Titanio said:This doesn't really tell me much..unless the X360 CPU is a hypothetical, equivalently clocked K8 core and your assumption is correct
Few of us here have access to actual hardware - I don't - so forgive me if for now I work with paper technology. Comparing theoretical to theoretical seems fair to me, for now, in the absence of benchmarks/hardware, and I feel that a significant difference on paper isn't going to be so betrayed in the real world as to reverse the situation.
But with the caveat that we are looking at all the numbers correctly. Bits, MHz, GFLOPs, etc... they only tell us so much.
The reality is thus: The xCPU and CELL (which, if you ask Sony fans here, the CELL shown 2 months ago is no clear indication of what we may or may not see in the PS3) are TOTALLY different paradigms. For example, GFLOPs:
If we compare the GFLOPs of the Xbox 360 to the PS3, we are hearing numbers like this:
xCPU: 80GFLOPs
PS3 CELL: 256GFLOPs
Ok, but this number neglects to mention two things:
#1 Not all game code can/should run on the SPEs/Vector units
#2 What are the xCPUs 3 PPC cores doing at this time? That is a lot of untapped power that we are not counting because we are focusing so narrowly on GFLOPs.
They are just very different. Whereas on the xCPU you can have code running on the PPC cores, on the CELL--since the PPE is going to be tasked with keeping the SPEs fed--will be too busy to do these tasks many times so the code will need to be designed to run on the SPEs unless it absolutely cannot.
I expect the PS3 to be a good measure more powerful than the Xbox 360 in GFLOPs, and therefore exclusive games that deal with math intensive tasks like physics should perform MUCH better.
But to remind us of this generation, more GFLOPs on the PS2 did not generate better looking games (where the Xbox is considered to be the most powerful). And yet in its own little corner the well balanced GCN not only held its own, but produced some of the best looking games this gen--including possibly the best in RE4 (and I am not even a fan of the game).
I am not saying GFLOPs are not important, but there needs to be an * because the xCPU and the CELL are VERY different paradigms of how to deal with processing code. I believe BOTH Xbox and PS developers are going to be pulling their head out with multithreading issues for years to come and in that regards development tools will be vital.
I will have to agree with others though that in general I am not expecting much difference--at least not on the surface. ATi and nVidia have been close for 3 years in performance (give or take on features and performance in specific settings). The two systems are being released 4 months apart. There are so many factors that affect a systems performance... but it ultimately comes down to how much support MS/Sony give developers, how good their HW/tools combo is, and how many people they get on board. Great developers can make any HW shine. Looking at games like GT4 and RE4 really show that the HW differences, while not unimportant, can really be totally overblown on a forum like this. Definately GFLOPs alone are not going to tell us what kind of games we can expect.
