoles spec wars, the xbox, gamecube, saturn, dreamcast..just that they only began once a gen was over. This i asked why do we have to wait until next gen to openly talk about PS3/360 specs? Developers' nda? They could talk about general issues...which i think many had.

IMO this is a fair time to judge both consoles..in one thread, this one.

That is my opening i hope its convincing enough. So thread proper...my personal opinion is that of ID Tech opinions...the PS3 is a more powerful but convoluted hardware. More in what ways? IIRC PS3 SPEs are very fast...it is very well suited for post processing layers and particle rendering...that being the biggest strength of PS3...to take DX9 std graphics and mixed it up with SPEs led effects. RSX have received the most criticism...but it is not that bad as a Burnout developer once said...the pixel shading theoretically has a higher output..but the efficiency and smaller bandwidth/fillrate requires one to be carefully not wasteful...you are not going to see thick volumes of smoke on PS3....fillrate/alpha.

360 strength is the Xenos gpu...a high efficiency unified unit...it is also able to push out more polygons...free 2xAA, as long you do some tiling..the memory configuring is one big pool and with a smaller amount reserved, makes most developers' work easier. The cpu however is very poor...as one developer IIRC puts it, the design means more for marketing than perf., it could do with less GFLOPs and still work better as a cpu.

As for the games... PS3 exclusives Killzone 2, Uncharted 2 and GT5 certainly show us how good graphics can be done on PS3. 360 has its fair share of technically good games but compared to PS3 best...they do appear slightly lacking...either in perf. or DX9 std good looking...some commentary has it put down to budget issues...not sure about this.

So that concludes my evaluation..for now, until more comments to consolidate what we know so far.

 

[Acert93]

the PS3 is a more powerful

I think comments like this (even with the qualifier) are too abstract and treat the hardware as a linear resource. "More powerful" is only defined by the software's need for resources; e.g. that statement isn't equally true (or true at all) when looking at different metrics (memory footprint or certain shader performance, as examples).

You post falls apart from there imo as you build a lot of assumptions as directly related to your conclusions that don't necessarily follow. e.g. Software can be judged by many metrics (where do services or features fit into how good hardware is?) and the end product is as much, if not moreso, of developer talent and resources as it is the hardware. And it would be niave to ignore that different developers have different pressures, markets, and requirements (e.g. take a 3rd party multiplatform developer with a 50 person team and 24 months to create a title; their opinion will different from a 90 person team with a 3 year design budget exclusive to a platform). Generalizing without a context is just asking for trouble.

Now if you want to discuss very specific scenarios or circumstances of how hardware performs, that is a little more concrete. But it is never simple to extrapolate such to the bigger picture without taking other considerations into view.

 

[liolio]

I think that the only reasonable conclusion (I mean without taking the risk to derail the thread) is that both systems are way closer than what most expected years ago.
Strengths and lacking of both systems have been discussed a lot in various topics, I'm not sure that it will be possible to have a something like a synthesis on the matter.
If it's about personal opinion a pool could be fun.

 

[Farid]

Versus threads

While the first post was started with a reasonable intent, these type of threads are rarely delivrering anything other mass amount of noise and drivel.

There are already a lot of interesting information, with regard to multiplatfom development, in the various threads about image quality, as well as the threads about middleware engines.