Armored Core 4 - PS3 vs Xbox 360 Comparison Video

TheFamilyGuy - 1005 days 13 hours ago

Actually there is an noticeable difference between the PS3 version and the Xbox 360 version. To me, the PS3 one seems more faded, and now that I watch it in HD, it looks like the 360 just has sort of a richer look to it.

If you click on "View Video" below the embedded video, I linked the HD video, which is bigger and you can see the differences easily.

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giovonni - 1005 days 5 hours ago

Right out my mouth. It seems they both have the same animation and graphics, but the brightness and contrass are different at times. This can be changed by changing your tv options

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AllroundGamer - 1005 days 6 hours ago

do you think im the only one, that wants you to shutup? :D you share the immature nobrain comments with theMart and PowerOfGreen, therefore you have two bubbles, and if you continue, there will be only one left...

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TheMART at Xboxkings - 1005 days 3 hours ago

So what about yourself @ 3 bubbles?

Although the game for both consoles isn't really next gen stuff, the 360 version is sharper, better shading, drawing distance etc etc.

Again. Over and over again, the PS3 looks washed out. Bad GPU!

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FordGTGuy - 1005 days 6 hours ago

That you shouldn't have to calibrate your TV every time you put a game in.

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deep - 1005 days 5 hours ago

You can callibrate your console once. Also tell me you're not going to have to turn up the brightness on the 360 one to see what you're doing.

But hey it looks kind of lame to me.

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soldier sean - 1005 days 1 hour ago

stop acting like a biotch and disagreeing with people who are correct. You sir , are incorrect, it doesnt have to do with tv calibration , its all about the shader technology inside the xbox 360.

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Dareaver1 - 1005 days 5 hours ago

It's easy to talk about contrast differences, the 360's is darker, kinda weird if you ask me. Makes no sense to play it if you can't see the game. But the textures and reflections on the 360 look a lot better. Also the explosions. It does not matter on which console it came out on first, when games came on the 360 first fanboys screamed foul play because it's a port. Now the ps3 get's a game first and they scream foul play, it got more dev time to look better. Please make up your mind. Right now all you fanboys are displaying situational biasism. It's a disease suffered by true fanboys. The only cure for it is to realize that there are two different consoles with different strengths, and cross platform games are always gonna look different no matter what. You have your next gen console, sorry it didn't live up to what the super hype machine said it would, (remember when sony said that the ps2 would be able to make games look like Toy Story) but it's still an amazing console, and when God of War 3 comes out on it, i will be sure to pick it up, plus devil may cry also, never played it but i want to try it out, it looks amazing.

ABOVE: whoah whoah, calm down, if you read my comment it was actually meant for 15 not you, clicked the wrong replay button. My sincere appologies. but we can do without the name callin. I mean i'm from jamaica, but i recently became a U.S. citizen, so i half to defend my country. And i do also get tired of all the fanboyism....

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Shadow - 1005 days 4 hours ago

The Xenos, while related to the R600 series of ATI GPU's, uses the R500 series's shaders (which are really just the R400's with a 20-pack of redbull).

The RSX uses the Nvidia equivelant of the same shaders, and Nvidia's shaders actually do a better job of pulling off dynamic HDR lighting.

So in most cases, the same game with the same effects, the PS3 version will have functional lighting, but the 360 version will have very very strong bleed-through and an almost overpowering lighting contrast when the Bloom shader is applied. It tends to get passed-off as "better lighting" by the pro-360 camp when its really a limitation of the hardware.

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Dareaver1 - 1005 days 4 hours ago

Now shadow, i would like to see you substantiate your claim. Every site i have ever been two has said that the 360 has a far superior graphics card, and has more shaders. So please share where you have gotten your facts from. I don't want to give any information that can be perceived as fanboy talk. But there are several sites that i can post to let you know where i get my information from.

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Shadow - 1005 days 3 hours ago

Far superior how? Most of the informed sites I've been to have remarked that the two are about the same, only varying in featuresets, beyond3d for example (a site where many game devs post and exchange info). Even more of a problem is that many of the workings of the RSX are still not fully understood, and the majority of comparison articles between the RSX and Xenos were made before we even fully understood the big picture.

Heck, don't believe me? Look up FP10 blending vs FP16 blending. 360 uses mostly FP10 blending but PS3 by definition doesn't support it. FP10 helps as a way to get HDR running, although, the range isn't as high so it tends to show artifacting and banding. FP16, by comparison, has a larger range, so things don't tend to look as "blown out". Its also more work intensive. Its also part of the reason some of the tweaks in PS3 Oblivion can't be transferred to 360. FP10 vs FP16.

Then you have even more exotic stuff, like NA032, which Heavenly Sword uses.

Its not cut and dry which GPU is better overall, since they're both widely divergent technologies and both excel in different ways, not to mention, the RSX has the CELL to help it with its sore-spot, namely vertex work.

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OldSchoolGamer - 1004 days 20 hours ago

These are parts of greatly informative articles where I draw information from in comparing the two GPU's for the systems, do the reading and you may learn something, if not may explain potentials minus the CPU's of course.

As for Xenos:
"... ATI's Xbox 360 GPU (codenamed Xenos) is quite interesting. The part itself is made up of two physically distinct silicon ICs. One IC is the GPU itself, which houses all the shader hardware and most of the processing power. The second IC (which ATI refers to as the "daughter die") is a 10MB block of embedded DRAM (eDRAM) combined with the hardware necessary for z and stencil operations, color and alpha processing, and anti aliasing. This daughter die is connected to the GPU proper via a 32GB/sec interconnect. Data sent over this bus will be compressed, so usable bandwidth will be higher than 32GB/sec. In side the daughter die, between the processing hardware and the eDRAM itself, bandwidth is 256GB/sec.

At this point in time, much of the bandwidth generated by graphics hardware is required to handle color and z data moving to the framebuffer. ATI hopes to eliminate this as a bottleneck by moving this processing and the back framebuffer off the main memory bus. The bus to main memory is 512MB of 128-bit 700MHz GDDR3 (which results in just over 22GB/sec of bandwidth). This is less bandwidth than current desktop graphics cards have available, but by offloading work and bandwidth for color and z to the daughter die, ATI saves themselves a good deal of bandwidth. The 22GB/sec is left for textures and the rest of the system (the Xbox implements a single pool of unified memory).

The GPU essentially acts as the Northbridge for the system, and sits in the middle of everything. From the graphics hardware, there is 10.8GB/sec of bandwidth up and down to the CPU itself. The rest of the system is hooked in with 500MB/sec of bandwidth up and down. The high bandwidth to the CPU is quite useful as the GPU is able to directly read from the L2 cache. In the console world, the CPU and GPU are quite tightly linked and the Xbox 360 stands to continue that tradition.

Weighing in at 332M transistors, the Xbox 360 GPU is quite a powerful part, but its architecture differs from that of current desktop graphics hardware. For years, vertex and pixel shader hardware have been implemented separately, but ATI has sought to combine their functionality in a unified shader architecture."

"Vertex and pixel processing differ in purpose, but there is quite a bit of overlap in the type of hardware needed to do both. The unified shader architecture that ATI chose to use in their Xbox 360 GPU allows them to pack more functionality onto fewer transistors as less hardware needs to be duplicated for use in different parts of the chip and will run both vertex and shader programs on the same hardware."

"ATI is predicting that developers will use lots of very small triangles in Xbox 360 games. As engines like Epic's Unreal Engine 3 have shown incredible results using pixel shaders and normal maps to augment low geometric detail, we can't tell if ATI is trying to provide the chicken or the egg. In other words, will we see many small triangles on Xbox 360 because console developers are moving in that direction or because that is what will run well on ATI's hardware?

Regardless of the paths that lead to this road, it is obvious that the Xbox 360 will be a geometry power house. Not only are all 3 blocks of 16 shaders able to become vertex shaders, but ATI's GPU will be able to handle twice as many z operations if a z only pass is performed. The same is true of current ATI and NVIDIA hardware, but the fact that a geometry only pass can now make use of shader hardware to perform 48 vector and 48 scalar operations in any given clock cycle while doing twice the z operations is quite intriguing. This could allow some very geometrically complicated scenes."

"There are 3 parallel groups of 16 shader units each. Each of the three groups can either operate on vertex or pixel data. Each shader unit is able to perform one 4 wide vector operation and 1 scalar operation per clock cycle. Current ATI hardware is able to perform two 3 wide vector and two scalar operations per cycle in the pixel pipe alone. The vertex pipeline of R420 is 6 wide and can do one vector 4 and one scalar op per cycle. If we look at straight up processing power, this gives R420 the ability to crunch 158 components (30 of which are 32bit and 128 are limited to 24bit precision). The Xbox GPU is able to crunch 240 32bit components in its shader units per clock cycle."

"Those who paid close attention to the amount of eDRAM (10MB) will note that this is not enough memory to store the entire framebuffer for displays larger than standard television with 4xAA enabled. Apparently, ATI will store the front buffer in the UMA area, while the back buffer resides on the eDRAM. In order to manage large displays, the hardware will need to render the back buffer in parts. This indicates that they have implemented some sort of very large grained tiling system (with 2 to 4 tiles). Usually tile based renderes have many more tiles than this, but this is a special case.

As for the PS3 RSX:

"The PlayStation 3’s RSX GPU shares the same “parent architecture” as the G70 (GeForce 7800 GTX), much in the same way that the GeForce 6600GT shares the same parent architecture as the GeForce 6800 Ultra. Sony isn’t ready to unveil exactly what is different between the RSX and the G70, but based on what’s been introduced already, as well as our conversations with NVIDIA, we can gather a few items.

Despite the fact that the RSX comes from the same lineage as the G70, there are a number of changes to the core. The biggest change is that RSX supports rendering to both local and system memory, similar to NVIDIA’s Turbo Cache enabled GPUs. Obviously rendering to/from local memory is going to be a lot lower latency than sending a request to the Cell’s memory controller, so much of the architecture of the GPU has to be changed in order to accommodate this higher latency access to memory. Buffers and caches have to be made larger to keep the rendering pipelines full despite the higher latency memory access.

The RSX only has 60% of the local memory bandwidth of the G70, so in many cases it will most definitely have to share bandwidth with the CPU’s memory bus in order to achieve performance targets.

There is one peculiarity that hasn’t exactly been resolved, and that is about transistor counts. Both the G70 and the RSX share the same estimated transistor count, of approximately 300.4 million transistors. The RSX is built on a 90nm process, so in theory NVIDIA would be able to pack more onto the die without increasing chip size at all - but if the transistor counts are identical, that points to more similarity between the two cores than NVIDIA has led us to believe. So is the RSX nothing more than the G70? It’s highly unlikely that the GPUs are identical, especially considering that the sheer addition of Turbo Cache to the part would drive up transistor counts quite a bit. So how do we explain that the two GPUs are different, yet have the same transistor count and one is supposed to be more powerful than the other? There are a few possible options.

So it is possible that NVIDIA’s estimates are slightly off for the two GPUs, but at approximately 10 million transistors per pixel pipe, the RSX will feature more than the 24 pixel rendering pipelines of the GeForce 7800 GTX, yet NVIDIA claims it is more powerful than the GeForce 7800 GTX. But how can that be?"

"The most likely explanation is attributed to nothing more than clock speed. Remember that the RSX, being built on a 90nm process, is supposed to be running at 550MHz - a 28% increase in core clock speed from the 110nm GeForce 7800 GTX. The clock speed increase alone will account for a good boost in GPU performance which would make the RSX “more powerful” than the G70.

Remember that the Cell host processor has an array of 7 SPEs that are very well suited for a number of non-branching tasks, including geometry processing. Also keep in mind that current games favor creating realism through more pixel operations rather than creating more geometry, so GPUs aren’t very vertex shader bound these days. Then, note that the RSX has a high bandwidth 35GB/s interface between the Cell processor and the GPU itself - definitely enough to place all vertex processing on the Cell processor itself, freeing up the RSX to exclusively handle pixel shader and ROP tasks. If this is indeed the case, then the RSX could very well have more than 24 pipelines and still have a similar transistor count to the G70, but if it isn’t, then it is highly unlikely that we’d see a GPU that looked much different than the G70.

The downside to the RSX using the Cell for all vertex processing is pretty significant. Remember that the RSX only has a 22.4GB/s link to its local memory bandwidth, which is less than 60% of the memory bandwidth of the GeForce 7800 GTX. In other words, it needs that additional memory bandwidth from the Cell’s memory controller to be able to handle more texture-bound games. If a good portion of the 15GB/s downstream link from the Cell processor is used for bandwidth between the Cell’s SPEs and the RSX, the GPU will be texture bandwidth limited in some situations, especially at resolutions as high as 1080p."

In summary:
The Xenox, built ground up by ATI, is capable of using today's graphic's engines to make some amazing looking screens with 10 mb of memory dedicated to 4x Anit-Aliasing (smoothing of jagged lines) at no cost to graphics horsepower. 332 Million transistors and 48 pipelines allow for lots of texturing, able to be flexible enough to do geometries (not currently the case) or pixels (much more used currently, especially by the Unreal engine, which is licensed for use the the vast majority of game developers) as needed. The GPU is linked very closely to the CPU, and is able to shift 512 mb of RAM towards either as needed.

The RSX is based on the G70 and is a card that was implimented late in the game when the cell could not handle graphics processing as was assumed it could (whether due to programming difficulty or simply too much drain on resources). The differences as noted above amount to a lessened memory bandwidth versus the 7800GTX PC cards. This will cause more reliance on the Cells Memory controller and memory banks (which causes a major problem in high detail at 1080p, which is why you are seeing the majority of PS3 games running 720 best frame rates).
300.4 million transistors and 36 piplines, 24 and 12 dedicated, versus 332 million (that is with the skimping due to unified pipelines, normally 48 pipelines would use a heck of alot more) and 48 pipelines, combined with 512 system memory and 10 mb dedicated 4x AA = roughly 522mb that could be used for graphics (more realistically about 386-412mb for pure graphics due to other needs), versus the 256 mb dedicated in the PS3 just allows for a more powerful GPU on the 360.

But these are facts, you read and you decide. May explain something though.

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Dareaver1 - 1004 days 4 hours ago

Thanx Oldschoolgamer, i know you have had to make similar posts, and i didn't feel like cut and pasting links, so thanx for the info drop. I'm not trying to be biased shadow, but those are the facts that i know of. Now can you please substantiate what you are saying. I have a couple of sites that say the same thing Oldschoolgamer just placed down, if you don't believe me here they are.

http://xbox360.ign.com/arti...
http://dpad.gotfrag.com/por...

P.S. Let's not forget the whole apollo tragedy, they had a whole theater choose which fightnight looked better Xbox360 vs. Ps3 and it was unanimous that the 360's looked better. Now that is saying something. Because they said that the ps3 version received more polish. Oh they also said that the 360 version played better. Now this was a unanimous decision, sorry to break it to you, but if you want that link too, here you go:

http://www.n4g.com/gaming/N...

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Violater - 1005 days 4 hours ago

I was sooo going to say the same thing, I see no reason to compare crap.

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TheFamilyGuy - 1005 days 2 hours ago

i think GTAIV is going to be a multiplatform game that will be heavily compared with the PS3 version's graphics vs. 360's

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