hey guys, i decided to create this thread because of all the fuss over which one is more powerful, or which games cant be done on what system. Then i noticed that people flood those threads with useless, and often incorrect information. So here is an article done about the consoles by an experienced game programmer. Now this article was published in 2006, but keep in mind that FACTS dont change, but opinions do, so this article is still valid. (you dont question the bible because it was written so long ago do you??) So just sit back, take off the fanboy goggles for a minute, dive in, and enjoy!! Discuss.......
Best Article You'll Ever Read!!
navyguy21
Please read NVidia's whitepaper on G7X vs G8X. Goto document's page 31 (or PDF page 39) on "Decoupled Shader Math and Texture Operations". Theoretical numbers are meaningless when G7x (i.e. RSX) family can't process shader/math and textures operation in a concurrent manner.
To quote NVIDIA "For comparison, a GeForce 7 Series GPU texture address calculation was interleaved with shader floating-point math operations in Shader Unit 1 of a pixel pipeline. Although this design was chosen to optimize die size, power, and performance, it could cause some shader math bottlenecks when textures were fetched, preventing use of a shader processor until the texture was retrieved. GeForce 8800 GPUs attacks the shader math and texture processing efficiency problem by decoupling shader and texture operations so that texture operations can be performed independent of shader math operations. Figure 22 illustrates math operations (not dependent on specific texture data being fetched) that can be executed while one or more textures are being fetched from frame buffer memory, or in the worst case, from system memory. Shader processor utilization is improved. In effect, while a thread fetching a texture is executing, the GeForce 8800 GPU's GigaThread technology can swap in other threads to execute, ensuring that shader processors are never idle when other work needs to done"
The article's GPU "ops per second" numbers is debunked by NVIDIA's G7x vs G8x whitepaper.
NVidia's own G80 vs G7X white paper is interesting since G80's improvements highlight G7X's design flaws.
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