Why to people say that the Xbox GPU is better than the PS3 GPU?

[Schadenfreude]

This reminds me of the argument when the PS1 and Sega Saturn came out - if I remember, wasn't the Saturn equipped w/ multiple core processors as well?

 

[Doopster]

Just an fyi, clock speed means next to nothing in today's world when comparing different components from different companies.

GPU performance decreases linear as you reduce clock speed.

Pls read thread before posting.

 

[Doopster]

This reminds me of the argument when the PS1 and Sega Saturn came out - if I remember, wasn't the Saturn equipped w/ multiple core processors as well?

Saturn was honestly a sweet console. It's 3D was worse than the PS1 even with more horse power. But it's 2D fighting games were arcade perfect...

 

[Doopster]

Doopster, you are clearly a fanboy. Personally, I don't give a crap about either console. But the speed of a given GPU has absolutely nothing to do with your desire or fanboyism. The Xbox GPU is faster. It's as simple as that. Why do you have such a hard time swallowing this?

I am being completely honest, I own both consoles and don't have enough time for games. Last games I completed were Dragon Age (on PC), Modern Warfare 2 (on PC), Uncharted 2 (on PS3), GTA IV (on Xbox).

All the time on boards I see "Xbox GPU way betta!", but I'm not so sure, the point of my posts to Anantech was to engage the intelligent people here to compare the PC technology that went into them.

Slag me off and call me a fan boy lawl... doesn't worry me. I'm not trying to 'win' an argument, just discuss a point of view.

 

[darkswordsman17]

GPU performance decreases linear as you reduce clock speed.

Pls read thread before posting.

His point is, when you're comparing different architectures, you can't directly compare clock speed.

And learn to use the multi-quote.

You'd do yourself a favor if you didn't just discard what people are telling you. As has already been told to you, the 360 GPU is not the same as an X1900. Then you keep trying to say the PS3 GPU would be better when its basically a 7800GTX, which people showed you got outperformed by the GPU you thought the 360 GPU was based on. One good reason the 360 probably has better performance is the unified RAM (certainly not in all cases, but in general it would make it easier on programmers). This is of course completely ignoring the fact that the PS3 is known to have better overall graphics capability due to Cell being able to help a lot with it (so it makes no sense to compare strictly GPU to GPU). But again, its dependent on what the programmer can get out of it, and the 360 is known to have much better support for that, so developers are able to better take advantage of what capability is there.

 

[OptimumSlinky]

Ultimately, the human element prevails. It doesn't matter how powerful your hardware is if the human programmers can't effectively push it to the limit. The PS3 may be capable of the most incredible technical accomplishments, but I personally think the Unreal Engine as applied in the Gears of War franchise produces equally breathtaking visuals as Killzone 2. It doesn't matter to my eye that the PS3 Cell is the "superior" workhorse. If Epic is able to produce the outstanding graphics seen in GOW2 and Unreal Tournament III using "inferior" hardware, then who cares?

The whole debate reminds me of the PSX versus the N64. Everybody got so fixated on the "it's 64-bit which has to be better than 32-bit" that they ignored the texture storage limitations of the cartridge.

I have both a brand new Jasper Xbox 360 and a PS3 Slim. I respect both for their technical strengths and their specific achievements in gaming. But I think Microsoft made the right call by going with a tried-and-true CPU design (one that developers were more immediately familiar with). As time goes on, maybe the Cell will eventually become understood and become the tried-and-true standard. Who knows? But in the mean time the p!ssing war over which is more powerful is silly.

Now, if my 360s would only stop dying on me...

 

[Cogman]

GPU performance decreases linear as you reduce clock speed.

Pls read thread before posting.

Your missing the "in the same architecture". It is completely conceivable that a 200MHz GPU is faster then a 1000GHz GPU if the architectures for those two GPUs are different.

The best example of this is the CPU MHz wars of around 2000. Intel got there P4's up to 3.4GHz, yet AMD was competitive with a 2.0GHz processor. Now, Intel has CPUs that are clocked at about 2.0GHz that CREAM their 3.4GHz behemoths of old.

 

[hans030390]

...but I personally think the Unreal Engine as applied in the Gears of War franchise produces equally breathtaking visuals as Killzone 2.

Ew. UE3 is great and all, but I think it's poorly used in GoW. It just has a very lackluster feel to it. It also feels like there's no "depth" to the image, IMO. I don't personally think GoW2 was all that great looking.

 

[MStele]

I hate it when people use Killzone 2 as an example of "breathtaking" graphics. Sure its beautiful....when its static. The second you add any type of motion and the entire screen turns into a blurry mess of excessive mipmapping. Of course they said the motion blur was a feature (as opposed to a cheat), but anyone who knows what to look for can see the irony. Overall I liked KZ2, so i'm not saying it wasn't a good game, but the developer traded clarity for framerates and it shows. Many graphic "cheats" were employed in that game to make it run smoother.

There are games on both systems that have symptoms of this, so this isn't a anti-ps3 or pro-360 thing, but KZ2 in particular pissed me off. All the eye candy in the worlds means nothing if you have to stop moving just to see what your aiming at. That's my only beef though. Otherwise I thought it was a top notch game.

 

[hans030390]

I hate it when people use Killzone 2 as an example of "breathtaking" graphics. Sure its beautiful....when its static. The second you add any type of motion and the entire screen turns into a blurry mess of excessive mipmapping. Of course they said the motion blur was a feature (as opposed to a cheat), but anyone who knows what to look for can see the irony. Overall I liked KZ2, so i'm not saying it wasn't a good game, but the developer traded clarity for framerates and it shows. Many graphic "cheats" were employed in that game to make it run smoother.

There are games on both systems that have symptoms of this, so this isn't a anti-ps3 or pro-360 thing, but KZ2 in particular pissed me off. All the eye candy in the worlds means nothing if you have to stop moving just to see what your aiming at. That's my only beef though. Otherwise I thought it was a top notch game.

Are you sure you played the same game as me?

 

[MStele]

Are you sure you played the same game as me?

The excessive blur in KZ2 is well documented. It even made some people sick. If you focus on an object within the game and try to keep it in focus while moving, you'll start to see what I'm talking about. The blur is there, though I think how it impacts people varies. It doesn't bother some people at all, while with others it causes motion sickness. Regardless, its there. I don't think most people are bothered by it though, and it is likely made worse on certain tvs. To each their own I guess.

 

[hans030390]

The excessive blur in KZ2 is well documented. It even made some people sick. If you focus on an object within the game and try to keep it in focus while moving, you'll start to see what I'm talking about. The blur is there, though I think how it impacts people varies. It doesn't bother some people at all, while with others it causes motion sickness. Regardless, its there. I don't think most people are bothered by it though, and it is likely made worse on certain tvs. To each their own I guess.

Yeah...I've played it on a number of TVs without issue. I've had numerous people play it without issue (on multiple TVs). I'm also one that gets motion sickness and/or headaches from a number of games. Killzone 2 was not one of them. I didn't even think the motion blur was overdone.

I may have to go back and look at this...

 

[bob4432]

The ps3's gpu is a much weaker gpu than the 360, at least in shader ability. Thankfully, the cell is powerful enough to make up for that somewhat, at the cost of being a pain to program. (I'm assuming it can't run opengl shaders, so a lot of functionality probably has to be duplicated onto the cell that would normally be handled by apis)

The ps3's gpu is an off the shelf pc gpu.
The 360's gpu was custom made for consoles. It uses a dual die approach, with a second die consisting of super fast 10MB of edram. This allows the 360 to target either SD resolution with 4x AA or 720p with plenty of usable bandwidth for special effects, lighting, and anti aliasing. The 360 gains a lot from having its gpu designed to target TV resolutions, and its gpu is more forward thinking/advanced anyway.

I read an article a while back that detailed the costs sony and ms put into their respective systems.
MS spent something like $100 million on their cpu (about what nintendo spent on the gamecube's cpu iirc)
Sony spent $2 billion on Cell.
MS spent ~$1 billion on their gpu.
Sony spent around $100 million on theirs.

Basically, MS has an off the shelf cpu fitted to their system with a custom gpu.
Sony has a custom cpu with an off the shelf gpu fitted to their system. The ps3 also came out a year later, yet manufacturing hadn't improved any (same process nodes), so both use hardware from the same generation of manufacturing tech.

The 360's cpu is about the size of a dual core.
The ps3's cpu is about the size of a quad core.
The ps3's gpu is larger, if you discount the secondary die of the 360.
Both the 360 and ps3 gpus are about the size of current high end integrated graphics, but with better memory bandwidth.

all that $$$ on gpu development and ms spends .50 on cooling of it. epic fail on ms's part yeah, i have 4here and only 1 has not rrod yet.

don't have a lot of the same games but have gamed mw2 on both systems (have it on ps3) but the i would give the graphics nod to ps3 for mw2 as that is all i can compare to, but only by a 10% margin - could be that i connect into a 720p tv via hdmi w/ the ps3 and component w/ the 360 but the ps3 does looks crisper and a bit clearer than on the 360 - again ~10% or so, not night and day difference. either way they both look good

 

[Doopster]

You'd do yourself a favor if you didn't just discard what people are telling you. As has already been told to you, the 360 GPU is not the same as an X1900. Then you keep trying to say the PS3 GPU would be better when its basically a 7800GTX, which people showed you got outperformed by the GPU you thought the 360 GPU was based on. One good reason the 360 probably has better performance is the unified RAM (certainly not in all cases, but in general it would make it easier on programmers).

Thanks for your input captain obvious. I'll give you the cliffs since you're clearly not the strongest on reading comprehension.

Xbox GPU is less powerful than X1900.

X1900 GPU downclocked to 500mhz would likely be slower than 7800 series GPU at 550Mhz.

Conclusion: Xbox GPU is not proven to be more powerful nor does technical evidence suggest that this is the case.

The entire point of the thread is to make people who claim the Xbox GPU is definitively better think again.

Yes, Cell influences graphical results.

Yes, the ease of programming has a massive influence on the graphical quality of games.

I'm talking just about the GPU and the widespread assumption that the Xbox has more rendering power than the PS3.

 

[jlee]

Thanks for your input captain obvious. I'll give you the cliffs since you're clearly not the strongest on reading comprehension.

Xbox GPU is less powerful than X1900.

X1900 GPU downclocked to 500mhz would likely be slower than 7800 series GPU at 550Mhz.

Conclusion: Xbox GPU is not proven to be more powerful nor does technical evidence suggest that this is the case.

The entire point of the thread is to make people who claim the Xbox GPU is definitively better think again.

Yes, Cell influences graphical results.

Yes, the ease of programming has a massive influence on the graphical quality of games.

I'm talking just about the GPU and the widespread assumption that the Xbox has more rendering power than the PS3.

I'm not trying to 'win' an argument, just discuss a point of view.

lol.

 

[erwos]

lol.

Agreed. What an awful troll thread.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Thanks for your input captain obvious. I'll give you the cliffs since you're clearly not the strongest on reading comprehension.

Xbox GPU is less powerful than X1900.

X1900 GPU downclocked to 500mhz would likely be slower than 7800 series GPU at 550Mhz.

Conclusion: Xbox GPU is not proven to be more powerful nor does technical evidence suggest that this is the case.

The entire point of the thread is to make people who claim the Xbox GPU is definitively better think again.

Yes, Cell influences graphical results.

Yes, the ease of programming has a massive influence on the graphical quality of games.

I'm talking just about the GPU and the widespread assumption that the Xbox has more rendering power than the PS3.

I'm the one with poor reading comprehension, but you couldn't figure out that he meant comparing clock speeds of different architectures?

Where is your proof the X1900 outperforms the 360 GPU? Technical evidence? You mean you comparing clock speeds of different architectures? Do we need to point out yet again that you're wrong in how you're comparing them that way?

The entire point of this thread is for you to convince people that you're right, but since you're ignoring all the rest which has a major impact on things, this is entirely pointless. That, and I think you're just imagining this assumption that the 360 GPU is better. Every debate I've ever seen discusses overall performance of the system, since that is actually what matters, and of course they also do not ignore the programming issues since its completely stupid to do so.

Go read the article, written by Anand and Derek, that Mike Gayner linked in the second post and then maybe understand why the way you're comparing things is off. Here's a quote in particular:

So it would be wrong to say that the PlayStation 3’s GPU is more powerful than the Xbox 360’s GPU, because you can’t isolate the two and compare them in a vacuum, how they interact with the CPU, with memory, etc... all influences the overall performance of the platform.

 

[exar333]

Thanks for your input captain obvious. I'll give you the cliffs since you're clearly not the strongest on reading comprehension.

Xbox GPU is less powerful than X1900.

X1900 GPU downclocked to 500mhz would likely be slower than 7800 series GPU at 550Mhz.

Conclusion: Xbox GPU is not proven to be more powerful nor does technical evidence suggest that this is the case.

The entire point of the thread is to make people who claim the Xbox GPU is definitively better think again.

Yes, Cell influences graphical results.

Yes, the ease of programming has a massive influence on the graphical quality of games.

I'm talking just about the GPU and the widespread assumption that the Xbox has more rendering power than the PS3.

Doopster - daycare is --------------------> way.

Your a fool, and a troll, don't let the AT door hit you on the way out.

Xbox360 GPU > PS3 GPU (fact)
Cell > Xbox360 CPU (theoretically)
Xbox360 <>= PS3 ???????

I really don't think a blanket statement that one system is better than the other is true. You have to look at different resolutions, with different eye candy enabled. The miniscule RAM in the PS3 really limits the console in high resolutions (1080P) which means you generally have to choose either 1080P or AA (not both). The Xbox360, in some situations, is suited better to offer 720P or 1080P with AA compared to the PS3. The architectures are very different, and I would consider them more or less a wash from a technical aspect.

I do give the nod to the superior storage on the PS3, however. BD gives the PS3 the ability to store larger textures on the disc, but the slow (1 or 2x) drive makes it painful to load from the disc during games, hence the huge installs for many PS3 games.

There isn't a clear winner. Pick a system (or both if you like) that you like the games for. I wish people would stop comparing low-end graphics systems like one was the holy grail. It's like two people pissing over whether their AMD integrated GPU is faster than someone else' NV integrated GPU.

Get over it, they are both relatively slow! Shut up and enjoy the games.