How can we compare the Xenos to other unified shader PC GPUs?

[Neb]

What is the cost of a PC that can do 720P/30fps? And what CPU/GPU/RAM needed. Thanks.

For les than 600$ excluding monitor you get a PC with dual-core CPU and 7900GT GPU or better with 2GB RAM. Such a PC would run the game at morethan 30fps at 720p with added graphics.

Also, what about Gears of War to have 720P/30fps?

Not out yet but straight from the devs and shown in interviews is GEoW running at 1920*1200 with improved graphics at 60fps with a 8800GTX. :smile:

My friend, they already have 1080p games.

And look how much they have to cut-down on graphics fidelity to maintain this resolution. Utterly ugly shadows due to low shadowmap res, textures without mapping, cardboard objects (trees etc), no AA, no AF and so on.

Not to forget that many 1080p games dont even run at native 1080p! GT5 runs at 1280*1080p (check Quaz51 posts in the res thread) for example and Lair uses some trick to render less pixels according to some on this forum with knowledge (~960x1080p?).

 

[swaaye]

My friend, they already have 1080p games.

I'm aware of this. But we also have AAA games running at weird resolutions like 1024x640 to work around RAM and performance limits.

There's nothing mystical about the console GPUs that make them immune to bottlenecks. RSX is basically a 7900 GTX with half the pixel fillrate and bandwidth. Xenos is more nifty but it has similar fillrate, and it doesn't quite have enough EDRAM for better anti-aliasing usability. The fact that both machines are limited to using <512 MB RAM for the game will hurt image quality, especially textures.

To be honest, I've been disgusted by a few 360 games. Primarily Forza 2. It uses bilinear filtering in some spots, which is terrible in 2007. It lacks AA most of the time and never uses any anisotropic filtering as far as I can tell. And this is a AAA game from MS basically. On the other hand, DIRT uses what looks like 4X AA but runs at 30fps or less at times. This is rather telling about what the hardware can do, IMO.

I'm not impressed that devs who can tailor their games down to the metal skip anisotropic filtering and leave games a blurry mess. It smells of hardware limitations, really. AF really hurts G7x (RSX) performance (NV cheated like crazy with their filtering with those chips), and hell who knows what the story is with Xenos.

 

[Mobius1aic]

Discussions like these really make me wonder why either MS or Sony didn't make an effort to design their consoles with 256-bit memory buses and a full 1 GB of memory. I know it costs money to develope, but perhaps if at least Sony didn't have their head up their ass about Blu-Ray so much, perhaps a more manageable budget could've been attained. As for MS, the overall offering of the 360, (except the hardware failure issues) can't even be touched as not only do you have a great console, but better graphics in many cases, as well as a superior online service, not to mention those great ad campaigns early on *BANG BANG BANG*

 

[swaaye]

I think 360 was initially rumored to have 256 MB RAM, actually.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Not rumoured. That's been confirmed in Dean Takahashi's book. Originally it was to have 256 MB RAM, and developers (some say Rockstar single handedly!) pressured them increase it.

 

[JardeL]

It was Epic Games ...

 

[Mobius1aic]

I think 360 was initially rumored to have 256 MB RAM, actually.

I remember that initial figure from somewhere too. Kinda funny since the console really does need 768 or 1024 MB instead. Do developer systems have more RAM like the original Xbox dev units?

 

[AlNom]

According to an IGN blog post from BioWare, the Xbox 360 XDK's do not have double the memory of retail units as prior console development kits did.

http://blogs.ign.com/BioWare_Games/2007/05/03/53888/

...the Xbox 360 offers a different challenge than we had on the PC or even the original Xbox, through a seemingly innocent difference: the development Xbox 360 units have the same memory as retail ones.

...

On the Xbox 360 however, players get a beefy 512MB of memory to play in, but us developers don’t get any extra room beyond that. So the reverse happens: we first make the most basic graphics fit within memory, and then we upgrade the visuals as we optimize the game. We’re also constantly tuning the art and the renderer to gradually improve the overall quality. Therefore you can actually expect the final game to look better than we’ve ever shown it.

 

[Mobius1aic]

According to an IGN blog post from BioWare, the Xbox 360 XDK's do not have double the memory of retail units as prior console development kits did.

http://blogs.ign.com/BioWare_Games/2007/05/03/53888/

Interesting way of looking at it.

 

[Mat3]

For R600, 320 shaders means 320 scalar processors, but for Xenos, 48 shaders mean 48 vec4 plus 48 scalar.

There are pros and cons to everything... what are the disadvantages to going scalar over vector?

Any idea how many fewer transitors vec4 plus 1 would be vs 5-way superscalar?

 

[Megadrive1988]

I think 360 was initially rumored to have 256 MB RAM, actually.

Xenon / Xbox 360 wasn't just rumored to have only 256 MB RAM, it was actually *going* to have 256 MB. the leaked design doc with block diagram that appeared in the internet in mid 2004 showed "256+" MB RAM.



It wasn't until developers (especially Epic) pleaded with Microsoft to put in 512 MB, that Xbox 360 got 512 MB. it was a major decision for Microsoft. the right one. of course we would've all loved 1GB but that just wasn't affordable, sadly.

the PS3 was at one point, was rumored to have 128 MB and then rumored to have 256 MB of RAM.

I am sure once Sony knew Xbox 360 was going to have 512 MB, they drew up specs that had PS3 with 512 MB also (256 MB + 256 MB).

 

[Cheezdoodles]

.
Any reason as to why ATi didn't use it for a PC graphics board? Frankly it would have given ATi a nice product to offer that Nvidia didn't have until the 8 series. Even if Xenos really isn't fully DX10 capable, you still can't mess with the pure efficiency of a unified shader GPU, even with DX9.

ATI did use it!

The Xenos GPU was the first ever gaming GPU to have unified shaders, and then, 2 months later, something called a X1900XTX came out for the PC's, which raped nvidia's ass sore for many months.

 

[AlNom]

The X1900 or any pre-R600 boards didn't make use of unified shaders... The R600 was called their second gen unified shader part after Xenos. And even then R600 ROPs can't do single-cycle 4xAA.

 

[Kaotik]

Was Xenos really the first implementation of the project that started as R400? Or only the first that actually got to any use?

 

[D3B]

Sorry for the off-topic but I thought UT3 on PC wasnt using the full spec, it has downgraded textures to fit in demo, so nobody really knows the performance?

 

[Neb]

Sorry for the off-topic but I thought UT3 on PC wasnt using the full spec, it has downgraded textures to fit in demo, so nobody really knows the performance?

Yep nobody really knows the perfomance of the final PC version, but remember that the PC version sports higher-res textures apart from some other graphics IQ enhancements. But my impression has been (adding high-res texture mods for many games) that adding higher-res textures has low impact on perfomance aslong as there is VRAM available.