Xbox 360 vs. PS3 (spec. wise)

[NikolaX]

Bandwidth
The PS3 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and 25.6 GB/s of RDRAM bandwidth for a total system bandwidth of 48 GB/s.

The Xbox 360 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and a 256 GB/s of EDRAM bandwidth for a total of 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth.

Why does the Xbox 360 have such an extreme amount of bandwidth? Even the simplest calculations show that a large amount of bandwidth is consumed by the frame buffer. For example, with simple color rendering and Z testing at 550 MHz the frame buffer alone requires 52.8 GB/s at 8 pixels per clock. The PS3's memory bandwidth is insufficient to maintain its GPU's peak rendering speed, even without texture and vertex fetches.

The PS3 uses Z and color compression to try to compensate for the lack of memory bandwidth. The problem with Z and color compression is that the compression breaks down quickly when rendering complex next-generation 3D scenes.

HDR, alpha-blending, and anti-aliasing require even more memory bandwidth. This is why Xbox 360 has 256 GB/s bandwidth reserved just for the frame buffer. This allows the Xbox 360 GPU to do Z testing, HDR, and alpha blended color rendering with 4X MSAA at full rate and still have the entire main bus bandwidth of 22.4 GB/s left over for textures and vertices.

more on http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-1-of-4/

 

[holydeadpenguins]

Yes but the xbox has what like 10mbs of edram??? So truly the ps3 has more bandwidth since the xdram(not rdram) is shared with the entire system.

 

[lePobz]

Yes but the xbox has what like 10mbs of edram??? So truly the ps3 has more bandwidth since the xdram(not rdram) is shared with the entire system.

the 10mb of ram is located on the GPU and deals with AA samples only. The xbox360 has 512mb of very fast GDDR3 memory which is used for holding game data and textures... it's a much better way of doing things.

 

[Cole]

*Min Edits and Deletes his post*
You know what,
Sony and Microsoft are simply 2 stupid companies!
Nintendo was the smart one, rather than getting into this huge who has a more detailed e-penis there staying out till the time is right.

 

[oD1Nz]

Might be worth revealing that this is all information is "courtesy" of Microsoft.

Compare it to IGN's article if you're unsure.

Microsoft is in damage control mode.

 

[Darkknighttt]

revolution will pwn all of the systems!!!!!

 

[OCybrManO]

Bandwidth
The PS3 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and 25.6 GB/s of RDRAM bandwidth for a total system bandwidth of 48 GB/s.

The Xbox 360 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and a 256 GB/s of EDRAM bandwidth for a total of 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth.

Why does the Xbox 360 have such an extreme amount of bandwidth? Even the simplest calculations show that a large amount of bandwidth is consumed by the frame buffer. For example, with simple color rendering and Z testing at 550 MHz the frame buffer alone requires 52.8 GB/s at 8 pixels per clock. The PS3's memory bandwidth is insufficient to maintain its GPU's peak rendering speed, even without texture and vertex fetches.

The PS3 uses Z and color compression to try to compensate for the lack of memory bandwidth. The problem with Z and color compression is that the compression breaks down quickly when rendering complex next-generation 3D scenes.

HDR, alpha-blending, and anti-aliasing require even more memory bandwidth. This is why Xbox 360 has 256 GB/s bandwidth reserved just for the frame buffer. This allows the Xbox 360 GPU to do Z testing, HDR, and alpha blended color rendering with 4X MSAA at full rate and still have the entire main bus bandwidth of 22.4 GB/s left over for textures and vertices.

more on http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-1-of-4/

The Xbox 360 needs the extra bandwidth because the GPU doesn't have dedicated memory other than the 10MB for stuff like AA. Everything done by the GPU has to access memory off the card. If the Xbox 360 didn't have a huge amount of bandwidth it wouldn't even be able to compete because this layout would suck. The PS3 is more like a PC GPU in that it has a large amount (256MB, IIRC) of memory on the GPU. With that layout you only need to go back to the system memory when a texture or something you need hasn't been loaded into the GPU's memory. That is only a very small portion of the time you are playing the game... and if you make the game think ahead (just generally good programming) a bit rather than waiting until the exact moment that bit of data is actually required you'll never even notice it was being loaded.

Microsoft is just trying to make their system sound more powerful (using any numbers that seem to go their way) because that's the only thing the PS3 showed at E3. Sony showed off how powerful it was with their tech demos and crap. Microsoft, to try to kill the PS3 hype, turns out some "information" that distorts facts like the one I just mentioned and grossly exaggerates the power of the 360 while playing down the power of the PS3. I'm not saying I know which is more powerful... but from what I have seen I would be inclined to bet on Sony.

 

[DiSTuRbEd]

revolution will pwn all of the systems!!!!!

I don't remember when the nintendo revolution was included in this discussion, and furthur-more, you cannot say that since we don't even have its SPECS. YOU LOSE.

 

[OCybrManO]

If Microsoft and Sony can lie in favor of their consoles... we can lie in favor of Nintendo!

 

[blahblahblah]

Your comparing apples to oranges. It won't work. They are two completely different designs. Its like comparing an PC to a Mac or an X-Box to a PC, they are just fundamentally different.

 

[Pesmerga]

PC > Mac

 

[Cole]

Is a Mac a personal computer? Yes.
A mac is a PC technically.
Now the OS mac vs the OS Windows is what you mean.

Btw, an X-box and a Pc arn't all that diffrent..maybe the OS but the parts..

 

[Revisedsoul]

PC > Mac

OMG DIDNT SEE THAT ONE COMING

 

[destrukt]

read that 3-4 page article comparing xbox 360 and ps3, it's really interesting.

nb: i'd post a link if i could remember it, i think it was on ign, and most likely other places.

 

[oD1Nz]

read that 3-4 page article comparing xbox 360 and ps3, it's really interesting.

nb: i'd post a link if i could remember it, i think it was on ign, and most likely other places.

Thanks for reading my post.

 

[NeoNight]

yeah interesting stuff one small thing caught my eye

" Cell's streaming floating-point work is done on its seven DSP processors. Since geometry processing is moved to the GPU, the need for streaming floating-point work and other DSP style programming in games has dropped dramatically.

Just like with the PS2's Emotion Engine, with its missing L2 cache, the Cell is designed for a type of game programming that accounts for a minor percentage of processing time.

Sony's CPU is ideal for an environment where 12.5% of the work is general-purpose computing and 87.5% of the work is DSP calculations. That sort of mix makes sense for video playback or networked waveform analysis, but not for games. In fact, when analyzing real games one finds almost the opposite distribution of general purpose computing and DSP calculation requirements. A relatively small percentage of instructions are actually floating point. Of those instructions which are floating-point, very few involve processing continuous streams of numbers. Instead they are used in tasks like AI and path-finding, which require random access to memory and frequent branches, which the DSPs are ill-suited to.

Based on measurements of running next generation games, only ~10-30% of the instructions executed are floating point. The remainders of the instructions are load, store, integer, branch, etc. Even fewer of the instructions executed are streaming floating point—probably ~5-10%. Cell is optimized for streaming floating-point, with 87.5% of its cores good for streaming floating-point and nothing else."

 

[Cole]

That caught my eye to, I would rather wait for something Sony has to say about it all before I make any judgements. Microsoft dosn't know everything about Cell. Only IBM and Sony do.

 

[G-Dub]

Simple answer = buy both consoles


Yes, obviously not simple if you can't afford but meh.

 

[Cole]

Simple answer = buy both consoles

More simplistic answer = Don't buy either.

 

[NeoNight]

lol that would be the "cost effective" answer.