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Originally posted by Animal Mother here is another interesting article, where sony states that microsoft is using inferior technology. But what makes me uneasy is the impression i am getting from sony that the ps3 will not be cheap. http://www.reuters.com/audi/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=8534442
Originally posted by EviscerationX I don\'t know what the hell a dot is, but it\'s probably not literally "dots".
Originally posted by ddaryl I would think a dot = pixel. Which would mean each pixel can be manipulated instead of multiple pixels making up a polygon.But thats my educational guess
Originally posted by EviscerationX But it\'s about twice the performance in most other aspects. NVIDIA did well with this GPU.
Hardware:Also, I think it is very interesting that Sony is playing the floating point calculation game. This has always been a very dirty game that technology companies have played over the years. It\'s very similiar with watt ratings of speaker companies. Why does Bose only claim to have 600 watts yet it sounds louder and clearer than my system that is rated at 1000? Of course you have questions such as "Is it 1000 watts RMS or peak?" The same can be said about flop ratings. Are your flop ratings theoretical or actual performance ratings? How are you measuring them? Nvidia has been known to use a flop measurments that advantage their hardware, for example. As far as Sony is telling the consumer, their RSX gpu performs at 1.8 Tflops while 360\'s GPU only runs around 750 Gflops. If you were to actually believe these numbers, you would be forced to come to the conclusion that 360\'s GPU is not even half as capable as PS3\'s. Is Nvidia\'s card really over two times as powerful as ATI\'s? Of course not. The 10 Mb of integrated DRAM has something to say about that as well as 48 pipelines and ambiguous shader processing. Also, I will bring up Sony\'s wonderful powerpoint presentation that showed the STARK contrast between PS3\'s floating point performance and Xbox 360\'s. 360 can do 1.33 Tflops while PS3 can do over 2 Tflops. Sounds impressive, no? First, I will restate the fact that flop measurements are and have been a very dirty business that, if done the right way, can make anyone look good. According to Sony\'s flop performance of the "Emotion Engine," it actually run around three times the flops as Xbox\'s yet look at the results. Of course there were API issues as well as memory bottlenecks and dedicated GPU\'s but you get my point. Also, anyone notice that the Cell processor that was on the power point was rated at 3.8 Ghz and yet, just a few minutes later, the specs for PS3 were flashed on screen and it showed the Cell in PS3 as being 3.2 Ghz?? Pretty sneaky and I would argue, pretty much lying. If Sony would have actually shown the "genuine" floating point rating of the Cell chip that was actually being used with PS3, as well as ATI using the same boosted math as Nvidia, we would be realizing that there is not as big of a difference between the two hardware configurations as Sony would like you to believe.As far as similiar memory goes, while they both have a total of 512 Mb\'s of RAM, it would be more accurate to say that PS3 has 256 Mb of Ram available to the CPU and GPU at any one time while 360 has 512 Mb of Ram available where needed between the CPU and GPU. Also, as stated before, 360\'s 10 Mb of EDRAM on the GPU is, while a seeminly small number, huge for being accessible with pretty much zero latency for use with AA and blurring effects without practically any hit on GPU performance. Giving the developers freedom to allocate memory where they need it is a huge bonus but it is yet to be seen whether the 256 Mb\'s of XDR running at 2.4 Ghz is going to make the difference for the lack of unified memory or the EDRAM. Finally, as much as I would like to look at pure theoretical performance, I think it would ignorant of me to do so. We have two deliberate architectures that the companies are going for. PS3 is aiming for the highest theoretical performance as possible while 360 is shooting for the most capable setup possible. M$ is giving developers a lot of freedom to put what they want, where they want it. The ambiguous nature of M$\'s three PPE\'s and the unified memory architecture allow developers to allocate performance wherever they want. Also, less is more when it comes to taking advantage of total system performance, as far as threads go. The more threads to assign tasks to, the more difficult to program for, thus leading to more tendency to not use all the power that you can. While having two less threads than PS3 can be a theoretical downfall, it also makes the programming 1/3 more accessible.
