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  • PS3 Masterbater 5 - Tuesday, January 9, 2007 - link

    I WOULD JUST LIKE TO SAY THAT IF PS3 HAD A HOLE IN IT I WOULD INSERT MY PENIS IN AND MAKE SWEET LOVE TO IT BECAUSE IT IS THE GREATEST THING EVER. NINTENDO WII CAN SUCK MY HUGE COCK BECAUSE ITS A LITTLE BITCH AND IT IS THE POOR MANS PS3. IF NINTENDO WII WAS A MAN IT WOULD HAVE A VERY SMALL PENIS AND STILL BE A VIRGIN YOU GUYS ARE SO JEALOUS THAT I HAD THE FIRST PS3 EVER AND I WILL DOMINATE ANYONE IN "RESISTANCE : FALL OF MAN"
  • Wizzdo - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link

    Definitely a bigger head below than above!
  • steveyoung123456789 - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link

    your a virgin pussy and if i ever find out where you live i will kick your ass!!!!!!!!!!!!
  • steveyoung123456789 - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link

    Btw your a psycho for wanting to fuck a gaming cousel... smh.... queef!!
  • Oliseo - Thursday, January 2, 2020 - link

    How amusing would it be to meet the guy who wrote that, all these years later in a pub. And show him what he wrote. Wonder how he'd respond! Here's to 2020 my main man! Imagine your wife or kids seeing this. *cringe*

    ha! But isn't that the beauty of growing up, that we can all look back on our younger selves and cringe a little.

    Thing is, if you're not doing this, are you even progressing as a person!?
  • SilverTrine - Friday, November 17, 2006 - link

    The GPU in the Ps3 is more than enough for what its intended for. Theres no magic in GPUs they're just specialized processors.

    In the Xbox360 the GPU carries more of the processing load. Remember the unified ram that the GPU uses in the Xbox360 is 700mhz fast.

    The GPU in the Ps3 also has 700mhz ram. However the Cell processor has access to XDR ram running at a whopping 3.2ghz! In the Ps3 system the Cell with the superfast XDR ram will do more of the grunt work and rely less on the GPU.

    Saying the GPU in the Xbox360 somehow gives the system is a mistake. What would you rather have doing processing work a GPU running relatively slow with 700mhz ram or a extremely fast Cell processor with 3.2ghz XDR ram?

    However utilizing this on the Ps3 will require more specialized programming, the Xbox360 because its fairly conventional will be able to tap more of its power sooner than the Ps3.
  • tipoo - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link

    Uhh, "mhz fast" doesn't matter an iota. The bandwidth of that XDR RAM was still 25GB/s to the Cell, it just works in a different way than GDDR, needs a higher clock speed for similar bandwidth. The clock speed was no advantage. And the RSX could only get data back at 15GB/s from the Cell going to the XDR.
  • theteamaqua - Tuesday, July 12, 2005 - link

    http://theconsolewars.blogspot.com/2005/05/xbox-36...
    i just wan people to know that how bias this site is, i mean this guy has no idea what he is talking about
  • jwix - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link

    #77 I wouldn't say Anand's article was "full of shit." I would say it was a bit sensationlist, as stated in the Arstechnica article. What surprised me more than anything was that Anand would post such an article, then remove it so quickly. That's not his style.
    Bottom line though - these consoles will offer nothing new or innovative in the way of gameplay. I think I'll stick with my PC and Nintendo DS for now.
  • steveyoung123456789 - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link

    get a life
  • calimero - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link

    http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050629-5054...

    btw Anand article was "full of shit" (sorry but that is the right phrase) and it's not odd that Anand pull it. It's quite embarassing for Anand; someone already told: one thing is to write test of CPU speed and speed of graphics card in games... and another to analyse CPU architecture.
  • jwix - Tuesday, July 5, 2005 - link

    Creathir - the article was reposted on other forums around the net. Here is the story in summary - Sony & Microsoft have both overhyped the processing power of their cpu's by using clever marketing speak. It turns out the processor designs are uneccessarily complicated, inefficient at crunching today's game code, and unlikely to be useful when game code finally becomes fully multi-threaded in the coming years. Why microsoft and sony didn't go with an Intel or AMD design, I don't know. The article speculates that both companies wanted IP rights to the cpu, maybe that's the reason.
    The GPU's on the other hand look plenty powerful. They should both be relatively equivalent in performance to the R520 and the current 7800 GTX.
    Bottom line - the new consoles will be quite powerful compared to the previous generation. However, PC's will still be more powerful, and wil remain the platform of choice for high end gaming. Something I was glad to read as I just built a new pc.

  • steveyoung123456789 - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link

    wow your so smart! faggit
  • creathir - Saturday, July 2, 2005 - link

    jwix:
    I had read a good portion of the article, but had been pulled away (thought to myself I'll just reread it later) and was upset to find it was gone. I have never seen this here at Anandtech, and Anand has not made a single comment on his blog about it. I suppose some fact was incorrect? Maybe Sony/Microsoft decided they would SUE him over the article? I bet the most logical answer is this, Tim Sweeney saw the article, and even though Anand referenced the "anonymous developer", he had earlier mentioned in his blog he had been waiting for some answers from Tim. I would bet this "outed" his source, much like the LA Times outed their source recently for a Grand Jury. This outing probably was followed by a request by Tim to pull the article. I would have to bet we will see it soon enough, reworked, reworded. Whatever the case, Anand, it was a good article, you should be sure to repost it.
    - Creathir
  • steveyoung123456789 - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link

    o someone can read!! yay!
  • linkgoron - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link

    blckgrffn, THIS IS NOT i repeat NOT the article you think it is.
  • blckgrffn - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link

    Yes it is back up! :D

    Nat
  • jwix - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link

    Last night, around 10:00pm EST, I surfed over to the Anandtech home page to see what was happening. I was greeted by Part II of the article (Xbox 360, Sony PS3 - a hardware discussion). Did anyone else read this article last night. I was only able to read the first 2 pages before the article was pulled off the website. Why would they post it and then pull it so quickly? And why has not been reposted since?
    The story it told was unbelievable - basically, the floating point processing power of both the Sony and Xbox processor was less than half of your average Pentium 4. Anand went into detail on how and why this was the case. His sources apparently were confidential, but definitely industry insiders (ie...game developers). I wish I could have finished reading the article before it was pulled. Did anyone read the whole article?
  • ecoumans - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link

    Physics Middleware will be Multithreaded and heavily optimized for Cell's 7 SPE's. This makes life easier for gamedevelopers, and it changes the story about CPU usage... Same story for sound etc.
  • Houdani - Tuesday, June 28, 2005 - link

    29: In order to turn off the "sponsored links" go to ABOUT in the top left menu and turn off INTELITEXT.

    I think this setting is stored in a cookie, so you will need to do this everytime you clear your cookies.
  • BenSkywalker - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    ""One thing is for sure, support for two 1080p outputs in spanning mode (3840 x 1080) on the PS3 is highly unrealistic. At that resolution, the RSX would be required to render over 4 megapixels per frame, without a seriously computation bound game it’s just not going to happen at 60 fps." -- Quote from page 10"

    First off 1080p doesn't support 60FPS as of this moment anyway, and there are an awful lot of games on consoles that aren't remotely close to being GPU bound anyway. Remember that the XBox has titles now that are pushing out 1080i and the RSX is easily far more then four times the speed of the GPU in the XBox.
  • tipoo - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link

    "RSX is easily far more then four times the speed of the GPU in the XBox."

    It's funny reading these comments years later, and seeing how crazy the PS3 hype machine was. I assume this insane comment reffered to the 1 terraflop RSX thing, which was a massive joke. RSX was worse than Xenon not only in raw gflops (180 vs over 200 I think), but since it didn't have unified shaders it could be bottlenecked by a scene having too much vertex or pixel effects and leaving shaders underused.
  • calimero - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    Here is one tip about Cell:
    to play MP3 files (stereo) on PC you need 100MHz 486 CPU. Atari Falcon030 with MC68030 (16MHz) and DSP (32MHz) can do same thing!
    Everyone who know to program will find Cell outstanding and thrilling everyone else who pretend to be a programer please continue to waste CPU cycles with your shity code!
  • coolme - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    "Supporting 1080p x2 may seem like overkill,"

    It's not gonna support 1080p x2

    "One thing is for sure, support for two 1080p outputs in spanning mode (3840 x 1080) on the PS3 is highly unrealistic. At that resolution, the RSX would be required to render over 4 megapixels per frame, without a seriously computation bound game it’s just not going to happen at 60 fps." -- Quote from page 10
  • nevermind4711 - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    People have different ways of expressing the frequency of DDRAM. The correct memory frequency of 7800GTX is 256MB/256-bit GDDR3 at 600MHz, but as it is double rate some people say 1200 MHz.

    In the same way you can say the RSX memory is operating at 1400 MHz. How else could 128 bit result in a memory bandwidth of 22 GB/s for the RTX?

    #64 knitecrow, who is your source that the RSX does not contain e-dram, or is it just speculation?

    Besides, your conclusion from extrapolating the transistor count may be correct, but assuming the transistor count is proportional to the number of pixel pipelines is a rather big simplification, there is quite a lot of other stuff inside a GPU as well, stuff that does not scale proportionally to the pixel pipelines.
  • Furen - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    The RSX is supposed to be clocked higher but will only have a 700MHz, 128bit memory bus (as opposed to the 1200MHz, 256bit memory bus on the 7800gtx).
  • knitecrow - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    #61
    too bad you don't speak marketing.
    When they say near.. it means very close. Could be slightly under or over. If it was something like 320M... they will be hyp3ing 320M.


    #62 too bad you are wrong

    with 300M transistors, the RSX is a native 24 pixel pipeline card

    You can extrapolate the number by looking at:
    6800ultra - 16 - 222M
    6600GT - 8 - 144M

    it has no eDRAM.

    The features remain to be seen, but its going to be a G70 derivate -- just like XGPU for the xbox was a geforce3 derivative.

    There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the RSX is going to be more powerful than 7800GTX.

    Just because a product comes out later doesn't make it better

    Exhibit A:
    Radeon 9700pro vs. 5800ultra

  • Darkon - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    http://www.psinext.com/index.php?categoryid=3&...
  • Dukemaster - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    I think it is very clear why the RSX gpu has the same number of transistors but still is more powerfull then the 7800GTX: the 7800GTX is a chip with 32 pipelines with 8 of them turned off.
  • nevermind4711 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Interesting article. However, I find it strange that Anand and Derek do not comment on the difference in floating point capacity between the combatants. 1 TFlops for X360 vs. 2 TFlops for PS3. For X360 we know that the majority of flops come from the GPU, where probably the big part consists of massively paralell compare ops and such coming from the AA- and filtering circuitry integrated with the e-DRAM.
    It would be very interesting to know how the RSX provides 1.8 TFlops. I do not think the G70 has a capacity anything near that. Could it be possible that Sony will bring some e-DRAM to the party together with AA and filtering circuitry similar to X360. After all Sony has quite some experience of e-DRAM from PS2 and PSP.
    Anand and Derek wrote "Both the G70 and the RSX share the same estimated transistor count, of approximately 300.4 million transistors." Where do this information come from? Sony only said in its presentation the RSX will have 300+ mil t:s. G70 we now know contains 302 mil t:s.
    #48: Sony may very well have replaced some video en/de-coding circuitry of the G70 with some e-dram circuitry.
  • tipoo - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link

    That was such bullshit. RSX was worth under 200Gflops, Cell about the same and much harder to extract that much from, Xenos was over 200, Xenon was around 100. Nothing was near the terraflop range except in marketing bullspeak.
  • LanceVance - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    #59

    "Does every xbox game needs to be playable? No."
    "How many of you still play your old games? Market research shows not a lot."

    Backwards compatibility is a feature. It's just like any other feature on a mass market consumer product. Some people value it and others don't.

    You clearly don't value that and won't consider it when making consumer decisions.

    Other people clearly DO value that and you are trying to persuade them not to. That's none of your business. If people value a specific feature they have every right to consider it in their buying behaviors.

    Sorry, I know this post has now gone way off topic from the original article of technical analysis. Beautiful article; but any open forum on such a political topic is doomed to degenerate into this.
  • knitecrow - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    software emulation is difficult and takes a lot of man power to get right.

    The main advantage for microsoft was that they didn't have to stuck with poor business and engineering design choices of the past.

    Does every xbox game needs to be playable? No. I don't care for games like "big rigs"
    I abviously want halo to work, but also the lesser known good titles on xbox ... like Panzer Dargoon Orta, Kingdom Under Fire, Otogi 1 & 2 and so on.

    How many of you still play your old games? Market research shows not a lot.I have an 80+ games library for the xbox. I don't mind.
  • BenSkywalker - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    milomnderbnder21-

    They are flipping consumers off. Sony and Nintendo at this point are both adding costs to their consoles to incorporate hardware to make certain that their systems have full compatability with the prior generation. MS has decided that you and I are not good enough to offer that same assurance. They have decided to save themselves a couple of dollars and render useless all of their games they can't get running on their new platform so they can save a few dollars. They will take a shot at software hacks- if they don't work we are out of luck. They are also stopping production of current gen XBox hardware. I have about thirty games for my XB currently, what do I do with them if my XB dies and they aren't supported by XB360(which there is no assurance they will)? I keep my legacy hardware around, back to my 2600, and my games.
  • Olaf van der Spek - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    > Compared to the built in 5X CAV DVD drive in the Xbox, the hard drive offered much faster performance. With the Xbox 360, the performance demands on the hard drive are lessened, the console now ships with a 12X CAV DVD-DL drive.

    Aren't all read-only DVD drives dual-layer?
  • Starglider - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    I'm a game programmer and I take issue with the statement on page 4 that BSP collision detection benefits from branch prediction. It doesn't; it's one of the rare types of code where the branches are effectively impossible to predict. The algorithm /does/ benefit heavily from speculative execution, but as I understand it neither the XBox360 or the PS3 are capable of this. As such this is one area where PC style processors have an advantage; neither console is going to beat a modern PC at SuperPi.
  • devilzblood - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    altho this is my first post at anandtech, i have been reading ur articles from the geforce 3 launch.
    newayz.....im posting here coz im wondering if neone knos this.....what degrees do Anand and Derek hold?? they seem to be such a bank of information, i never thought it was humanly possible to know so much about computers..needless to say im impressed by u people..and all i would like to say about the article is that it was an informative and enjoying read
  • milomnderbnder21 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #46

    MS is by no means "flipping off it's supporters" with regards to backwards compatibility. They have flat out stated that it is there goal that EVERY Xbox game be compatible on the 360, but they simply cannot guarentee it. In any case, look for a majority of them to be so. And if they can't get everything working, I'm not going to miss outlaw golf on my 360...
  • MDme - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #50

    Sony WILL support 1080p. They are supporting it so that they can BRAG about it. It's all about the hype, even if they only have 1 game supporting it, they will BRAG about it. heck, if you really think about it, if sony played a video (H.264) at 1080p then ran the game at 720p they will still claim, WE HAVE SUPPORT FOR 1080p. It's all marketing. Even X360 can claim this.
  • finbarqs - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    bla bla bla, which one is better?
  • Darkon - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #49

    WTF are you talking ?

    The Cell does general-purpose processing although not as good as 360 cpu.


    And Anand I suggest you do some more research on cell
  • Alx - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Someone explain to me how Sony will support 1080p please. If developers make the games run at acceptable framerate at that resolution, most people running them at 720p and 480i will be wasting at least half of PS3's rendering power.

    On the other hand if XBOX360 game devs make their games run just fast enough at 720p, that'll give them far more resources to work with than those poor Sony game devs.
  • Shinei - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    That's not necessarily true, #48. The Cell processor doesn't do general-purpose processing, so it can't do decoding on its own--and as far as I know, even pressed DVDs have to be decoded by some kind of processor. (Of course, I know next to nothing about video equipment, so I could be wrong...)
  • arturnow - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Another difference between RSX and G70 is hardware video decoder - PureVideo, i'm sure RSX doesn't need that which saves transistors count
  • freebst - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Actually, in response to 31 there is no 1080p 60 frame/sec signal. the only HD signals are 1080 30p, 24p, 60i, 720 60p, 30p, 24p.
  • BenSkywalker - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Why the support for lower resolutions? I'm a bit confused by this- I can't see why anyone who isn't a fanatic loyalist wouldn't want to see the highest resolution possible supported by the consoles. The XBox(current) supports 1080i and despite the extreme rarity in which it is used- it IS used. Supporting 1080p x2 may seem like overkill, but think of the possibilities in terms of turn based RPGs or strategy games(particularly turn based) where 60FPS is very far removed from required.

    The most disappointing thing about the new generation of consoles is MS flipping its customers off in terms of backwards compatability. Even Nintendo came around this gen and MS comes up with some half done emulation that works on some of 'the best selling' games. Also, with their dropping production of the original XB already it appears they still have an enormous amount to learn about the console market(check out sales of the original PS after the launch of the PS2 for an example).
  • Warder45 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    errr #31 not 37
  • Warder45 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #37 is right on the money. There is a good chance that there will be no HDTV that can accept a 1080p signal by the time the PS3 comes out.

    It seems less like Sony future proofing the PS3 and more like Sony saying we have bigger balls then MS. Not to say MS is exempt from doing the same.
  • IamTHEsnake - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Excellent article Anand and crew.

    Thank you for the very informative read.
  • masher - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    > "Collision detection is a big part of what is commonly
    > referred to as “game physics.” ..."

    Sorry, collision detection is computational geometry, not physics.

    > "However it is possible to structure collision detection for
    > execution on the SPEs, but it would require a different
    > approach to the collision detection algorithms... "

    Again, untrue. You walk the tree on the PPE, whereas you do the actual intersection tests on the SPs. The SPs are also ideally suited to calculating the positions of each object (read: real physics) and updating the tree accordingly.
  • MDme - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    now i know what to buy :)
  • SuperStrokey - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    lol, thats funny
  • bldckstark - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Having a PS2 and an XBOX I was not even thinking about buying a PS3 since the XBOX kicks the PS2's ace. (IMHO). After reading this article I have much more respect for the PS3 and now I don't have any idea which onw I will buy. My wife may force me to buy the PS3 if the 360 isn't as backward compatible as most want it to be.

    Maybe I will just use my unusually large brain to create a PS360 that will play everything. Oooh, wait, I gotta get a big brain first. Then a big p3nis. Or maybe just a normal one.
  • Furen - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #37: supposedly yes. Since it will have to be through hardcore emulation there will be issues (but of course). It wont be fully transparent like the ps2 but rather you'll have profiles saved on your harddrive which will tell the system how to run the games.
  • SuperStrokey - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    I havnt been following the 360 too much (im a self admitted nintendo fanboy), but will it be backward compatible too? I heard it was still up in the air but as PS3 is going to be and revolution is going to be (bigtime) i would assume that 360 will be too right?
  • ZobarStyl - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #32 is right: how many games get released for all 3 console with only minor, subtle differences between them? Most of the time, first party stuff is the only major difference between consoles. Very few 3rd party games are held back from the 'slower' consoles; most are just licensing deals (GTA:SA on PS2, for example). And if you look back, of the first party games lineup, XBox didn't have the most compelling of libraries, in my opinion.
  • yacoub - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    imo, the revolution will be a loser in more than just hardware. i can't remember the last time i actually wanted to play any of the exclusive nintendo games. actually, i think for about one day i considered a gamecube for metroid but then i saw it in action at a friend's place and was underwhelmed by the gameplay. forget mario and link, give me splinter cell or gran tourismo or forza or... yeah you get the idea.
  • nserra - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #27

    If you read the article carefully, you will see that since they are "weaker" pipelines, the 48 will perform like 24 "complete" ones.

    I think with this Ati new design, there will be games where the performance will be much better, equal or worst.
    But that’s the price to pay for complete new designs.

    On paper Ati design is much more advance, in fact reminds the VOODOO2 design where there are more than one chip doing things. I think I prefer some very fancy graphics design over a double all easy solution.
  • Taracta - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    With 25.5 Gbs of bandwith to memory, is OoO (Out Of Order processing) necessary? Isn't OoO and its ilk bandwith hiding solutions? I have an issue with regards to Anandtech outlook on the SPPs of the CELL processor (I could be wrong). I consider the SPPs to be full fledge Vector Processors and not just fancy implementation of MMX, SSE, Altivec etc, which seems to be Anandtech's outlook. As full fledge Vector Processors they are orders of magnitude more flexible than that and as Vector Processors comparing them to Scalar Processors is erroneous.

    Another thing, RISC won the war! Don't believe, what do you call a processor with a RISC core with a CISC hardware translator around it? CISC? I think not, it's a RISC processor. x86 did win the procesor war but not by beating them but joining them and by extension CISC loss. Just needed to clear that up. The x86 instruction set won but the old x86 CISC architecture loss. The x86 insrtuction set will always win, fortunately for AMD because the Itanium was to have been their death. No way could they have copied the Itanium in this day and age which come to think of it is very unfortunate.

    From you have the processor the runs x86 the best you will always win. Unless you can get a toehold in the market with something else such as LINUX and CELL!
  • CuriousMike - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    If it's a 3rd party game, it won't matter (greatly) which platform you pick, because developers will develop to the least-common-denominator.

    In the current generation, about the best one could hope for is slightly higher-res textures and better framerate on XBOX over ps2/gc.

    IMO, pick your platform based on first-party games/series you're looking forward to. Simple as that.

  • Doormat - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    @#22: Yes 1080P is an OFFICIAL ATSC spec. There are 18 different video formats in the ATSC specification. 1080/60P is one of them.

    FWIW, Even the first 1080P TVs coming out this year will *NOT* support 1080P in over HDMI. Why? I dunno. The TVs will upscale everything to 1080P (from 1080i, 720p, etc), but they cant accept input as 1080P. Some TVs will be able to do it over VGA (the Samsung HLR-xx68/78/88s will), but still thats not the highest quality input.
  • Pastuch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    RE: 1080P
    "We do think it was a mistake for Microsoft not to support 1080p, even if only supported by a handful of games/developers."

    I couldnt disagree more. At the current rate of HDTV adoption we'll be lucky if half of the Xbox 360 users have 1280x720 displays by 2010. Think about how long it took for us to get passed 480i. Average Joe doesnt like to buy new TVs very often. Unless 1080P HDTVs drop to $400 or less no one will buy them for a console. We the eger geeks of Anandtech will obviously have 42 widescreen 1080P displays but we are far from the Average Joe.

    RE: Adult Gamers

    Anyone who thinks games are for kids needs a wakeup call. The largest player base of gamers is around 25 years old right now. By 2010 we will be daddys looking for our next source of interactive porn. I see mature sexually oriented gaming taking off around that time. I honestly believe that videogames will have the popularity of television in the next 20 years. I know a ton of people that dont have cable TV but they do have cable internet, a PC, xbox, PS2 and about a million games for each device.
  • Pannenkoek - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #19 fitten: That's the whole point, people pretend that even rotten fruit laying on the ground is "hard" to pick up. It's not simply about restructuring algorithms to accomodate massive parallelism, but also how it will take ages and how no current game could be patched to run multithreaded on a mere dual core system.

    Taking advantage of parallism is a hot topic in computer science as far as I can tell and there are undoubtedly many interesting challanges involved. But that's no excuse for not being able to simply multithread a simple application.

    And before people cry that game engines are comparable to rocket science (pointing to John Carmack's endeavours) and are the bleeding edge technology in software, I'll say that's simply not the reality, and even less an excuse to not be able to take advantage of parallelism.

    Indeed, game developers are not making that excuse and will come with multithreaded games once we have enough dual core processors and when their new games stop being videocard limited. Only Anandtech thinks that multithreading is a serious technical hurdle.

    This and those bloody obnoxious "sponsored links" all through the text of articles are the only serious objections I have towards Anandtech.
  • jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #26 - yeah i know that happens all over but I was just commenting on the fact that the console's market is mainly teens and adults not mainly kids.
  • expletive - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    "If you’re wondering whether or not there is a tangible image quality difference between 1080p and 720p, think about it this way - 1920 x 1080 looks better on a monitor than 1280 x 720, now imagine that blown up to a 36 - 60” HDTV - the difference will be noticeable. "

    This statement should be further qualified. There is only a tangible benefit to 1080p if the display device is native 1080p resolution. Otherwise, the display itself will scale the image down to its native resolution (i.e. 720p for most DLP televisions). If youre display is native 720p then youre better off outputting 720p becuase all that extra processing is being wasted.

    There are only a handful of TVs that support native 1080p right now and they are all over $5k.

    These points are really important when discussing the real-world applications of 1080p for a game console. The people using this type of device (a $300 game console) are very different then those that go out and buy 7800GTX cards the first week they are released. Based on my reading in the home theater space, less than 10% of the people that own a PS3 will be able to display 1080p natively during its lifecycle (5 years).

    Also, can someone explain how the Xenos unified shaders was distelled from 48 down to 24 in this article? That didnt quite make sense to me...

    John
  • nserra - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    I was on the supermarket, and there was a kid (12year old girl) buying the game that you mention with the daddy that know sh*t about games, and about looking for the 18 year old logo.

    Maybe if they put a pen*s on the box instead of the carton girl, some dads will then know the difference between a game for 8 year old and an 18.

    #21 I don’t know about your country, but this is what happen in mine and not only with games.
  • knitecrow - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    would you be able to tell the difference at Standard resolution?

    instead of drawing more pixels on the screen, the revolution can use that processing power and/or die space for other functions... e.g. shaders

    If the revolution opts to pick an out-of-order processor, something like PPC970FX, i don't see why i can't be competitive.


    But seriously, all speculation aside, the small form factor limits the ammount of heat components can put out, and the processing power of the system.
  • perseus3d - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    --"Sony appears to have the most forward-looking set of outputs on the PlayStation 3, featuring two HDMI video outputs. There is no explicit support for DVI, but creating a HDMI-to-DVI adapter isn’t too hard to do. Microsoft has unfortunately only committed to offering component or VGA outputs for HD resolutions."--

    Does that mean, as it stands now, the PS3 will require an adapter to be played on an LCD Monitor, and the X360 won't be able to be used with an LCD Monitor with DVI?
  • Dukemaster - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    At least we know Nintendo's Revolution is the lozer when it comes to pure power.
  • freebst - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    I just wanted to remind everyone that 1080P at 60 Frames isn't even an approved ATSC Signal. 1080P at 30 and 24 frames is, but not 60. 1280x720 can run at 60, 30, and 24 that is unless you are running at 50 or 25 frames/sec in Europe.
  • jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #20 well that can't be right for the whole consumer base, as I'm 24 and only know other adults that have consoles and alot of them have flashy tv's for them as well, I do. I think if you look at the market for consoles it is mainly teens and adults that have consoles - not kids. Alot of people I know started with a NES or an Atari 2500, etc and have continued to like games as they have grown up. Why is it that the best selling game has an 18 rating?? (GTA: San Andreas)

    The burning of the screen would be minimal unless you have a game paused for hours and the tv left on - TV technology is moving on and they often turn themselves off if a static image is displayed for an amount of time. So burning shouldn't occur.
  • nserra - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    All the people that i know having consoles is kids (80%), and their parents have bought an TV just for the console, an 70€ TV.....

    Who is the parent that will let kids on an LCD or PLASMA (3000€) to play games (burn them).

    Or there will be good 480i "compatibility" in games, or forget it....

    #17 I agree.
  • fitten - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #14 There are a number of issues being discussed.

    For example, given the nature of current AI code, making that code parallel (as in more than one thread executing AI code working together) seems non-trivial. Data dependencies and the very branch heavy code making data dependencies less predictable probably cause headaches here. Sure, one could probably take the simple approach and say one thread for AI, one for physics, one for blah but that has already been discussed by numerous people as a possibility.

    Parallel code comes in many flavors. The parallelism in the graphics card, for instance, is sometimes classified as "embarassingly parallel" which means it's trivial to do. Then there are pipelines (dataflow) which CPUs and GPUs also use. These are usually fairly easy too because the data partitioning is pretty easy. You break out a thread for each overall task that you want to do. You want to do OpA on the data, then OpB, then OpC. All OpB depends on is the output data of OpA and OpC just depends on OpB's final product. Three threads, each one doing an Op on the output of the previous.

    Then there are codes that are quite a bit more complex where, for example, there are numerous threads that all execute on parts of the whole data instead of all of it at once but the solution they are solving for requires many iterations on the data and at the end of each iteration, all the threads exchange data with each other (or just their 'neighbors') so that the next iteration can be performed. These are a bit more work to develop.

    Anyway, I got long-winded anyway. Basically... there are *many* kinds of parallelism and many kinds of algorithms and implementations of parallelism. Some are low hanging fruit and some are non-trivial. Since I've already read that numerous developers for each platform already see low hanging fruit (run one thread for AI, another for physics, etc.) I can only believe they are talking about things that are non-trivial, such as a multithreaded AI engine, for example (again, as opposed to just breaking out the AI engine into one thread seperate from the rest of game play).
  • probedb - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Nice article! I'll wait till they're both out and have a play before I buy either. Last console I bought was an original PlayStation :) But gotta love that hi-def loveliness at last!

    #3 yeah 1080i is interlaced and at such a high res and low refresh the text is really difficult to read, it'd be far better at 1080p I think since that would effectively be the same as 1920x1080 on a normal monitor. 1080i is flickery as hell for me for desktop use but fine for any video and media centre type interfaces on the PC.
  • A5 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    You know, the vast majority of the TVs these systems will be hooked up to will only do 480i (standard TV)...
  • jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #14 - here here!
  • jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #10 - sounds to me like they're way ahead of they're time, future-proofing is good as they'll need another 6 years to develop the PS4 - but the Cell and Xenon will force developers to change their ways and will prepare them for the future of developing on PC's that eventually have this kind of CPU chip design (ref intel's chip design future pic on the first page of the article), like the article says the initial round of games will be single threaded etc etc...

    You might get alot of mediocre games but then you should get ones that really shine bright on the PS3, noticeably Unreal 3 and I bet the Gran Turismo (polyphony) guys will put in the effort.
  • Pannenkoek - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    I'm quite tired of hearing how difficult it is to develop a multithreaded game. Only pathetic programmers can not grasp the concept of parallel code execution, it's not as if the current CPU/GPU duality does not qualify as one.
  • knitecrow - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    you'll need HDD for online service and MMOP

    how many people are going to buy a $100 HDD if they don't have to?
  • LanceVance - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    "the PS3 won’t ship with a hard drive"

    If that's true, then will it be like:

    - PS2 Memory Card; non-included but standard equipment required by all games.
    - PS2 Hard Drive; non-included and considered exotic unusual equipment and used by very few games.
  • LanceVance - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Excellent article. Definitely the most thorough, informative, well researched article on the PS3/Xbox360.

    And most importantly, unlike every other article on the subject, it's not strongly biased toward one camp while making comments of substance.
  • yacoub - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    I bet the PS3 debuts at a higher price.

    Also regarding statements made on the Conclusionary page:

    --"That being said, it won’t be impossible to get the same level of performance out of the PS3, it will just take more work. In fact, specialized hardware can be significantly faster than general purpose hardware at certain tasks, giving the PS3 the potential to outperform the Xbox 360 in CPU tasks. It has yet to be seen how much work is required to truly exploit that potential however, and it will definitely be a while before we can truly answer that question."--

    I find it funny that once again the PlayStation will be the harder system to code games for that take full advantage of its abilities. If trends mimic the past (as they often do) this will lead to a large amount of mediocre games by companies too small to afford the dev time necessary to take real advantage of the PS3's advantages or on deadlines too tight to spend the time doing more.
  • Furen - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    It does sound pretty low but (I'm guessing) it's more than enough, I dont think they would have separated the dies unless it didnt lead to a big performance penalty. also, I'm guessing that the 256MB/sec bandwidth between the eDRAM and its processing hardware is 256GB/sec? Microsoft was using that number to inflate their "system bandwidth" total.
  • Woodchuck2000 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    And for that matter, 32Mb/s inter-die communications in the Xenos GPU seems low to me
    :p
    Good article though guys!
  • Furen - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Is there any word on the media center extender capabilities on the xbox 360? I think Microsoft mentioned something about that but I'm not sure if that was oficial or not. Just hope they allow us to plug in some video capture device and use it as a dvr eventually.

    As much as I like sony's playstation, I find it quite boring on the technical side. It seems like they're just throwing everything they can into it but nothing is really that exciting, or useful. Come on, dual-HDMI. I dont see myself having two HDTVs in such close proximity to each other. Gigabit router? Seems like they're desperate to use the extra cpu muscle. I wonder how heavy ethernet traffic will affect cpu usage.
  • Woodchuck2000 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Surely porting between multi-core PC software and Xenon should be fairly trivial, not fairly Non-trivial as stated in the article...?
  • jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    I stands for interlaced whilst the P stands for progressive scan. Check out the difference at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/720p

    or

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080i

    This should resolve this issue.
  • AnnihilatorX - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    1080i = 720p doesn't it? 1080p is the one Xbox 360 doesn't support.

    These "i"s and "p"s are confusing me
  • sprockkets - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    How is 1080i on your tv's? On my 1 year old Mitsubishi native 1080i tv using dvi from the computer at 1080i is basically useless since the text is too small and the image looks like the refresh rate is below 60hz, whereas HDTV broadcasts look fine. Using the other mode of 720x480 looked great.

    Will HD output from a console be any better than a video card in a computer? Is it just my tv?

    Cmon, did you really think nVidia would release something far more advanced for a console than for a video card, or perhaps, more specifically, having it way outperform 6800 ultras in sli?

    If you need around a 400w power supply for even non sli setup, what kind of heat and power will these new consoles need anyhow???

    Of course I am more interested in how the PS3 will work with Linux more than games hahahahaha, since Sony officially mentioned it.
  • emmap - Sunday, December 4, 2005 - link

    And that's this article, Sony and M$ have missed:

    it's not the number of megapixels, shader pipelines, CPU / GPU bandwidth, multithreaded or single threaded code which do a great game. It's imagination put in the game, gameplay, artistic art quality, human feeling we get looking at the characters, fun and so on. It's not only mathematics and physics: we don't love a game because it has X millions polygons or run at Y fps, no it's totally different. Just see all the mame fans out there, you'll see that they don't care about the obsolete hardware the game they are playing on, they care about the most important thing about game: ENTERTAINMENT!
  • Shinei - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    I had hoped RSX was a good deal more powerful than G70, considering they had more time to tape it out and add stuff to it... Especially considering how bandwidth-deprived G70 is.
    I guess nVidia is REALLY banking on games becoming more pixel-shader dependant and less texture-dependant. (Mistake, if you ask me.)
  • knitecrow - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    #1 woo... let the flame war begin
  • Oliseo - Thursday, January 2, 2020 - link

    Absolutely fascinating revisiting these kind of articles. Naturally I come fully loaded with a plethera or hindsight.

    And that hindsight makes these articles rather amusing to read. Not least because it teaches us that none of can see into the future. And often that future is very different than we imagined it to be.

    And the lesson to be taken away from all of this, is that articles written today, will age similar to this one. And all of us arguing in the comments section, well, our comments will age just as badly too.

    So, going forward this year, I'm gonna simply carry around a rather large sack of salt. And I'll need a large sack of it, for all the little pinches I'll be using...

    Cheers

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