Please respond if you know what the heck your talking about, preferebly PC hardware people like myself. A lot of people get this general idea that Xenos is superior to RSX, and the main thing they bring up is the unified shader architechure. Well lets go over this architechure. Xenos is based on R600, ATI's 2000s series. It is probably the worst architechure ATI has ever came up with, first generation shader architechure was highly ineffiecent. Xenos closely resembles a 2600xt a card that was no better than a 8600GT which is probably 10% better than 7600gt give or take, people here love to say Xenos was based on 2900XT but its severly bottlenecked by its 128 bit bus, and the core clock is only 500mhz. To just stay competative ATI has to cramp hundreds of shaders in its cards just to stay competative with Nvidia, a card like 9800GTX which has 128 shaders compares with a 4850 which has 800 SP's. RSX is based on Nvidia 7 series doesnt use Shader architechure, most resembles a 7800GT due to 128 bit bus, not a 7800GTX like everyone is claiming. So to claim that 48 crappy first gen shaders that are severely underclocked is a major advantage over RSX is just a pipedream, basically they help a little, just as they helped 2600xt which wasnt much, the higher core clock of RSX and the not so efficent Xenos shaders, you can call it a draw. I know this will start a flame war, but oh well its system wars.
Why is 360 GPU better than PS3 GPU again?
This topic is locked from further discussion.
My computer has ATI Radeon HD 2600XT from a few years ago and it runs all the games i have great, though i know it's out dated i have had 0 problems with it. Though i don't know who is saying the RSX is any worse then the Xenos but they are probably wrong however i have heard that the 360 has better ram but I'm not completely sure because i haven't been botherd to really care.
Either way games are about games not hardware and both consoles aren't really that much different in games or hardware.
I think the biggest advantage the Xenos has it the 10 MB of embedded ram for the frame buffer, making most post processing effects much cheaper (hence why most 360 games tend to feature better AA in multiplatformers). DerekLoffin
I've read this huge nerdy article discussing this somewhere (11 pages) and they say that Xenon is a generation ahead of RSX. Forgot where that site is though
I'll give you the two big reasons:
1. eDRAM. This gives Xenos 256GB/s for writing and blending pixels to a framebuffer. On RSX, any time pixels are written or blended the bandwidth has to come out of the ~20GB/s bandwidth to GDDR3 or ~15GB/s XDR, which takes away precious bandwidth that can be used for reading textures. This makes MSAA and transparency/particle effects much cheaper on the 360.
2. Unified shaders. On RSX you have 8 shaders dedicated to vertex processing, and 24 shaders dedicated to pixel processing. So unless you keep both of those perfectly balanced and saturated, you'll always be wasting part of the GPU. On Xenos it doesn't matter, the load is automatically balanced no matter what you're doing. Unified shaders are also great if you want to sample textures in your vertex processing...on RSX you can do it but it's much slower since the vertex shaders aren't optimized for texture sampling.
Is it a newer technology, yes it is, does it make it any better, not really. It is highly ineffiecent, even today ATI's architechure, they still relly on cramming in the most SP that can fit on a wafer, while Nvidia SP's mean a lot more and they are clocked twice as much, 285GTX with 240 SP's gets slightly beaten by a 5850 which has 1400SP's. So I wouldnt be too proud of a 48 SP card that was two gens back, to call it this revolutionary card is really misleading, Xenos is a lot weaker than what most people seem to think.
because it has 500MB of memory and its ATI and ps3 is 256MB and is Nvidia, only real difference is that the ps3 cpu and gpu are designed to work together, so the ps3 can dump processes onto the cpu and accomplish more. check my sig and read all about it from one of the programmers.Please respond if you know what the heck your talking about, preferebly PC hardware people like myself. A lot of people get this general idea that Xenos is superior to RSX, and the main thing they bring up is the unified shader architechure. Well lets go over this architechure. Xenos is based on R600, ATI's 2000s series. It is probably the worst architechure ATI has ever came up with, first generation shader architechure was highly ineffiecent. Xenos closely resembles a 2600xt a card that was no better than a 8600GT which is probably 10% better than 7600gt give or take, people here love to say Xenos was based on 2900XT but its severly bottlenecked by its 128 bit bus, and the core clock is only 500mhz. To just stay competative ATI has to cramp hundreds of shaders in its cards just to stay competative with Nvidia, a card like 9800GTX which has 128 shaders compares with a 4850 which has 800 SP's. RSX is based on Nvidia 7 series doesnt use Shader architechure, most resembles a 7800GT due to 128 bit bus, not a 7800GTX like everyone is claiming. So to claim that 48 crappy first gen shaders that are severely underclocked is a major advantage over RSX is just a pipedream, basically they help a little, just as they helped 2600xt which wasnt much, the higher core clock of RSX and the not so efficent Xenos shaders, you can call it a draw. I know this will start a flame war, but oh well its system wars.
deniiiii21
Is it a newer technology, yes it is, does it make it any better, not really. It is highly ineffiecent, even today ATI's architechure, they still relly on cramming in the most SP that can fit on a wafer, while Nvidia SP's mean a lot more and they are clocked twice as much, 285GTX with 240 SP's gets slightly beaten by a 5850 which has 1400SP's. So I wouldnt be too proud of a 48 SP card that was two gens back, to call it this revolutionary card is really misleading, Xenos is a lot weaker than what most people seem to think.
deniiiii21
RSX is not more powerful than Xenos.
Is it a newer technology, yes it is, does it make it any better, not really. It is highly ineffiecent, even today ATI's architechure, they still relly on cramming in the most SP that can fit on a wafer, while Nvidia SP's mean a lot more and they are clocked twice as much, 285GTX with 240 SP's gets slightly beaten by a 5850 which has 1400SP's. So I wouldnt be too proud of a 48 SP card that was two gens back, to call it this revolutionary card is really misleading, Xenos is a lot weaker than what most people seem to think.
deniiiii21
When Nvidia says they have "128 shaders" they're refering to scalar units. The "shaders" in Xenos are 5-way vector ALU's, so they'd be equivalent to 240 scalar units. Of course it's not nearly as simple as just comparing the number of scalar units you have available, but the situation isn't really like what you're making it out to be.
I'll take the word of all the developers that have worked with both, and have said the 360's GPU is superior than that of the PS3's. Hell, even the head engineer of the Cell, and 360's CPU said so. Look it up on Google. Try to argue with the professionals. I can tell by your lack of knowledge that you're not quite a pro, yet.Please respond if you know what the heck your talking about, preferebly PC hardware people like myself. A lot of people get this general idea that Xenos is superior to RSX, and the main thing they bring up is the unified shader architechure. Well lets go over this architechure. Xenos is based on R600, ATI's 2000s series. It is probably the worst architechure ATI has ever came up with, first generation shader architechure was highly ineffiecent. Xenos closely resembles a 2600xt a card that was no better than a 8600GT which is probably 10% better than 7600gt give or take, people here love to say Xenos was based on 2900XT but its severly bottlenecked by its 128 bit bus, and the core clock is only 500mhz. To just stay competative ATI has to cramp hundreds of shaders in its cards just to stay competative with Nvidia, a card like 9800GTX which has 128 shaders compares with a 4850 which has 800 SP's. RSX is based on Nvidia 7 series doesnt use Shader architechure, most resembles a 7800GT due to 128 bit bus, not a 7800GTX like everyone is claiming. So to claim that 48 crappy first gen shaders that are severely underclocked is a major advantage over RSX is just a pipedream, basically they help a little, just as they helped 2600xt which wasnt much, the higher core clock of RSX and the not so efficent Xenos shaders, you can call it a draw. I know this will start a flame war, but oh well its system wars.
deniiiii21
The only advantage I see is the memory is shared on the 360, which is a plus, PS3 has two sets of 256mb sticks that arent unified.
I'll give you the two big reasons:
1. eDRAM. This gives Xenos 256GB/s for writing and blending pixels to a framebuffer. On RSX, any time pixels are written or blended the bandwidth has to come out of the ~20GB/s bandwidth to GDDR3 or ~15GB/s XDR, which takes away precious bandwidth that can be used for reading textures. This makes MSAA and transparency/particle effects much cheaper on the 360.
2. Unified shaders. On RSX you have 8 shaders dedicated to vertex processing, and 24 shaders dedicated to pixel processing. So unless you keep both of those perfectly balanced and saturated, you'll always be wasting part of the GPU. On Xenos it doesn't matter, the load is automatically balanced no matter what you're doing. Unified shaders are also great if you want to sample textures in your vertex processing...on RSX you can do it but it's much slower since the vertex shaders aren't optimized for texture sampling.Teufelhuhn
Yes, I agree. To be honest I don't fully understand the texture sampling with the unified shaders, but from what I've read the dedicated pixel shaders on the RSX can do more calculations per clock, and the cell also helps take some of the load off the RSX, so I think the PS3 has more shader power.
Your first point is the main reason for the 360's advantage on multiplatform games. The exclusive PS3 games shows it's potential, but to make the PS3 the lead platform for a multiplatform game (so using the Cell), would probably make porting it back to the 360 very difficult.
The only thing that seperates the two systems somewhat, is Cell's ability to act as a hybrid GPU, call me a cow or whatever, but if you think a 7800GT can run games like UC2 or Killzone 2 without Cell's ability to help out with graphics your out of your mind. Naughty Dog will top UC2 graphics with the next installment, just guessing the systems power, I would say that PS3 is about 15-20% more powerful, when taken full advantage of its hardware. Problem is few people can, and few companies have that type of money to utilize this pain in the neck system.
[QUOTE="Teufelhuhn"]
I'll give you the two big reasons:
1. eDRAM. This gives Xenos 256GB/s for writing and blending pixels to a framebuffer. On RSX, any time pixels are written or blended the bandwidth has to come out of the ~20GB/s bandwidth to GDDR3 or ~15GB/s XDR, which takes away precious bandwidth that can be used for reading textures. This makes MSAA and transparency/particle effects much cheaper on the 360.
2. Unified shaders. On RSX you have 8 shaders dedicated to vertex processing, and 24 shaders dedicated to pixel processing. So unless you keep both of those perfectly balanced and saturated, you'll always be wasting part of the GPU. On Xenos it doesn't matter, the load is automatically balanced no matter what you're doing. Unified shaders are also great if you want to sample textures in your vertex processing...on RSX you can do it but it's much slower since the vertex shaders aren't optimized for texture sampling.stevencompton
Yes, I agree. To be honest I don't fully understand the texture sampling with the unified shaders, but from what I've read the dedicated pixel shaders on the RSX can do more calculations per clock, and the cell also helps take some of the load off the RSX, so I think the PS3 has more shader power.
Your first point is the main reason for the 360's advantage on multiplatform games. The exclusive PS3 games shows it's potential, but to make the PS3 the lead platform for a multiplatform game (so using the Cell), would probably make porting it back to the 360 very difficult.
Yes, the PS3 does show more shader power, but like you said, that's with the Cell, which isn't really fair when you are comparing GPUs. Another thing you are correct with is that the RSX does have a higher clock frequency, but it isn't as efficient in its cycles. The RSX has a problem of missing a cycle causing a slight bog down in the data rates, while the Xenos doesn't have that problem. That's why its easier to keep frame rates up and the screen tearing low on the 360.Is it a newer technology, yes it is, does it make it any better, not really. It is highly ineffiecent, even today ATI's architechure, they still relly on cramming in the most SP that can fit on a wafer, while Nvidia SP's mean a lot more and they are clocked twice as much, 285GTX with 240 SP's gets slightly beaten by a 5850 which has 1400SP's. So I wouldnt be too proud of a 48 SP card that was two gens back, to call it this revolutionary card is really misleading, Xenos is a lot weaker than what most people seem to think.
deniiiii21
You're comparing here apples against oranges, because the two chips works in a different way. I admit that Nvidia can have the key in design features (currently I'm using a GTX 275) but in performance x size Ati has the edge, which means that Nvidia is not competitive in price now and also with the next G300. His chips are a 50% bigger that the Ati ones. I'm aiming for a 5870 to my next rig.
I love it when people know what they are talking about. It makes me happy. Hope no fanboys taint this thread *cross fingers.* Anyway, Teufelhuhn basically explained why the Xenos was better. While 10mb of eDRAM isn't much to do anything really, it helps add that extra AA that makes the games look clean. If anything though they should have atleast used an amount that was a factor of 8, preferably 16mb (obviously more is better) but it would allow them to dump processes a lot easier without waisting any of that ram. I'm sure not all 10mb of that eDRAM is used because it's such an odd number for the data packets.zero_snake99
The 10MB is where the backbuffer is stored, so the amount you use is directly related to the resolution and AA you're using. So if you're doing 1280x720 you usually use 8 bytes per pixel (4 for color, 4 for z + stencil) so that gives you abotu 7.03MB combined. Double that for 2xMSAA, quadruple for 4xMSAA. For rendering other things like shadow maps or reflections the resolution might be even weirder. Point is, the framebuffer size is almost never a multiple of 8MB.
Some games like to fill it up almost compltely, like Ninja Gaiden 2 which was 585p with 2xMSAA. A lot of games will use a res/AA combo that gives a framebuffer + z-buffer that's greater than 10MB, in which case they just tile (this means that the screen is split up into "tiles", and each piece is rendered seperately and then combined).
I don't know about all this GPU, CPU, Ram stuff.
All I know is Killzone 2 looks amazing, and Uncharted 2 looks amazing.
I thought the same thing for Bioshock and GeoW back in the day.
I don't care about the HOW, I care about the results.
SolidTy
Yeah people really like to get worked up about specs and "technical graphics"...but really all that matters is whether a game looks good or not. It doesn't matter how many triangles you're throwing at the screen...if it doesn't look pretty then it's pointless.
Here you go TC....... http://dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=7 Comparison of the gpu's.Please respond if you know what the heck your talking about, preferebly PC hardware people like myself. A lot of people get this general idea that Xenos is superior to RSX, and the main thing they bring up is the unified shader architechure. Well lets go over this architechure. Xenos is based on R600, ATI's 2000s series. It is probably the worst architechure ATI has ever came up with, first generation shader architechure was highly ineffiecent. Xenos closely resembles a 2600xt a card that was no better than a 8600GT which is probably 10% better than 7600gt give or take, people here love to say Xenos was based on 2900XT but its severly bottlenecked by its 128 bit bus, and the core clock is only 500mhz. To just stay competative ATI has to cramp hundreds of shaders in its cards just to stay competative with Nvidia, a card like 9800GTX which has 128 shaders compares with a 4850 which has 800 SP's. RSX is based on Nvidia 7 series doesnt use Shader architechure, most resembles a 7800GT due to 128 bit bus, not a 7800GTX like everyone is claiming. So to claim that 48 crappy first gen shaders that are severely underclocked is a major advantage over RSX is just a pipedream, basically they help a little, just as they helped 2600xt which wasnt much, the higher core clock of RSX and the not so efficent Xenos shaders, you can call it a draw. I know this will start a flame war, but oh well its system wars.
deniiiii21
The only thing that seperates the two systems somewhat, is Cell's ability to act as a hybrid GPU, call me a cow or whatever, but if you think a 7800GT can run games like UC2 or Killzone 2 without Cell's ability to help out with graphics your out of your mind. Naughty Dog will top UC2 graphics with the next installment, just guessing the systems power, I would say that PS3 is about 15-20% more powerful, when taken full advantage of its hardware. Problem is few people can, and few companies have that type of money to utilize this pain in the neck system.
deniiiii21
Well the Cell SPUs are stream processors, which is what a GPU uses, so you'd hope it would be able to do that :P.
The Cell architecture isn't too far off from the beast that Larrabee is. Both have extremely similar architectures. It's just that LB will have a MUCH better FSB and cache so data transfer is basically flawless and is literally several times faster than the Cell. Look at the similarities of the Cell and LB.
Cell
Larrabee Siggraph diagram
To get the LB from the cell, you would essentially need a larger L2 and a texture unit (which the cell lacks since its main use is of a CPU).
Read this for more details.
I think the PS3 is getting pushed a lot more. Sony's studio's really do know how to make that console shine. As for what is actually more powerful I'd say the 360... but Sony's developers get a bigger budget and more time to make something look really impressive.
[QUOTE="stevencompton"]
[QUOTE="Teufelhuhn"]
I'll give you the two big reasons:
1. eDRAM. This gives Xenos 256GB/s for writing and blending pixels to a framebuffer. On RSX, any time pixels are written or blended the bandwidth has to come out of the ~20GB/s bandwidth to GDDR3 or ~15GB/s XDR, which takes away precious bandwidth that can be used for reading textures. This makes MSAA and transparency/particle effects much cheaper on the 360.
2. Unified shaders. On RSX you have 8 shaders dedicated to vertex processing, and 24 shaders dedicated to pixel processing. So unless you keep both of those perfectly balanced and saturated, you'll always be wasting part of the GPU. On Xenos it doesn't matter, the load is automatically balanced no matter what you're doing. Unified shaders are also great if you want to sample textures in your vertex processing...on RSX you can do it but it's much slower since the vertex shaders aren't optimized for texture sampling.zero_snake99
Yes, I agree. To be honest I don't fully understand the texture sampling with the unified shaders, but from what I've read the dedicated pixel shaders on the RSX can do more calculations per clock, and the cell also helps take some of the load off the RSX, so I think the PS3 has more shader power.
Your first point is the main reason for the 360's advantage on multiplatform games. The exclusive PS3 games shows it's potential, but to make the PS3 the lead platform for a multiplatform game (so using the Cell), would probably make porting it back to the 360 very difficult.
Yes, the PS3 does show more shader power, but like you said, that's with the Cell, which isn't really fair when you are comparing GPUs. Another thing you are correct with is that the RSX does have a higher clock frequency, but it isn't as efficient in its cycles. The RSX has a problem of missing a cycle causing a slight bog down in the data rates, while the Xenos doesn't have that problem. That's why its easier to keep frame rates up and the screen tearing low on the 360.I didn't mean the higher clock speed, I was saying that for each clock a pixel shader in the RSX can do more operations than one in the Xenos. The shaders in the desktop 7800 series can do 26 floating point operations per clock (the RSX uses the same shader architecture), whereas the Xenos is commonly believed to do 10 flops per clock.
What you are saying about the RSX missing cycles sounds a bit odd, wouldn't problems like that be down to poor programming? But I don't fully understand the causes of screen tearing (though I think it's related to framerate dips).
[QUOTE="zero_snake99"]I love it when people know what they are talking about. It makes me happy. Hope no fanboys taint this thread *cross fingers.* Anyway, Teufelhuhn basically explained why the Xenos was better. While 10mb of eDRAM isn't much to do anything really, it helps add that extra AA that makes the games look clean. If anything though they should have atleast used an amount that was a factor of 8, preferably 16mb (obviously more is better) but it would allow them to dump processes a lot easier without waisting any of that ram. I'm sure not all 10mb of that eDRAM is used because it's such an odd number for the data packets.Teufelhuhn
The 10MB is where the backbuffer is stored, so the amount you use is directly related to the resolution and AA you're using. So if you're doing 1280x720 you usually use 8 bytes per pixel (4 for color, 4 for z + stencil) so that gives you abotu 7.03MB combined. Double that for 2xMSAA, quadruple for 4xMSAA. For rendering other things like shadow maps or reflections the resolution might be even weirder. Point is, the framebuffer size is almost never a multiple of 8MB.
Some games like to fill it up almost compltely, like Ninja Gaiden 2 which was 585p with 2xMSAA. A lot of games will use a res/AA combo that gives a framebuffer + z-buffer that's greater than 10MB, in which case they just tile (this means that the screen is split up into "tiles", and each piece is rendered seperately and then combined). Yeah, but wouldn't you have to take into consideration of things like upscaling or is that not done in the eDRAM? Also, if we were to render a 1080p screen, that would need about 15.82mb (basically 16) of ram since 1080 is 2.25 times the pixel count of 720p. Thats why 16 should have been used.
[QUOTE="deniiiii21"]
The only thing that seperates the two systems somewhat, is Cell's ability to act as a hybrid GPU, call me a cow or whatever, but if you think a 7800GT can run games like UC2 or Killzone 2 without Cell's ability to help out with graphics your out of your mind. Naughty Dog will top UC2 graphics with the next installment, just guessing the systems power, I would say that PS3 is about 15-20% more powerful, when taken full advantage of its hardware. Problem is few people can, and few companies have that type of money to utilize this pain in the neck system.
zero_snake99
Well the Cell SPUs are stream processors, which is what a GPU uses, so you'd hope it would be able to do that :P.
The Cell architecture isn't too far off from the beast that Larrabee is. Both have extremely similar architectures. It's just that LB will have a MUCH better FSB and cache so data transfer is basically flawless and is literally several times faster than the Cell. Look at the similarities of the Cell and LB.
Cell
Larrabee Siggraph diagram
To get the LB from the cell, you would essentially need a larger L2 and a texture unit (which the cell lacks since its main use is of a CPU).
Read this for more details.
Aside from Cell's lack of texture units (which is a really big deal, when you're doing graphics stuff) there's also another key difference. Cell's SPE's use a local store, which is super-fast programmer-managed memory. So basically if you want to have the SPE's chew through a bunch of data you have to split it up into small chunks, then have the SPE's manually fetch each chunk from main memory via DMA. Larrabee uses a traditional L1 + L2 cache setup, where the CPU core automatically pulls data and code out of device memory and evicts it when more space is needed. Cell is also assymetrical since you have two different kinds of cores on there while on Larrabee they're all the same.
But yeah, they're definitely similiar in that they both have a "many cores with vector units" approach.
Yes, the PS3 does show more shader power, but like you said, that's with the Cell, which isn't really fair when you are comparing GPUs. Another thing you are correct with is that the RSX does have a higher clock frequency, but it isn't as efficient in its cycles. The RSX has a problem of missing a cycle causing a slight bog down in the data rates, while the Xenos doesn't have that problem. That's why its easier to keep frame rates up and the screen tearing low on the 360.[QUOTE="zero_snake99"]
[QUOTE="stevencompton"]
Yes, I agree. To be honest I don't fully understand the texture sampling with the unified shaders, but from what I've read the dedicated pixel shaders on the RSX can do more calculations per clock, and the cell also helps take some of the load off the RSX, so I think the PS3 has more shader power.
Your first point is the main reason for the 360's advantage on multiplatform games. The exclusive PS3 games shows it's potential, but to make the PS3 the lead platform for a multiplatform game (so using the Cell), would probably make porting it back to the 360 very difficult.
stevencompton
I didn't mean the higher clock speed, I was saying that for each clock a pixel shader in the RSX can do more operations than one in the Xenos. The shaders in the desktop 7800 series can do 26 floating point operations per clock (the RSX uses the same shader architecture), whereas the Xenos is commonly believed to do 10 flops per clock.
What you are saying about the RSX missing cycles sounds a bit odd, wouldn't problems like that be down to poor programming? But I don't fully understand the causes of screen tearing (though I think it's related to framerate dips).
I'm not exactly sure what the comparison is for the FLOP output of each, but the problem I mentioned for the RSX is related to the main threads. I'm not sure the exact reasons for it getting bogged down, but I think it has to do with having clock cycles go out of sync when faced with large data loads. Don't take my word for it. I'm only a programmer, not a hardware specialist lol.Ram Architecure thats why
I didn't mean the higher clock speed, I was saying that for each clock a pixel shader in the RSX can do more operations than one in the Xenos. The shaders in the desktop 7800 series can do 26 floating point operations per clock (the RSX uses the same shader architecture), whereas the Xenos is commonly believed to do 10 flops per clock.
stevencompton
This is true, but in reality it doesn't happen because on the RSX texture samples also have to use the ALU. On Xenos the texture units can do it all by themselves.
What you are saying about the RSX missing cycles sounds a bit odd, wouldn't problems like that be down to poor programming? But I don't fully understand the causes of screen tearing (though I think it's related to framerate dips).
stevencompton
Yeah that doesn't really make sense either to me. Frame tearing happens when you're not synchronized with the vertical refresh. Many games will try to lock at 30fps, but then if the framerate slips below that they will disable vsync and display a torn frame. Many PS3 games have more unpredictable framerates because for RSX it's more difference to balance vertex and pixel load, and also because transparencies have much more of a performance hit.
Yeah, but wouldn't you have to take into consideration of things like upscaling or is that not done in the eDRAM? Also, if we were to render a 1080p screen, that would need about 15.82mb (basically 16) of ram since 1080 is 2.25 times the pixel count of 720p. Thats why 16 should have been used.
zero_snake99
Upscaling isn't done in the eDRAM. IF you wanted to upscale you would first render to a buffer in eDRAM, then transfer it out to main memory, and then write to a larger buffer in eDRAM while reading the first buffer from main memory.
And yeah more eDRAM would of course have been nicer, but at some point MS had to draw the line somewhere. Another 6MB might have added a significant cost. Also 1080p isn't really a practical target for 95% of games anyway.
[QUOTE="stevencompton"]
I didn't mean the higher clock speed, I was saying that for each clock a pixel shader in the RSX can do more operations than one in the Xenos. The shaders in the desktop 7800 series can do 26 floating point operations per clock (the RSX uses the same shader architecture), whereas the Xenos is commonly believed to do 10 flops per clock.
Teufelhuhn
This is true, but in reality it doesn't happen because on the RSX texture samples also have to use the ALU. On Xenos the texture units can do it all by themselves.
What you are saying about the RSX missing cycles sounds a bit odd, wouldn't problems like that be down to poor programming? But I don't fully understand the causes of screen tearing (though I think it's related to framerate dips).
stevencompton
Yeah that doesn't really make sense either to me. Frame tearing happens when you're not synchronized with the vertical refresh. Many games will try to lock at 30fps, but then if the framerate slips below that they will disable vsync and display a torn frame. Many PS3 games have more unpredictable framerates because for RSX it's more difference to balance vertex and pixel load, and also because transparencies have much more of a performance hit.
Yeah, overall it seems the 360 is designed to be flexible for the developers (unified memory and shaders). The PS3 appears to have as much if not more potiential power, but the developers have to work with the hardware to keep things running smoothly.
For the few people that mentioned the RAM. I don't think the split memory on the PS3 would be much of a problem most of the time. I think the main problem was from the extra memory taken up from the PS3's OS; I think it used around 80-90mb of RAM initially compared to the 360's 30-35mb RAM. Now the PS3's OS is supposedly down to around 40mb. Apparently the RSX can render from the Cell's 256mb XDR memory, though like with the split shader architechture, I think the split in the RAM could cause occasional problems when the developer wants more RAM for something and can't quite fit in either of the pools.
Why this thread just fell off..........not suprised considering!
[QUOTE="deniiiii21"]
Is it a newer technology, yes it is, does it make it any better, not really. It is highly ineffiecent, even today ATI's architechure, they still relly on cramming in the most SP that can fit on a wafer, while Nvidia SP's mean a lot more and they are clocked twice as much, 285GTX with 240 SP's gets slightly beaten by a 5850 which has 1400SP's. So I wouldnt be too proud of a 48 SP card that was two gens back, to call it this revolutionary card is really misleading, Xenos is a lot weaker than what most people seem to think.
Teufelhuhn
When Nvidia says they have "128 shaders" they're refering to scalar units. The "shaders" in Xenos are 5-way vector ALU's, so they'd be equivalent to 240 scalar units. Of course it's not nearly as simple as just comparing the number of scalar units you have available, but the situation isn't really like what you're making it out to be. I use the "ATi Stream Processors / 5 = basic equivalent amount of Nvidia unified shaders" when comparing ATi and Nvidia GPUs lol. It's not too extraneous way of comparison since a single cluster (master + 4 slaves) is more capable than a single shader on an Nvidia 8 9 series GPUs. Of course, then we got to bring in clock speeds, and basic comparison gets more convoluted thanks to Nvidia's separate clock domains. Though I must say the "divide by 5" method does work reasonably well for low end ****s of GPUs:
Radeon 2400/34xx-------------40 SPs/5 = 8 Shaders Geforce 8400/9200M
Radeon 43xx/45xx-------------80 SPs/5 = 16 Shaders Geforce 8500/9400
Radeon 2600/36xx------------120 SPs/5 = 24 Shaders
Radeon 2900/38xx/46xx-----320 SPs/5 = 64 Shaders Geforce 9600GT/9800M
Radeon 47xx------------------640 SPs/5 = 128 Shaders Geforce 8800GTS(G92)GTX/9800GTX
Radeon 48xx------------------800 SPs/5 = 160 Shaders
Radeon 5870-----------------1600 SPs/5 = 320 Shaders
Of course this is very dependent on the various clock speeds as well as memory bus width but for me it's a decent way of comparing similar competing cards into performance catagories.
Ignore the shader count, the 360 has 10MB of EDram which basically gives a 2xAA pass with almost no performance hit, is free.
Snagal123
While you did state "almost" it is important to note that an image 1280x720 or larger is too large to be held in the 10MB buffer and processed. Such images must be tiled, processed, and reassembled, which isn't "free".
The eDRAM is an excellent idea just flawed in execution.
the 360 GPU aka the R500 has 10MB EDRAM. RSX does not.
the 360 GPU has more available RAM- X360 OS uses much less RAM than PS3 OS.
the 360 GPU uses unified shader architecture which makes it a lot more efficient. You're talking 90-95% efficiency compared to the RSX being only 75% efficient. (48 ALUs in constant use by R500, where as upto 8 pipeines out of the 32 RSX has can be out of use at any one time.)
you fail, the ATI team behind the xenos GPU alraedy stated that the xenos CANNOT be compared to exixting ATI graphics cards/GPU's, it even uses it's own language, people seem to forget that the CPU in the 360 is a MAC processor,not a PC processor,also on paper the xenos pushes twice as many polygons as the RSX, the xbox 360 was the first machine to even use unified shader architecture, it enebles the xenos to push twice as many shader operations with no extra recource cost, also the RSX stalls during shader operations, the xenos also has a tessalator and can emulate DX10 subroutines, ATI are even saying now it may be possible for the xenos to emulate DX11 subroutines, and you seriously failed when you said the xenos has innefficient shaders, what's innefficient about a GPU that can push the same level of shaders as the RSX at half the resource cost, which is what USA does, throw in the 10mb Edram, which gives free AA, and you can see that the xenos IS uperior to the RSX, maybe not by much, but it is.Please respond if you know what the heck your talking about, preferebly PC hardware people like myself. A lot of people get this general idea that Xenos is superior to RSX, and the main thing they bring up is the unified shader architechure. Well lets go over this architechure. Xenos is based on R600, ATI's 2000s series. It is probably the worst architechure ATI has ever came up with, first generation shader architechure was highly ineffiecent. Xenos closely resembles a 2600xt a card that was no better than a 8600GT which is probably 10% better than 7600gt give or take, people here love to say Xenos was based on 2900XT but its severly bottlenecked by its 128 bit bus, and the core clock is only 500mhz. To just stay competative ATI has to cramp hundreds of shaders in its cards just to stay competative with Nvidia, a card like 9800GTX which has 128 shaders compares with a 4850 which has 800 SP's. RSX is based on Nvidia 7 series doesnt use Shader architechure, most resembles a 7800GT due to 128 bit bus, not a 7800GTX like everyone is claiming. So to claim that 48 crappy first gen shaders that are severely underclocked is a major advantage over RSX is just a pipedream, basically they help a little, just as they helped 2600xt which wasnt much, the higher core clock of RSX and the not so efficent Xenos shaders, you can call it a draw. I know this will start a flame war, but oh well its system wars.
deniiiii21
Please respond if you know what the heck your talking about, preferebly PC hardware people like myself. A lot of people get this general idea that Xenos is superior to RSX, and the main thing they bring up is the unified shader architechure. Well lets go over this architechure. Xenos is based on R600, ATI's 2000s series. It is probably the worst architechure ATI has ever came up with, first generation shader architechure was highly ineffiecent. Xenos closely resembles a 2600xt a card that was no better than a 8600GT which is probably 10% better than 7600gt give or take, people here love to say Xenos was based on 2900XT but its severly bottlenecked by its 128 bit bus, and the core clock is only 500mhz. To just stay competative ATI has to cramp hundreds of shaders in its cards just to stay competative with Nvidia, a card like 9800GTX which has 128 shaders compares with a 4850 which has 800 SP's. RSX is based on Nvidia 7 series doesnt use Shader architechure, most resembles a 7800GT due to 128 bit bus, not a 7800GTX like everyone is claiming. So to claim that 48 crappy first gen shaders that are severely underclocked is a major advantage over RSX is just a pipedream, basically they help a little, just as they helped 2600xt which wasnt much, the higher core clock of RSX and the not so efficent Xenos shaders, you can call it a draw. I know this will start a flame war, but oh well its system wars.
you fail, the ATI team behind the xenos GPU alraedy stated that the xenos CANNOT be compared to exixting ATI graphics cards/GPU's, it even uses it's own language, people seem to forget that the CPU in the 360 is a MAC processor,not a PC processor,also on paper the xenos pushes twice as many polygons as the RSX, the xbox 360 was the first machine to even use unified shader architecture, it enebles the xenos to push twice as many shader operations with no extra recource cost, also the RSX stalls during shader operations, the xenos also has a tessalator and can emulate DX10 subroutines, ATI are even saying now it may be possible for the xenos to emulate DX11 subroutines, and you seriously failed when you said the xenos has innefficient shaders, what's innefficient about a GPU that can push the same level of shaders as the RSX at half the resource cost, which is what USA does, throw in the 10mb Edram, which gives free AA, and you can see that the xenos IS uperior to the RSX, maybe not by much, but it is. indeed which is why the RSX is heavily reliant on assistance from the CELL to get the best visuals out of the PS3.well clearly the PS3 doesnt ouput far better looking games than the 360. yes games like Killzone 2 and Uncharted 2 look very good but they have long dev times and huge budgets. games like gears of war 2 on the X360 dont look much worse and are done on a lower budget. in addition to this Forza 3 for example looks AS GOOD as anything the PS3 can do. the PS3 is heavily reliant on the CELL to assist the RSX. nobody is disputing the PS3 can do GREAT visuals but I think it goes to show how advanced the 360 GPU is that it can keep the Xbox 360 competing with the PS3. the RSX is by no means weak (for its time) just it's not as good as the R500.Bla...Bla...Bla....360 has better GPU,360 has easier architect,360 is easier to work/design with,Xenos is generations ahead of PS3 And Yet the PS3 outputs far better looking games than the 360.
cb_au
did you read the rest of the thread? i think you missed the point, the RSX can only do what it does with help from the cell, the RSX+the cell is better at rendering graphics than the xenos, but the RSX on it's own is inferior to the xenos, if it wasn't for the cell you wouldn't have games that look as good as uncharted 2 on the ps3, there is no way the RSX is capable of graphics like that without the cell, it's not fair to use the cell when comparing the two GPU's, the xenos has more power than the RSX, the experts have said so , game developers have said so, and everyone in the know on this forum has said so.Bla...Bla...Bla....360 has better GPU,360 has easier architect,360 is easier to work/design with,Xenos is generations ahead of PS3 And Yet the PS3 outputs far better looking games than the 360.
cb_au
[QUOTE="cb_au"]well clearly the PS3 doesnt ouput far better looking games than the 360. yes games like Killzone 2 and Uncharted 2 look very good but they have long dev times and huge budgets. games like gears of war 2 on the X360 dont look much worse and are done on a lower budget. in addition to this Forza 3 for example looks AS GOOD as anything the PS3 can do. the PS3 is heavily reliant on the CELL to assist the RSX. nobody is disputing the PS3 can do GREAT visuals but I think it goes to show how advanced the 360 GPU is that it can keep the Xbox 360 competing with the PS3. the RSX is by no means weak (for its time) just it's not as good as the R500. Yea i agree. But when time is actually put into PS3s hardware, ps3 shows the better result. So logically its capabilities are more. Whether or not money is required. In the end its hardware can do more, its capabilities are more. Money doesnt belong in this thread, there were no considerations. It was just "Which is superior,which is inferior??" . And btw Gears 2 is like MGS4. And killzone 2 is far ahead of any Gears of War. And Uncharted II is even light years ahead of Killzone 2, so do not say that Gears looks just as good and stuff. A Gears of War on an 8800GT on PC looks miles ahead of Gears of War 2 on xbox 360. In the end you are wrong by saying that "PS3 doesnt ouput far better looking games than the 360". Its not about money or time, those considerations are not ours or do not belong here at all. It simply matters which is ahead. And thats PS3 mate.Bla...Bla...Bla....360 has better GPU,360 has easier architect,360 is easier to work/design with,Xenos is generations ahead of PS3 And Yet the PS3 outputs far better looking games than the 360.
CwlHeddwyn
[QUOTE="stevencompton"]
I didn't mean the higher clock speed, I was saying that for each clock a pixel shader in the RSX can do more operations than one in the Xenos. The shaders in the desktop 7800 series can do 26 floating point operations per clock (the RSX uses the same shader architecture), whereas the Xenos is commonly believed to do 10 flops per clock.
Teufelhuhn
This is true, but in reality it doesn't happen because on the RSX texture samples also have to use the ALU. On Xenos the texture units can do it all by themselves.
What you are saying about the RSX missing cycles sounds a bit odd, wouldn't problems like that be down to poor programming? But I don't fully understand the causes of screen tearing (though I think it's related to framerate dips).
stevencompton
Yeah that doesn't really make sense either to me. Frame tearing happens when you're not synchronized with the vertical refresh. Many games will try to lock at 30fps, but then if the framerate slips below that they will disable vsync and display a torn frame. Many PS3 games have more unpredictable framerates because for RSX it's more difference to balance vertex and pixel load, and also because transparencies have much more of a performance hit. i think what he's talking about is something actually stalls when you use a particular pipe, i don't feel like looking it up but from what i remember using pixel pipes stalls the vertex pipes or soemthing to that extent.
[QUOTE="CwlHeddwyn"][QUOTE="cb_au"]well clearly the PS3 doesnt ouput far better looking games than the 360. yes games like Killzone 2 and Uncharted 2 look very good but they have long dev times and huge budgets. games like gears of war 2 on the X360 dont look much worse and are done on a lower budget. in addition to this Forza 3 for example looks AS GOOD as anything the PS3 can do. the PS3 is heavily reliant on the CELL to assist the RSX. nobody is disputing the PS3 can do GREAT visuals but I think it goes to show how advanced the 360 GPU is that it can keep the Xbox 360 competing with the PS3. the RSX is by no means weak (for its time) just it's not as good as the R500. Yea i agree. But when time is actually put into PS3s hardware, ps3 shows the better result. So logically its capabilities are more. Whether or not money is required. In the end its hardware can do more, its capabilities are more. Money doesnt belong in this thread, there were no considerations. It was just "Which is superior,which is inferior??" . And btw Gears 2 is like MGS4. And killzone 2 is far ahead of any Gears of War. And Uncharted II is even light years ahead of Killzone 2, so do not say that Gears looks just as good and stuff. A Gears of War on an 8800GT on PC looks miles ahead of Gears of War 2 on xbox 360. In the end you are wrong by saying that "PS3 doesnt ouput far better looking games than the 360". Its not about money or time, those considerations are not ours or do not belong here at all. It simply matters which is ahead. And thats PS3 mate. I wouldn't consider anything the ps3 does FAR better, slightly with that added 2 years of dev time, and all the big games on 360 don't really use game engines built from the ground up for it, which is why i'm interested in reach, allegedly this will be the first real attempted at making efficient code on the 360 designed specifically for it.Bla...Bla...Bla....360 has better GPU,360 has easier architect,360 is easier to work/design with,Xenos is generations ahead of PS3 And Yet the PS3 outputs far better looking games than the 360.
cb_au
Bla...Bla...Bla....360 has better GPU,360 has easier architect,360 is easier to work/design with,Xenos is generations ahead of PS3 And Yet the PS3 outputs far better looking games than the 360.
cb_au
Agreed, this is all rhetoric.
Like they say the proof is in the puddin' :)
rsx is stronger anyways imo, xbox cant even play 1080p movies. But who cares srly its like comparing a 7600 to 7800 both are junk.
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