Re: Gallary: Graphics Cards
slayer322 said:
sorry to say buddy, but ps3 is gonna little xbox 360
(p.s. ... u can have dual HDTV with ps3 and free for online play as usual)
Haha, the RSX's mere lead by 50mhz in speed doesn't do shit for it. THe RSX is like a normal PC GPU, and is inefficient. The 360's Xenos chip, however is more flexible for developers to utilize the Unified Shader Architecture (which allows them to allocate how many pipelines or vertex shaders is needed at that moment). The Xenos chip has 48 ALU pipelines, which can be used as pixel or vertex shaders. It's the Unified Shader Architecture's job to assign which pipeline to be a pixel or vertex shader when it needs to, resulting in maximum efficiency without loss of performance. The Xenos chip and the CPU both share the consoles' 512mb of GDDR3 RAM @ 700mhz with a memory bandwidth of 22.4GB/sec for the GPU and 21.6GB/sec for the CPU, which is somewhat slow compared to modern PC's, which have about 37GB/sec of memory bandwidth. In order to make up for that lack of speed, ATI added 10mb of embedded DRAM in the GPU (which connects with the system at an insane speed of 256GB/sec) to act as a buffer for graphically intense situations that need lots of RAM and fast. The RSX however, uses "Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines", which means that developers have to tell the GPU where to allocate it's resources, instead of having the system allocate it where it's best used.
The Cell Processor is a incredible piece of technology, but it's way overhyped. It's architecture limits it's capabilities when used in games.
The Cell
1x PowerPC-based Core @ 3.2GHz
1x VMX vector unit per core (since the Cell ony has one general computing CPU core, there is only one VMX vector unit)
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @ 3.2GHz (these SPE cores are NOT for general-computing, they specialize in floating point work)
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE (basically the "Cache" for the SPE cores)
The 360's CPU
3x PowerPC Cores @ 3.2ghz each
1x VMX-128 vector unit per core (because the 360's CPU has 3x general-computing cores, it means that the CPU has 3x VMX-128 vector units)
1 MB L2 cache
Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total (The 360's CPU uses SMT or Simultaneous Multi-Threading, which is similar to Intel's HyperThreading)
Game code usually uses 80% general-computing and 20% floating-point. Since the Cell has 7 SPE cores which specialize in floating-point work, it excels at that area. However, because the 360's CPU has 3x general-computing cores and 3x vector units (compared to the Cell's 1x general-computing core and 1x vector unit) it gives the 360 the advantage when it comes to games. The Cell is a really nice chip, but the design of it's architecture is unsuitable for gaming, and because of that, it hampers the Cell's performance.
Ok, the PS3 has Dual-Outputs. So? How many people are going to buy, much less afford 2 High-Definition TVs (which are still expensive)? 1 or 2% of the market? Psh. What a waste of resources, money and time.
Just to let you know, Xbox Live Silver is free with Xbox 360 (all you need is a Broadband connection). To be honest, I'd rather pay for Xbox Live than get Sony's P.O.S excuse of an Online Gaming service for free. What Sony does is impress everyone with the PS3's specs on paper (not how it works and the architecture) in order to cover up the fact that they haven't come up with anything to compete with Xbox Live. Speed or the number of cores doesn't matter...it's how you design the chip's architecture to suit your needs. The Cell Processor is very nice (and powerful), but it's ill suited for gaming.
) using 3 CPUs and a 48 pipe graphics chip 
