SO this is what I am getting out of the 360 and PS3...

[Josh378]

(correct me if I'm wrong)

Both systems are going to be very powerful...

Both systems will require developers to try out different procedures to get out different graphic "aspects" out of each system fully.

Both system will have a learning curve, this is both good and bad since developers are learning to adapt to multi-processing cores for game development.

PS3 and Xbox 360 hardware are soo different from each other that porting games may be very well hard, or even impossible between each other.

By having this possibility above, exclusives will be more made between the two systems determining by the publisher or how the developer feels about the hardware of their liking.

Both seems to be "PC Friendly", once developers learn how to code with the CPU.

Xenos has a learning curve for a GPU, but once mastered, it's effective and easy to work with and possibly MORE efficient between itself and the RSX.

RSX is dealing with current GPU based technology, so developers should realise how to tap the potential of the RSX pretty well since verybody is familiar with nvidia's GPUs.

Both GPU's are auing developemt friendly resources....Xenos from Direct X and RSX for Open GL....both will take full advantage of their software.

The Real trick behind CELL and RSX is to have both work togeather on graphics while having the rest of the CELL being free for other areas of processing (A.I, Physics...etc)

Xenon and and Xenos main trick is the free Stuff, like FSAA at 4x at 720p...giving it freed system resources to do other task.

But if the game goes for an higher resolution, the game will take an hit in the Framerate department as the 10MB "daughter" die can't handle the issue on it's own...

Both systems will be very capable and may not ever be fully "tapped", even when PS4 and Xbox 720 is released, just like it's xbox and PS2 brothern.

Both systems will have awesome games and will sell great to the masses (unless your in Japan, then it's all Sony )

IF I'm wrong or missing anything, let me know...thanks everybody!!!

-Josh378

 

[Asher]

But if the game goes for an higher resolution, the game will take an hit in the Framerate department as the 10MB "daughter" die can't handle the issue on it's own...

Not quite true, the daughter die can handle it on its own, it's just tiled. There is a performance hit, but it's not near the level of, say, RSX doing AA at the same level.

 

[Simon Templar]

Both systems are going to be very powerful

Yes

Both systems will require developers to try out different procedures to get out different graphic "aspects" out of each system fully.

Yes, but I think on the graphics front they are similar (basically they are both dx9 PS3.0 or Open GL 2.0 compatible) on the CPU side is where the bulk of the optimization will be.

Both system will have a learning curve, this is both good and bad since developers are learning to adapt to multi-processing cores for game development.

Yes, see my previous answer.

By having this possibility above, exclusives will be more made between the two systems determining by the publisher or how the developer feels about the hardware of their liking.

That hasn't stopped this generation I and I feel the differences IMHO are greater.

Both seems to be "PC Friendly", once developers learn how to code with the CPU.

I would agree basically because of the GPU's being very similar to existing standards and with PC's cpu moving towards multi-core.

Xenos has a learning curve for a GPU, but once mastered, it's effective and easy to work with and possibly MORE efficient between itself and the RSX.
RSX is dealing with current GPU based technology, so developers should realize how to tap the potential of the RSX pretty well since everybody is familiar with nvidia's GPUs.

I'm not too sure here...I don't think there is much of a learning curve for the GPU's the Xenos is different but from the developer standpoint it should actually be easier to program for as the vertex and pixel load is automatically managed. This is a big if but it i can do this well I agree with you it should be more efficient.

Both GPU's are auing developemt friendly resources....Xenos from Direct X and RSX for Open GL....both will take full advantage of their software.

Sony's middleware was a problem at launch last time and this time they may have solved it on the gpu front by partnering with Nvidia (cg for PS3)but Cell libraries (Even if the open source it) will be slow to develop and may not allow the platform to show it's true potential till it's 2nd generation of games.

The Real trick behind CELL and RSX is to have both work together on graphics while having the rest of the CELL being free for other areas of processing (A.I, Physics...etc)

True but I don't think you'll see that until 2nd generation at the earliest maybe as late as third gen titles.

Xenon and and Xenos main trick is the free Stuff, like FSAA at 4x at 720p...giving it freed system resources to do other task.
But if the game goes for an higher resolution, the game will take an hit in the Framerate department as the 10MB "daughter" die can't handle the issue on it's own...

I agree with this but funny thing is they will make the games look better instantly (at launch) and should allow developers to spend time developing better content and AI (Or optimizing the CPU).

Both systems will be very capable and may not ever be fully "tapped", even when PS4 and Xbox 720 is released, just like it's xbox and PS2 brothern.

Yes they are both capable but they probably WILL be tapped to the extent of thier feasibility. Someone's not going to spend $$$ on getting an extra 5 FPS on a title when it won't make any difference on the number units sold.

Both systems will have awesome games and will sell great to the masses (unless your in Japan, then it's all Sony )

I agree...But his time I think the real battle will be Europe. That will decide the overall victor this gen.

-Simon

 

[Acert93]

PS3 and Xbox 360 hardware are soo different from each other that porting games may be very well hard, or even impossible between each other.

By having this possibility above, exclusives will be more made between the two systems determining by the publisher or how the developer feels about the hardware of their liking.

Both seems to be "PC Friendly", once developers learn how to code with the CPU.

I see them as more similar than disimilar.

-3.2GHz PPC core(s)
-Floating Point friendly designs
-Sound Processing on the CPU
-512MB of system memory
-(Basically) SM 3.0 GPU technology with similar featuresets
-Optical Media for game storage
-Movie playback
-Online gaming, Ethernet port(s), Wireless, Cameras, wireless controllers, HDDs, HD support, 5.1 support, backwards compatibility with some/all titles, etc

Obviously there are some differences (e.g. 360 comes with a HDD standard, PS3 comes with BR standard) but tit for tat they basically look like systems developed with the same technology in mind, just different philosophies on how to use that technology. Even from a transistor budget they are fairly similar (X360: 502M + scaler; PS3: 550).

When you look at the Xbox, GCN, and PS2 designs and see how often porting occured, I think we will see **more** porting this generation. Really, the Xbox and PS2 could not be more different.

With Nintendo appearantly outside the main porting fray, the two big guys have similar 1.) CPU cores (PPC), 2.) similar GPU featuresets, 3.) the same amount of system memory, and 4.) large/cheap optical media to distribute their games.


Where the hurdle is relates to the CPUs. Bizzarecreations already noted they expect a lot of 3rd parties to design their games with porting in mind, with 1st parties seeking to exploit the systems specific nuances. I would not at all be surprised if many 3rd party developers, at first, only began lightly toying with multicores and SPEs. As time goes one I believe many 3rd parties will just invest time into making game design decisions where they can fragment their game engines where for a certain task (like physics) they will have a phys engine for the PS3 that is SPE friendly and a phys engine for the 360 that is friendly to the PPC cores. There will be compromises of course, but I think they will design their games in a modular fashion. Since both machines have a lot of performance to throw at games--**significantly** more floating point than current PCs or consoles--I don't think they will be hitting the system limitations anytime soon.

And all is not lost in the performance department for EITHER console from a 3rd party perspective. The PS2 had 2x the FLOPs of the Xbox, but everything ended up being fine on 3rd party apps. Similarly the PS2 CPU is not very good at general purpose code compared to the Celeron in the Xbox, but that did not seem to make much of a difference down the road anyhow.

Middleware is another reason to be optimistic. e.g. phys engines are being written to be multicore friendly for both platforms. So if you use the Novadex or Havok engines, you can use those engines and use them on either platform. Similar UE3, which seems to be the hottest app around for next gen games, is being developed for both platforms. So if you make a game with UE3 targeting both platforms you should have a bit of assistance in getting the core engine on both platforms running.

And finally hardware is not where it is all at anymore. You can make a GREAT game with great art without pushing the hardware to its absolate limits. Although the power is good, I suspect we will continue to see game titles that look great, a step below the 1st party franchise/flagship titles but still good, that port fairly easy. I think good art is more important than good technology at this point.


So overall I think we will see more, and not less, porting and cross platform titles. With Nintendo falling pretty far behind this gen in cross platform titles and the "consensus" appearing to be MS&Sony as top dogs, I think it will probably be easier for companies to make games for the very similar PS3/360 platforms than it was for this generation.

And if that was not motivation enough, this is: rising development costs AND time. If games take 24mo on average to make now, instead of 18-20mo, that extra time spent on a game is money not earned making another title. Add in the complexity of the game worlds and the quality of the game mechanics it is safe to say developers have a large task ahead.

The smartest move, from a publisher standpoint, is to double (or more) the potential sales by making the game available to a much larger audiance. Offering a game on both platforms is a smart fiscal move in most cases.

Btw, this makes sense if you consider your "PC friendly" comment. If they can port it to the PC (with an x86 processor and weak floating point performance and a WIDE disparity of video cards) and can be called "friendly" a closed box with identical RAM amounts, similar core CPU technologies, and similar GPU feature sets, well, I think we would have to say the consoles are even more "friendly" than the PC

Xenon and and Xenos main trick is the free Stuff, like FSAA at 4x at 720p...giving it freed system resources to do other task.

But if the game goes for an higher resolution, the game will take an hit in the Framerate department as the 10MB "daughter" die can't handle the issue on it's own...

I am not sure the 360 will do anything higher than 720p (so I am not sure what hit you are talking about specifically). The built in scalar chip seems to be able to scale both directions well (as well as most 1080i sets will convert a 720p image up anyhow). There is also only ~10% difference between 720p and 1080i in total pixels.

The 360 wont support 1080p.

If you are talking about a hit at 720p w/ 4x MSAA, I think until proven otherwise ATI's on the record statement of a 1-5% performance hit from 2xAA to 4xAA is the consensus (and makes sense).

I would be interested in seeing the performance hit for FP16 w/ 4xAA though.

 

[DotProduct]

Actually I think multi platform titles will basicly use only one CPU core and ports will be quite easy.
If there is engine/middleware support for the spus/2nd/3thrd core they will be used, too.

 

[Sean*O]

One problem is that by not using the full potential of a CPU (ie. only using one core per your example) the titles run the risk of being upstaged and selling far less than the ones which were programmed with care using the full potnetial of the system.

 

[Inane_Dork]

One problem is that by not using the full potential of a CPU (ie. only using one core per your example) the titles run the risk of being upstaged and selling far less than the ones which were programmed with care using the full potnetial of the system.

True, but underutilization of hardware is not exactly new to multiplatform titles, and it's not like consumers have instruction counters, seeing how well the various cores are utilized.

Some games just don't need a whole lot of CPU, as is evidenced by the games on current consoles.

 

[London Geezer]

Porting won't be nearly as difficult as it was this generation.

Most launch games on both platforms will only use one core extensively, making the 2 consoles pretty much equal.

Obviously 3-core and SPE optimisations will be what's tough to translate from one console to the other.

GPU-wise, everything seems so automated or at least VERY supported on both sides that i think there won't be too many problems.

And now, with 512MB of RAM both, the content (models and textures mainly) won't even need editing or resizing, like it happened this generation, one console having double the memory than the other.

All they will need is a standard-ish tool to port the engine, all the rest should remain intact. That's why i expect most multiplatform games to look pretty much the same, not only because the 2 consoles are quite close in power, and whatever difference in power will be probably shrugged off when making multiplatform games, but also, especially, because the textures will be the same, at the same resolution, the models will be the same.

Any "bonus" one console has over the other will in most cases be ignored, and if not, i'm not too sure many people will notice them.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

which makes divergence hardware stupid. They've creted two different systems with different strengths, and as a result devs will ignore the stregnths to target the common midground at 50-70% total system power.

Huzzah

Incidentally, how many 3rd party titles this gen weren't cross platform? I know the PS2 got a load, because of Japanese devs and a large enough base that cost of porting maybe wasn't worthwhile. GC got a few didn't it? Or are it's exclusives all1st and 2nd party? And what of XB? I'd have thought some devs targetting that platform due to similarities with PC, and not bothering to learn the complexities of PS2.

 

[Nicked]

Next-gen cross-platform titles will probably all be created with middleware, so depending on how advanced the tools are and how dedicated the developers are to modifying and tweaking them for each console, there shouldn't be any great disparity between non-exclusives and exclusives.

Incidentally, how many 3rd party titles this gen weren't cross platform?

All 3 consoles had a lot of exclusive third party titles. PS2 obviously had most (although a lot were just from companies who couldn't fund two SKUs), Xbox I think came in 2nd by a fair margin (a lot of PC ports, the Sega deal and others) and GC came in last, but still had some notable ones (RE4 especially).

 

[London Geezer]

which makes divergence hardware stupid. They've creted two different systems with different strengths, and as a result devs will ignore the stregnths to target the common midground at 50-70% total system power.

Huzzah

Incidentally, how many 3rd party titles this gen weren't cross platform? I know the PS2 got a load, because of Japanese devs and a large enough base that cost of porting maybe wasn't worthwhile. GC got a few didn't it? Or are it's exclusives all1st and 2nd party? And what of XB? I'd have thought some devs targetting that platform due to similarities with PC, and not bothering to learn the complexities of PS2.

Well for one, the Xbox got all the big FPS games that would have looked like crap if ported directly to PS2. Instead they just looked like crap on Xbox, but at least they were easy ports. Farcry, HL2, D3...

Other than that, the DOA series and tie-ins, Tecmo is 3rd party but they're exclusive to Xbox. And many others (SEGA etc)

GC got a few exclusives from 3rd parties, with the RE series remakes and temporary exclusive of RE4 being the biggest example.

PS2 got a hell of a lot of games from all sides, exclusives, temporary exclusives, not exclusives, from 3rd parties, 4th parties, my granma... counting them is hard.

I am convinced that, as much as many "elite" gamers will hate it, the magic formula for a successful console at this present time and for a long time in the future is to flood the console with as many games as possible, ranging from crappiest to excellent.

How many games did Sony say will be playable on PS3 thanks to backward compatibility? More than 10.000... I mean that's just crazy, but i'm convinced that this overflowing mass of software has a lot to do with the success of the Playstation brand.

 

[fouad]

I see them as more similar than disimilar.

-3.2GHz PPC core(s)

XBOX 360 CPU will be only running at 3.00 GHZ, unlike the CELL 3.2 GHZ.



And by the way,

PS3 is a lot more powerful than xbox360. for those reasons :

1/ The CELL is 100 GFLOPS/s more powerful than the XeCPU of xbox360. And this is HUGE difference.

2/ the bandwidth of the main ram of xbox360 is shared between the GPU and the CPU ( 22.4 GB/s shared ), and this is the biggest ERROR committed by the designers of xbox360. this made the xbox360 an unbalanced systme. The CELL of PS3 has dedicated 25.6 GB/s bandwidth, and this is a huge difference between PS3 ad xbox360.

3/ the connexion between the CELL and the RSX is 35 GB/s, unlike xbox360 where the connexion is almost 22.6 GB/s ( i dont have exact number ) and this is a HUGE DIFFERENCE.

4/ PS3 could do a lot more pixel shaders than xbox360, and this too a huge difference for genius developers.

5/ the PS3 has BLU-RAY capable of 50 GB ( dual layer ), xbox360 has norma DVDs capable of 9 GB, and this is more than huge difference, because this will allow exclusive ps3 games to be a lot more bigger with more extras, CGs, and contents than exclusive xbox360 games. ( GT5 the best example here )



Multiplatform games will look almost the same, BUT exclusive ps3 games made by talented genius developers ( kazunori yamuchi and his team ( GT5 ) and hideo kojima and his team ( MGS4 ) are completely a different story, because those games just cant be made for xbox360, xbox360 doesent have the power to run them, so the experience of gameplay will be totally different betweeen exclusive well developed ps3 games, and exclusive well developed xbox360 games.

the main difference in next generation games will be not in graphics quality, but on animations, physics, and AI. And the PS3 is far better in those domains than xbox360, and you will experience this by yourself in the end of 2007 ( the photo realistic GT5 than MGS4 with a full simulated world by ps3). PERIOD

 

[Alpha_Spartan]

So you guys are just going to let this fanboy get away with this blantant B.S.? Seriously, I've grown tired of this fanboy misinformation so I'll leave it to someone else.

 

[Arty]

Thanks for the laugh fouad. I'm still laughing hard at your post. rofl !

 

[blakjedi]

nobody really cares what fouad says. R.I.P. fouad July 14th 2005.

 

[twotonfld]

Similarly the PS2 CPU is not very good at general purpose code compared to the Celeron in the Xbox, but that did not seem to make much of a difference down the road anyhow.

This is something I've been very curious about. The PS2 got away with no/weak branch HW because it had very shallow pipes. I think the cost of a mispredict was soimething like 5-7 cycles.

I'm wondering if Sony figured that the speed increase on the PS3 would mitigate the lengthening of the pipes and are hoping for a similar situation to the PS2.

The real thron in my side is that I can't find a pipe-length comparison of the PPC cores on the 360 versus the PPE/SPE. This could me a lot in the end.

 

[Acert93]

I see them as more similar than disimilar.

-3.2GHz PPC core(s)

XBOX 360 CPU will be only running at 3.00 GHZ, unlike the CELL 3.2 GHZ.

And where did you get this news?

The officially specs are for a tricore custom PPC CPU operating at a frequency of 3.2GHz. This is what MS announced, this is what everyone is reporting, and there has been no official (nor unofficial) statement otherwise.

So far your post has not started off on a good first step...

1/ The CELL is 100 GFLOPS/s more powerful than the XeCPU of xbox360. And this is HUGE difference.

And the PS2 CPU did 2x the theoretical peak FLOPs compared to the Xbox. This did not prevent the Xbox from doing fine in these situations. And less we forget, floating point is not the end-all be-all aspect of code, it is an important part, but applications require more than FP performance (or Intel would have gone this direction a decade ago)/

Conversely, the Xbox CPU was far superior in general purpose code--yet the PS2 CPU did more than adequately in these areas.

Simply a single metric does not define the strength of a system, especially a closed box system.

2/ the bandwidth of the main ram of xbox360 is shared between the GPU and the CPU ( 22.4 GB/s shared ), and this is the biggest ERROR committed by the designers of xbox360. this made the xbox360 an unbalanced systme. The CELL of PS3 has dedicated 25.6 GB/s bandwidth, and this is a huge difference between PS3 ad xbox360.

Yet many reagard the 360 UMA as a strength.

And once again, the systems are designed quite differently. Framebuffer, specifically backbuffer, operations can easily saturate your memory bandwidth.

PS3.

Memory
   |
Memory Tasks + framebuffer

Xbox 360.

System Memory  <>          eDRAM
   |                           |
Memory Tasks            framebuffer

They are simply different approaches. Sony went for a large aggregate system bandwidth pool; MS went for isolating the largest bandwidth need, backbuffer, into a separate pool of memory.

As Shifty has noted, in simplified terms, the difference is brute strength (Sony) versus elegence (MS). In the end I would guess that we will find that each design has strengths and excells in different gaming situations.

To put it in simple terms for you: What use is a large memory pool if the bandwidth is saturated by the very small backbuffer? Basically you get a large pool of memory underutilized because a small amount (~60MB) is consuming most of the system bandwidth.

Memory bandwidth will be an issue on both systems, in the end they are different solutions to dealing with the same problem.

3/ the connexion between the CELL and the RSX is 35 GB/s, unlike xbox360 where the connexion is almost 22.6 GB/s ( i dont have exact number ) and this is a HUGE DIFFERENCE.

And yet that connection is, again, not an apples-to-apples.

The RSX has 35GB/s / 42GB/s to CELL+XDR. RSX has to balance XDR memory access and CPU interaction. This is not a bad thing, but it is very different compared to the Xenon-C1 link.

Remember, C1 does not need to bother the bus/memory bandwidth with its backbuffer.

4/ PS3 could do a lot more pixel shaders than xbox360, and this too a huge difference for genius developers.

Are you sure about that

The 360 can dedicate all its resources to Pixel Shading, RSX (based on the little we know) cannot. Having the Xenon CPU tesselate HOS and directly feed the information to the GPU to shade them could create an environment where the GPU is dedicated almost entirely to Pixel Shading.

While the PS3 can do this with CELL-RSX, that would mean that the RSX VS sit idle. i.e. Some of the RSX performance would be neglected and useless.

And there is always that issue of effeciency. The C1 has a very different approach to shading, using an array instead of fixed pipelines. ATI is confident that this will be more effecient in the end than a traditional design.

5/ the PS3 has BLU-RAY capable of 50 GB ( dual layer ), xbox360 has norma DVDs capable of 9 GB, and this is more than huge difference, because this will allow exclusive ps3 games to be a lot more bigger with more extras, CGs, and contents than exclusive xbox360 games. ( GT5 the best example here )

There are obviously positives to large media.

But in the end: How many developers will have the money to fill a 9GB DVD, let alone a 25GB BR disk?

And there is the issue of a HDD standard on the 360.

Overall most of your points are mangled and contrived to push forth your agenda of "PS3 > 360". Having an opinion is fine, but so far every post has been the same. e.g.

because those games just cant be made for xbox360, xbox360 doesent have the power to run them, so the experience of gameplay will be totally different betweeen exclusive well developed ps3 games, and exclusive well developed xbox360 games.

the main difference in next generation games will be not in graphics quality, but on animations, physics, and AI. And the PS3 is far better in those domains than xbox360, and you will experience this by yourself in the end of 2007 ( the photo realistic GT5 than MGS4 with a full simulated world by ps3). PERIOD

You claim the above, without any proof in final software.

I am glad you are a fan of the PS3, and by all means enjoy your future purchase, but your posts lobbying for the PS3 and misrepresenting the market is tiresome. Some advice: If you want to stick around much longer, change your tune or you may find out that the mods really dislike trolls. Just some friendly advice.

 

[blakjedi]

4/ PS3 could do a lot more pixel shaders than xbox360, and this too a huge difference for genius developers.

Are you sure about that

The 360 can dedicate all its resources to Pixel Shading, RSX (based on the little we know) cannot. Having the Xenon CPU tesselate HOS and directly feed the information to the GPU to shade them could create an environment where the GPU is dedicated almost entirely to Pixel Shading.

While the PS3 can do this with CELL-RSX, that would mean that the RSX VS sit idle. i.e. Some of the RSX performance would be neglected and useless.

And there is always that issue of effeciency. The C1 has a very different approach to shading, using an array instead of fixed pipelines. ATI is confident that this will be more effecient in the end than a traditional design.

And the Xenos GPU also has a tesselation unit to more geometry than just what can be generated on the cores can be created internally...

 

[3roxor]

And in the end it's still most likely that the Ps3 will have the most impressive graphics.

 

[London Geezer]

The 360 can dedicate all its resources to Pixel Shading, RSX (based on the little we know) cannot. Having the Xenon CPU tesselate HOS and directly feed the information to the GPU to shade them could create an environment where the GPU is dedicated almost entirely to Pixel Shading.

While the PS3 can do this with CELL-RSX, that would mean that the RSX VS sit idle. i.e. Some of the RSX performance would be neglected and useless.

I agree with all your posts mainly, but the above is not entirely true.

The fact that Cell might handle vertex data doesn't necessarily mean that the RSX vertex shaders would just sit idle. The VS could very well handle geometry of their own on top of the information Cell is sending it. It's not an exclusive deal, both can work on geometry at once, therefore there is the potential for having very high polygon counts since both are calculating triangles.

For example, Cell might be handling geometry for the environments and RSX handles the characters. Still better than RSX hadnling everything on its own, which can be done, it's all up to the developers really.

Also, Cell might just be helping RSX with cloth, water and hair animation, leaving the VS free to handle all sorts of other aspects in the scene. Certainly not sitting there idle while Cell finishes.