How did Xbox 360 and PS3 get their numbers?

[LunchBox]

Just for the sake of discussion.
It's really irritating me that all this jabber is makig its way mainstream. But I'm quite curious on how thet got their numbers.
I'm refering to their 1 TFLOP and 2 TFLOP claims btw.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This has been asked lots of times. Read around. Basically they...made them up!

 

[cthellis42]

You see, you put numbers on a bunch of pieces of paper and you put them in a hat, and then...

 

[sunscar]

They're not entirely made up, but they're not exactly correct either. The numbers are extrapolated (in the GPU) from the performance that a group of generic boxes would need to render at the same quality as their GPU.... So Nvidia is saying that you would need a brute force processing ability of 1.8 teraflops to match its GPU, ATI is saying closer to 885 gigaflops for theirs. That doesn't give you that amount of power "Actually", though. You can't, for example, use all of those hundreds of "virtual gigaflops" for simulation, or really anything else, it's not actual performance, only equivalent rendering performance.

This does not mean that the GPUs are complete slouches by any measure, though. In terms of actual floating point ability they should both be closely approaching the performance of the Xbox 360 GPU in general purpose "Actual" floating point performance.


But, finally. The complete numbers... the 1 teraflops, and two teraflops measures are estimates, and they're estimates of both the CPUs real floating point power and the "virtual" floating point power of the GPUs combined.


Hope that helps some.

Later

 

[The GameMaster]

FLOPs? Well they can be calculated using a standard method across the platforms, but instead both Microsoft and Sony made up their numbers (for different reasons mind you)... it is easy to fudge FLOPs numbers and say one machine is more powerful based on that, but there are other elements that are a lot harder to fudge. Sometime in the future once I get more finalized specifications I will make a article on this to determine which machine is actually more powerful on paper... but in the end the game's themselves will prove which system is more power. That said, so far Sony has hardly NOTHING to show game wise compared to quite a bit of games from Microsoft (running off of the much weaker PowerMAC alpha devkits.). Long story short... Microsoft won this E3 because they actually had GAMES to show on their next generation platform.

The GameMaster...

 

[jvd]

Well if you must know 3 people are choosen . They then guess the price of a house hold item . Who ever is closest with out going over moves on to the next round , they spin a big wheel and whatever it lands on is the gflop / tflop rating . Then we are told to get our pets spayed or neutered

 

[DEO3]

The same place Enron got theirs?

 

[mckmas8808]

Long story short... Microsoft won this E3 because they actually had GAMES to show on their next generation platform

Well you know GameMaster they are launching their console this year. I would hope that they had something playable. Did MS have something playable January of this year?

 

[The GameMaster]

And Sony is launching their system in Japan 4 months later if the time table from Sony is to believed (March 2006)... the same principle applies. I would imagine that Sony would of at least had something to play during this E3 showing, but instead they had mostly CGI videos to prove their claim that the PS3 was twice as powerful as the XBox360 and certainly nothing playable with the few applications that was actually real time. This would just mean if Sony does intend on launching in March 2006 in Japan, which would effectively mean the PS3 could launch here as early as summer 2006, just will not have a whole lot available for that launch. As for the question of did Microsoft have something playable in January, there is no way to know for sure, but I would assume they did... actually I KNOW they did considering the fact they used XNA to port some of their existing XBox projects to the XBox360. But that is... as they say... another story.

4 months is not exactly a whole lot of difference in time.

The GameMaster...