PS3 Vs. Xbox 360

You obviously didn't read very carefully, otherwise, you would've seen I'm referring to shooters only in the first example. Of COD 4 (which I proudly own), GRAW 2, R6: Vegas, and Halo 3, H3 is the most unrealistic unrealistic. THEN I listed ALL the games that are out. And there's nothing wrong with listing games that are multisystem. I just gave some examples which you OVER ANALYZED like crazy. Chill, kid. I'm not a hard core gamer like you. The PS3 is the first and only system I have ever owned.

I just prefer something that has more function than a gaming system. Like I mentioned before, I use it as my PC since I have Yellow Dog Linux installed. In this aspect, PS3 beats the XBox 360 hands down. Sony doesn't have a problem with making the PS3 a work machine as well, incorporating Folding At Home along with the system. Microsoft is too timid to make that move because of the original XBox which everyone said it would turn gaming consoles into PCs. A lot games have the "Sony Computer Entertainment Presents" start up.

I'm not really a hardcore gamer. I am a gamer, but i wouldn't say i was hardcore. The reason i went into such detail is beacuse you make statements like "cod4 for ps3 is hands down graphically superior" this just isn't true. I've seen about 3/4 comparisons of the two some video and some pics, and there is just no difference, or if there is it is not very clear. From the comparisons i've seen there might be about a 1% advantage either way. They are pretty much the same. I may have over analyzed, but it's pretty much factual. Rating scores comparison, were as your cod4 statement just isn't true, no offence but it isn't, not from what i've seen.

I do stand by my original statement though, if i already have a 360 i would be bored having a ps3 also. There is very little reason from my perspective to own it, although uncharted looks promising. The list of games you listed, if i take out the multiplats which score better on 360, i'm not left with much at all. A very lacluster mediocre list of games, no doubt this will improve over time.

Everyone wants something different from a console i guess. Personally i just want to play games. I don't want HD movies as i can stream from my p.c. I'm not interested in folding or web browsers or OS or home or any of that stuff. I just want to play good games on my own or with friends. I can and do all the other stuff on my p.c, but to each there own.

Okay, I'm sick and tired of the PS3 fanboys spewing that bullshit about the PS3 being more powerful. It isn't, in fact, it is ass backwards in terms of design and performance.

Stop saying it is, if you don't know anything about processor design and actual hardware design, don't say anything.

1. The CELL processor is a poor design choice. It only has one general purpose CPU, the rest are practically useless SPE/DSP cores. Game code is a mixture of integer, floating-point, and vector math with a lot of branches and ramdom memory access. This is always, ALWAYS, best handled by general purpose CPUs (they have branch predicto9rs, and vector units.) The SPE cores have no cache, no director access to memory, no branch predictors, and a completely different instruction set from general purpose CPUs. The 360 has 3 general purpose CPUs, the PS3 has one, and that single general purpose CPU spends about 30% of its cycles monitoring and directing the almost useless SPE/DSP cores. Each 360 core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread, with dot product instruction on a shared 1MB L2 cache. The vector processing on the CELL is handled by the DSP/SPE cores.

Dot products are necessary for 3D math (calculation of 3D space, paths, geometry transformations, etc.) The CELL cannot handle these functions without software emulation which causes a massive performance hit. While the 360 can run the dot product in one cycle, the PS3 has to reprocess the same function three to four times to accomplish the same effect.

The floating point work for the CELL is handled by the SPE/DSP (the only thing they are really good for anyways) which means the code has to be multithreaded extensively just to match the performance of the general purpose CPU. This also consumes a vast amount of the small allotted bandwidth. A relatively small part of game code (~5%) is actually floating-point math that requires continuous data streaming. Quick Floating-point math only accounts for 10-30% of code, which is better handled by a general purpose CPU because of branch prediction and memory access. Most code requires random access to the memory and branch prediction. The SPE/DSP is a terrible choice. Yeah it may scream at running Folding@Home, but that is pretty much it.


2. The PS3's graphics system is also less powerful. The RSX maxes out at 228.8 GFLOPS/s, while the 360's GPU maxes out at 240 GFLOPS/s. The shader performance on the PS3 is at 74.8GOp/s, and the 360 is at 80GOp/s. The bandwidth on the PS3's GGDR3 is 22.4GB/s, the RDRAM is 25.6GB/s. The bandwidth on the 360's GGDR3 is 22.4B/s and 256GB/s on the EDRAM. That is ten times the capacity. The RSX's frame buffer is terribly crippled because the PS3 can't keep pace with a 550MHz frame buffer's necessary 52.8GB/s at 8ppc, even without texture or vertex fetching. Simply put, the RSX cannot reach or maintain peak rendering capacity due to its tiny bandwidth.

Add in the fact that HDR, alpha-blending, and Anti-Aliasing require even more memory bandwidth, the PS3's paltry 25.6GB/s is simply not enough. Even with the 360 running at full capacity Z-testing, HDR, alpha-blending, 4xAA, it still has 22.4GB/s of bandwidth left for texture and vertices.

3. Blu-Ray is a step back in terms of speed. The PS3's blu-ray drive transfer speed is dead slow peak at 8.6MB/s, with about 6.5Mb/s sustainable. The DVD drive on the 360 reads at a sustainable 15.9MB/s. To counter act this slow speed, and slow loading many developers have had to create redundant data to keep the PS3 load times comparable. Besthesda stated that they had to place the Oblivion game data on the disc TWICE. That means instead of using only 4.6GB of data (8.5GB available on a dual-layer), they had to put 9.2GB of data on the disc just to keep pace. That is beyond stupid of Sony to do. Speed always matters most, not capacity. I don't care if the Blu-Ray can hold twice the data if it is dead slow.

Coll post Kanzen. If i understood what half of that meant i think i'd be quite intelligent.

Nice post nontheless

Quick question. You've basically bashed the Cell in that post. Why is it so bad. It was made out to be a supercomputer, i mean surely they had an idea of how it would work. Is it actually flawed or are people not using it properly?

Why go to all the trouble of inventing a new technology when regular tech is better?

Quote:

Originally posted by Kanzen

Okay, I'm sick and tired of the PS3 fanboys spewing that bullshit about the PS3 being more powerful. It isn't, in fact, it is ass backwards in terms of design and performance.

Stop saying it is, if you don't know anything about processor design and actual hardware design, don't say anything.

1. The CELL processor is a poor design choice. It only has one general purpose CPU, the rest are practically useless SPE/DSP cores. Game code is a mixture of integer, floating-point, and vector math with a lot of branches and ramdom memory access. This is always, ALWAYS, best handled by general purpose CPUs (they have branch predicto9rs, and vector units.) The SPE cores have no cache, no director access to memory, no branch predictors, and a completely different instruction set from general purpose CPUs. The 360 has 3 general purpose CPUs, the PS3 has one, and that single general purpose CPU spends about 30% of its cycles monitoring and directing the almost useless SPE/DSP cores. Each 360 core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread, with dot product instruction on a shared 1MB L2 cache. The vector processing on the CELL is handled by the DSP/SPE cores.

Dot products are necessary for 3D math (calculation of 3D space, paths, geometry transformations, etc.) The CELL cannot handle these functions without software emulation which causes a massive performance hit. While the 360 can run the dot product in one cycle, the PS3 has to reprocess the same function three to four times to accomplish the same effect.

The floating point work for the CELL is handled by the SPE/DSP (the only thing they are really good for anyways) which means the code has to be multithreaded extensively just to match the performance of the general purpose CPU. This also consumes a vast amount of the small allotted bandwidth. A relatively small part of game code (~5%) is actually floating-point math that requires continuous data streaming. Quick Floating-point math only accounts for 10-30% of code, which is better handled by a general purpose CPU because of branch prediction and memory access. Most code requires random access to the memory and branch prediction. The SPE/DSP is a terrible choice. Yeah it may scream at running Folding@Home, but that is pretty much it.


2. The PS3's graphics system is also less powerful. The RSX maxes out at 228.8 GFLOPS/s, while the 360's GPU maxes out at 240 GFLOPS/s. The shader performance on the PS3 is at 74.8GOp/s, and the 360 is at 80GOp/s. The bandwidth on the PS3's GGDR3 is 22.4GB/s, the RDRAM is 25.6GB/s. The bandwidth on the 360's GGDR3 is 22.4B/s and 256GB/s on the EDRAM. That is ten times the capacity. The RSX's frame buffer is terribly crippled because the PS3 can't keep pace with a 550MHz frame buffer's necessary 52.8GB/s at 8ppc, even without texture or vertex fetching. Simply put, the RSX cannot reach or maintain peak rendering capacity due to its tiny bandwidth.

Add in the fact that HDR, alpha-blending, and Anti-Aliasing require even more memory bandwidth, the PS3's paltry 25.6GB/s is simply not enough. Even with the 360 running at full capacity Z-testing, HDR, alpha-blending, 4xAA, it still has 22.4GB/s of bandwidth left for texture and vertices.

3. Blu-Ray is a step back in terms of speed. The PS3's blu-ray drive transfer speed is dead slow peak at 8.6MB/s, with about 6.5Mb/s sustainable. The DVD drive on the 360 reads at a sustainable 15.9MB/s. To counter act this slow speed, and slow loading many developers have had to create redundant data to keep the PS3 load times comparable. Besthesda stated that they had to place the Oblivion game data on the disc TWICE. That means instead of using only 4.6GB of data (8.5GB available on a dual-layer), they had to put 9.2GB of data on the disc just to keep pace. That is beyond stupid of Sony to do. Speed always matters most, not capacity. I don't care if the Blu-Ray can hold twice the data if it is dead slow.

good god that almost made me cry.. thats the best post oh this topic ive ever read

Yay another one of these threads...

Kanzen really mate, stop calling folks fanboys when ya one yaself

I have both which i say all the time and they both rock... Games are great on both. PS3 is no dearer when you actually add up all the extras ya need for the 360 (all included on the PS3)

One is not better than the other, all have plus points and minus points.

and..

Blu-ray is from what i see when i watch it on me LCD no different to HD-DVD so who gives a fuck about transfer speed?

One thing that does get to me though, is when people slag off the PS3 and they have never played one, yet alone owned one.

Quote:

Originally posted by HipsterDufus

Quick question. You've basically bashed the Cell in that post. Why is it so bad. It was made out to be a supercomputer, i mean surely they had an idea of how it would work. Is it actually flawed or are people not using it properly?

Why go to all the trouble of inventing a new technology when regular tech is better?

The CELL is a fine processor; if you use it for the correct purpose. Gaming is not that purpose. The CELL can tear through data at incredible speeds, but only at selective applications. Its great for media playback, like video streaming or network analysis applications, but terrible for games. It is just poorly suited for its task at gaming. At its current state, all of its power is not available to the purposes, because it wasn't designed for that kinda workload.

Say for example that the CELL was a student. That student would be astonishing at Math, but suck at Art and English. That one advantage doesn't make up for its sereve deficiencies. Especially when what you need is a student that is good at Math, Art, and English all at once. IBM, Toshiba, and Sony's hardware divisions aren't stupid. The CELL can be quite useful for future use. This current iteration is nothing more than a bare prototype for a market that doesn't really need it yet.

The poor decision was at the hands of Sony's Playstation development, not the CELL's development. I don't know why the heads at Sony thought it was smart to place their bets on an unproven experiment. Imagine a car company selling a car when they haven't tested it. It is just a very bad idea. SCEI put their own interests in the design before the actual game developers. They put their interest in pushing Blu-Ray on the consumers. Kutaragi put his own hobby-ish interests before the developers.

Neither processor (360 or the PS3) is the best choice for gaming applications, Gaming is best handled on a multicore x86 processor because it offers better direct performance. PowerPC takes considerable amount of optimization, and it requires use of the Extension sets. Oddly the CELL in the PS3 removed the PowerPC's killer function. Which to be honest does not make a lick of sense to me or anyone I know.

I don't consider myself a fanboy, just a realist who doesn't like hype and false promises. I have all the systems anyways:

http://img183.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=28819_IMG_0721t_122_9lo.jpg

@ Watty:

http://img166.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=28813_IMG_0726t_122_1125lo.jpg

all i can say is call of duty 4 on 360 kicks as

I have the 360 and I've never had any problems with it. I've never seen the red ring of death. I think Live is really well done. The games are all excellent. I've also been using the media extender so I can play music and slideshow pics through it.

I don't know what Playstation has that is similar in all of those regards. We had a PS2 and honestly we got bored of it and sold it. Bought an xbox instead and will never turn back. If I wanted to spend that much on a game system, I'd go back to PC gaming.

The graphics .... who gives a shit? Graphics aren't fun. I don't know anyone who has a PS3 or wants one. I know lots of people with 360s. Having friends to play with is fun.

360 is well done and fun.

In times passed, I'd have said to hold out for the PS3. It is in fact, a superior machine and will eventually catch up to the 360 games wise.

However, there's a legitimate point made by some in this and other threads that the 360 has a bunch of good games out, and they're out right now while some game-makers are self-admittedly holding on to titles that are ready to ship because there aren't enough units of PS3s out there to support software sales, yet.

Also, in ten days or so, Mass Effect is coming out. It's from Bioware, which has a termendously long line of nothing but hits that they make. This is an RPG shooter. I despise shooters traditionally, but this game is something special. It's similar to Oblivion in terms of story and that you actually do some fighting, but the combat system is far superior to Oblivion's.

It's a shooter complete with stats and such, but it also has a story which can be followed and investigated by people like me who really love that kind of stuff, or it can be ignored by those who just want to blow shit up.

Some video game mags are calling this the Halo Killer. It's not just the Halo Killer, but it cut its throat, stole its girlfriend, danced on its grave, and fucked in its bed.

This game will revolutionize shooters, and perhaps all games, with as much if not more force than Oblivion did.

This is the single best video game I have ever seen.

Before this game, I was determined to only buy one system, and it was going to be a PS3. I have to have a PS3 because that's what some of my nephews have and they'll want to play it when they come over.

However, I'm now not only buying a 360, but I'm buying it for this game and this game alone.

And I hate shooters.

So... PS3, to be blunt, has the better mousetrap. What they failed to do however, is get the cheese out.

They'll fix it (most-likely). The question is when. And in the mean-time, what are you missing out on? We're each our own best judges of whether or not that trade-off is a good one. Personally, Sony's been at it a year and a half, and I can't say I see any games they have that a 360 doesn't that completely blow my socks off.

That's going to change, but is it worth the wait?

I sold my 360 with 5 games for $200. My PC doesn't freeze up, or lock my disc tray, require anything other than an internet connection to play online, and I can pick and choose hardware options I want. All the games I want to play hit PC first, so it wasn't too hard to part with.

blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda. Everyone could go back and forth arguing little points here and there trying to decide which system is better than the other. It all boils down to which games you want to play, and which system they came out on. If you're a Halo fan, get the XBOX. If you're a Final Fantasy or Call of Duty fan, get the PS3. Check the games, and decide from there. I've owned both, and I can't tell any real difference between either console. But I'm a Final Fantasy and SOCOM fan, so I sold my XBOX and bought a PS3. Never been happier.

oh and right now, Call of Duty 4 is a sick game when it ACTUALLY works. piece of shit Activision server crashes every 20 minutes or so.

Quote:

Originally posted by Kanzen

I don't consider myself a fanboy, just a realist who doesn't like hype and false promises. I have all the systems anyways:

@ Watty:

touche mate and clean ya gamecube its filthy

You I like the Xbox 360 more the Playstation 2, haven't played the 3 yet.

I was a long time playstation guy, and switched to Xbox360. Its great, for graphics, but lately It been freezing alot, I only play Madden 08 more then any other game, but the things that are pissing me off, atleast with the Madden game.

1) It's fine until the 2012 season then it freezes

2) You have to sim the preseson one week at a time, or the whole system stops working, like I can't pull up the menu for the Xbox system itself.

3) The regular season you have too sometime sim one game at a time, or the same thing happened the whole system just shuts down.

4) I traded some players and got 4 first round picks, the computer traded 3 of first rounders, by itself I had everything selected for human mode on my team, still can't figure that one out.

5) If you sim the regular season, the computer switches your settings to computer mode. But if you sim the season by week it stays in human control

6) If you sim the regular season, the computer changes the human controlled roster.



Anyone else have these issues with the Madden 08 game?

I've never had a problem with my 360 freezing ever. If you are having an issue like that with Madden I'd think its an EA problem and not a microsoft one.

I bought an external fan for my 360, as mine was supposedly one on the bad batch that kept dying... and i can play it for hours and it wont get hot... they are loud, but i think worth it

I have a 360. had it from launch. Not had one bit of trouble. Games are kick ass and i play for hours on end.
If u think the XboX360 is bad with crashs and so then take a look at the PS3, Sure they dont brake like the 360s BUT they do brake. surge plugs void the warranty and even dust. NO JOKES
Check this out. dust voids PS3>http://consumerist.com/consumer/audio/sony-csr-what-no-dust-doesnt-void-your-ps3-warranty-321288.php
and surge plug voids PS3 > http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=ps3&thread.id=2041636

and the fact that the Xbox360 is out selling the PS3 in japan is a dead clear winner.
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/11/09/xbox-360-outsells-ps3-in-japan/

Lets be fair it's outsold the PS3 for 1 or 2 weeks and that's because they have somke big games right now. Halo, Ace Combat is big in Japan, but it's doing really badly overall in Japan. The ps3 is generally outselling it, and it will outsell it, especially when the big games drop. Then there is Nintendo......