NEON MERCURY's ++ ps360ii Lite ++ thread -weaning you off WoW since 07

[Pubrick]

that playstation controller doesn't look remotely comfortable.

they say the design has been enhanced for ass-to-ass gameplay.

[Jeremy Blackman]

that playstation controller doesn't look remotely comfortable.

[cron]

xbox 360,
i  like what they said about it in digit magazine  :
"Just wait until you get a peak under the hood of this monstrosity!"
"Frankly, it's like looking two or three years into the future of PC gaming. "
"It's simply ridiculous."


and here's the Nintendo Revolution

Wednesday 18 May 2005 - 10:30



Nintendo on Tuesday offered assembled media the first look at a prototype of their new Revolution console, due out in 2006. Details were scarce, however -- Nintendo made no attempt to offer performance specifications or pricing. They also outlined their plans for Wi-Fi connectivity for the popular DS handheld system and introduced the Game Boy Micro, an iPod mini-sized handheld game system capable of playing Game Boy Advance titles.



"And now you say you want a Revolution. Well, we've got one," said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.

The Revolution uses an IBM PowerPC-derived CPU code-named "Broadway" and a graphics chip set designed by ATI Technologies Inc called "Hollywood." Iwata-san held aloft a gleaming obsidian prototype unit, which he carefully noted might not represent the final design of the Revolution when it debuts next year. Iwata-san said that the system is the smallest game console yet designed by Nintendo, about the size of three standard DVD cases stacked together. It'll be able to be stacked vertically or horizontally.


The Revolution uses a slot-loading drive that plays new 12-inch optical discs containing Revolution games, but it will also accept GameCube discs. And with a "small, self-contained attachment," the Revolution will play DVDs.

The controllers, which were not revealed today, are wireless using technology developed by Broadcom.

Backwards-compatibility doesn't end with GameCube support -- Nintendo describes the Revolution as being a "virtual console" capable of playing Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 games as well. Nintendo plans to release downloadable versions of the games for these older systems, and Iwata-san noted that the Revolution would sport Nintendo's own form of digital rights management to "deter sharing of intellectual property."

The Revolution features 512MB of internal flash memory, wireless controllers, two USB 2.0 ports and built in support for Wi-Fi wireless networking. There's a bay for an SD memory card to expand internal flash memory.

Nintendo plans to leverage its previously announced Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service, a partnership it is developing with GameSpy, to offer online gaming connectivity for Revolution players. The company said there are a number of companies who will be developing Wi-Fi compatible games, and Nintendo is working on making Wi-Fi compatible titles with key franchise characters.

"I am pushing our team to make sure Super Smash Bros is one of them," said Iwata-san, who said the game is one of his favorites.

Without any specific details about the system's performance, Iwata-san added that gamers will turn on the Revolution and be wowed by graphics and gameplay, something Nintendo's development partners IBM and ATI are working together to assure.

Emphasis on content

The central focus of executive vice president of sales and marketing Reggie Fils-Aime's speech to the assembled throng of media and analysts wasn't on hardware or performance, but on content. Nintendo showed off new titles in development that are coming out Nintendo's GameCube and DS handheld system this year.

While many of the titles received warm and occasionally enthusiastic applause and yells from the crowd, the new title featuring Link, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess drew the most animated reaction. The game will be coming to GameCube in time for Christmas.

Other GameCube titles expected soon include Battalion Wars, Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix, Mario Baseball, New Super Mario Bros and Pokemon XD. Game Boy Advance SP titles coming forth include Donkey Kong Country 3, Dynasty Warriors Advance and more.

Nintendo's emphasis on its DS handheld was on the online connectivity coming through Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, including Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossing DS, two titles due out before the end of the year. Nintendogs, a Shigeiru Miyamoto-designed title for the DS, sports Local Area Network (LAN) support. Miyamoto-san made a brief appearance to demonstrate Nintendogs' networking support. Iwata-san also noted that Miyamoto-san and his team are working on a new game for Revolution, but offered no details.

Nintendo also highlighted Electroplankton, a new game that turns the DS into a musical instrument. Users can create rhythms and melodies using the DS's touch screen, interacting with luminescent sea creatures on screen.

Game Boy Micro


Fils-Aime also slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and revealed a new handheld gaming system, the Game Boy Micro. He compared it to Apple's iPod mini, saying the tiny gaming system was "just a hair bigger and two thirds the weight of an iPod mini." The system measures 4-x-2-x-0.7 inches, and weighs 2.8 ounces. It has the same processing power as a Game Boy Advance SP, and contains the brightest screen Nintendo's ever put in a handheld, according to Fils-Aime. The screen also features brightness adjustability for indoor and outdoor play.


Removable faceplates will let Game Boy Micro users customize the look of their systems. The Game Boy Micro draws its power from a built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery. And, in a move away from the design of the DS, Nintendo is equipping the Game Boy Micro with a standard headphone jack.

The Game Boy Micro will be released in autumn. Pricing was not announced.


winner: nintendo.

[Raikus]

The Revolution uses a slot-loading drive that plays new 12-inch optical discs containing Revolution games, but it will also accept GameCube discs.

They're bringing back laser discs?  

That's Nintendo for you. Always on the cusp of technological popularity.

[GodDamnImDaMan]

The Revolution uses a slot-loading drive that plays new 12-inch optical discs containing Revolution games, but it will also accept GameCube discs.

They're bringing back laser discs?  

That's Nintendo for you. Always on the cusp of technological popularity.

I think that was a mistake you damn nazi!

[Stefen]

Raikus is a hater.

[Reinhold]

that playstation controller doesn't look remotely comfortable.

fine. it looks remotely comfortable.  

[GodDamnImDaMan]

I eat babies.

You monster.  

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

It appears as though the 360 is coming with those uncomfortable Mad Catz controllers as standard...

Why don't game makers notice their shitty controllers?

Xbox was too clunky and Gamecube was just an ugly set up.  

Playstation used the same controller, so at least we were used to it.

[Raikus]

I eat babies.

You monster.  

In my defense, I only eat them with a bit of paprika.

[SHAFTR]

First off, Microsoft has released a press release saying that Xbox 360 will be backwards compatible.

----
Microsoft's Xbox 360 Vs. Sony's PlayStation 3?
With Sony's specs out, Microsoft has sent us its a comparitive analysis. What's the outcome?
by Douglass C. Perry

We decided to put this Microsoft-provided information our undigested. Thus, enclosed is a Microsoft-made comparitive analysis. We have not alterted, added, or tinkered with the data. We have not interpreted the specs. We have pasted and cut this information from the email into our site and formatted it. Make of it what you will, but be clear we know Microsoft has clearly slanted this info, and we're not endorsing it, just printing their version. There is a difference.

XBOX 360 / PLAYSTATION 3 PERFORMANCE COMPARISON

SUMMARY
Now that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 specifications have been announced, it is possible to do a real world performance comparison of the two systems.

There are three critical performance aspects of a console:
Central Processing Unit (CPU) performance.
The Xbox 360 CPU architecture has three times the general purpose processing power of the Cell.
Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) performance
The Xbox 360 GPU design is more flexible and it has more processing power than the PS3 GPU.
Memory System Bandwidth
The memory system bandwidth in Xbox 360 exceeds the PS3's by five times.
      
The Xbox 360's CPU has more general purpose processing power because it has three general purpose cores, and Cell has just one.

Cell's claimed advantage is on streaming floating point work which is done on its seven DSP processors.
      
The Xbox 360 GPU has more processing power than the PS3's. In addition, its innovated features contribute to overall rendering performance.
      
Xbox 360 has 278.4 GB/s of memory system bandwidth. The PS3 has less than one-fifth of Xbox 360's (48 GB/s) of total memory system bandwidth.

CPU
The Xbox 360 processor was designed to give game developers the power that they actually need, in an easy to use form. The Cell processor has impressive streaming floating-point power that is of limited use for games.

The majority of game code is a mixture of integer, floating-point, and vector math, with lots of branches and random memory accesses. This code is best handled by a general purpose CPU with a cache, branch predictor, and vector unit.

The Cell's seven DSPs (what Sony calls SPEs) have no cache, no direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and a different instruction set from the PS3's main CPU. They are not designed for or efficient at general purpose computing. DSPs are not appropriate for game programming.

Xbox 360 has three general purpose CPU cores. The Cell processor has only one.

Xbox 360's CPUs has vector processing power on each CPU core. Each Xbox 360 core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread, with a dot product instruction, and a shared 1-MB L2 cache. The Cell processor's vector processing power is mostly on the seven DSPs.

Dot products are critical to games because they are used in 3D math to calculate vector lengths, projections, transformations, and more. The Xbox 360 CPU has a dot product instruction, where other CPUs such as Cell must emulate dot product using multiple instructions.

Cell's streaming floating-point work is done on its seven DSP processors. Since geometry processing is moved to the GPU, the need for streaming floating-point work and other DSP style programming in games has dropped dramatically.

Just like with the PS2's Emotion Engine, with its missing L2 cache, the Cell is designed for a type of game programming that accounts for a minor percentage of processing time.

Sony's CPU is ideal for an environment where 12.5% of the work is general-purpose computing and 87.5% of the work is DSP calculations. That sort of mix makes sense for video playback or networked waveform analysis, but not for games. In fact, when analyzing real games one finds almost the opposite distribution of general purpose computing and DSP calculation requirements. A relatively small percentage of instructions are actually floating point. Of those instructions which are floating-point, very few involve processing continuous streams of numbers. Instead they are used in tasks like AI and path-finding, which require random access to memory and frequent branches, which the DSPs are ill-suited to.

Based on measurements of running next generation games, only ~10-30% of the instructions executed are floating point. The remainders of the instructions are load, store, integer, branch, etc. Even fewer of the instructions executed are streaming floating point—probably ~5-10%. Cell is optimized for streaming floating-point, with 87.5% of its cores good for streaming floating-point and nothing else.
      
Game programmers do not want to spread their code over eight processors, especially when seven of the processors are poorly suited for general purpose programming. Evenly distributing game code across eight processors is extremely difficult.

Game programmers do not want to spread their code over eight processors, especially when seven of the processors are poorly suited for general purpose programming. Evenly distributing game code across eight processors is extremely difficult.

GPU
Even ignoring the bandwidth limitations the PS3's GPU is not as powerful as the Xbox 360's GPU.


Below are the specs from Sony's press release regarding the PS3's GPU.

RSX GPU
550 MHz
Independent vertex/pixel shaders
51 billion dot products per second (total system performance)
300M transistors
136 "shader operations" per clock
The interesting ALU performance numbers are 51 billion dot products per second (total system performance), 300M transistors, and more than twice as powerful as the 6800 Ultra.

The 51 billions dot products per cycle were listed on a summary slide of total graphics system performance and are assumed to include the Cell processor. Sony's calculations seem to assume that the Cell can do a dot product per cycle per DSP, despite not having a dot product instruction.

However, using Sony's claim, 7 dot products per cycle * 3.2 GHz = 22.4 billion dot products per second for the CPU. That leaves 51 - 22.4 = 28.6 billion dot products per second that are left over for the GPU. That leaves 28.6 billion dot products per second / 550 MHz = 52 GPU ALU ops per clock.

It is important to note that if the RSX ALUs are similar to the GeForce 6800 ALUs then they work on vector4s, while the Xbox 360 GPU ALUs work on vector5s. The total programmable GPU floating point performance for the PS3 would be 52 ALU ops * 4 floats per op *2 (madd) * 550 MHz = 228.8 GFLOPS which is less than the Xbox 360's 48 ALU ops * 5 floats per op * 2 (madd) * 500 MHz= 240 GFLOPS.

With the number of transistors being slightly larger on the Xbox 360 GPU (330M) it's not surprising that the total programmable GFLOPs number is very close.

      
The PS3 does have the additional 7 DSPs on the Cell to add more floating point ops for graphics rendering, but the Xbox 360's three general purpose cores with custom D3D and dot product instructions are more customized for true graphics related calculations.

The 6800 Ultra has 16 pixel pipes, 6 vertex pipes, and runs at 400 MHz. Given the RSX's 2x better than a 6800 Ultra number and the higher frequency of the RSX, one can roughly estimate that it will have 24 pixel shading pipes and 4 vertex shading pipes (fewer vertex shading pipes since the Cell DSPs will do some vertex shading). If the PS3 GPU keeps the 6800 pixel shader pipe co-issue architecture which is hinted at in Sony's press release, this again gives it 24 pixel pipes* 2 issued per pipe + 4 vertex pipes = 52 dot products per clock in the GPU.

If the RSX follows the 6800 Ultra route, it will have 24 texture samplers, but when in use they take up an ALU slot, making the PS3 GPU in practice even less impressive. Even if it does manage to decouple texture fetching from ALU co-issue, it won't have enough bandwidth to fetch the textures anyways.

For shader operations per clock, Sony is most likely counting each pixel pipe as four ALU operations (co-issued vector+scalar) and a texture operation per pixel pipe and 4 scalar operations for each vector pipe, for a total of 24 * (4 + 1) + (4*4) = 136 operations per cycle or 136 * 550 = 74.8 GOps per second.

Given the Xbox 360 GPU's multithreading and balanced design, you really can't compare the two systems in terms of shading operations per clock. However, the Xbox 360's GPU can do 48 ALU operations (each can do a vector4 and scalar op per clock), 16 texture fetches, 32 control flow operations, and 16 programmable vertex fetch operations with tessellation per clock for a total of 48*2 + 16 + 32 + 16 = 160 operations per cycle or 160 * 500 = 80 GOps per second.

      
Overall, the automatic shader load balancing, memory export features, programmable vertex fetching, programmable triangle tesselator, full rate texture fetching in the vertex shader, and other "well beyond shader model 3.0" features of the Xbox 360 GPU should also contribute to overall rendering performance.

Bandwidth
The PS3 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and 25.6 GB/s of RDRAM bandwidth for a total system bandwidth of 48 GB/s.

The Xbox 360 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and a 256 GB/s of EDRAM bandwidth for a total of 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth.

      
Why does the Xbox 360 have such an extreme amount of bandwidth? Even the simplest calculations show that a large amount of bandwidth is consumed by the frame buffer. For example, with simple color rendering and Z testing at 550 MHz the frame buffer alone requires 52.8 GB/s at 8 pixels per clock. The PS3's memory bandwidth is insufficient to maintain its GPU's peak rendering speed, even without texture and vertex fetches.

The PS3 uses Z and color compression to try to compensate for the lack of memory bandwidth. The problem with Z and color compression is that the compression breaks down quickly when rendering complex next-generation 3D scenes.

HDR, alpha-blending, and anti-aliasing require even more memory bandwidth. This is why Xbox 360 has 256 GB/s bandwidth reserved just for the frame buffer. This allows the Xbox 360 GPU to do Z testing, HDR, and alpha blended color rendering with 4X MSAA at full rate and still have the entire main bus bandwidth of 22.4 GB/s left over for textures and vertices.

CONCLUSION
When you break down the numbers, Xbox 360 has provably more performance than PS3. Keep in mind that Sony has a track record of over promising and under delivering on technical performance. The truth is that both systems pack a lot of power for high definition games and entertainment.

However, hardware performance, while important, is only a third of the puzzle. Xbox 360 is a fusion of hardware, software and services. Without the software and services to power it, even the most powerful hardware becomes inconsequential. Xbox 360 games—by leveraging cutting-edge hardware, software, and services—will outperform the PlayStation 3.

[Stefen]

Xbox sucks. Gimme PS3 everytime. Sony delivers the games. Cool, Halo 3 just came out!! when does part 4 come out?!! Weak sauce.

[SHAFTR]

Xbox sucks. Gimme PS3 everytime. Sony delivers the games. Cool, Halo 3 just came out!! when does part 4 come out?!! Weak sauce.

Well, remember that the Xbox 360 will be out about 5-6 months before PS3.  If there are as many launch titles as Xbox 360 is saying there will be (a record for a system launch), then the game libraries will be much closer than they were before.  Look for Developers to sign on to Xbox 360 since it's the first system.

Rumor is that Halo 3 will be relased the day PS3 is released.  

I think it's going to be interesting how these console wars play out.  I've played all three systems extensively and Xbox has won me over (w/ gamecube distant 2nd).

[Pubrick]

i'm an xbox guy. with mod chip and all that shit.

syke.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

Xbox rules, except for its games.