Updated Info on the PS3 SDK Hardware

PC Watch, a Japanese PC news site, posted some interesting news today regarding the technical specifications of the PLAYSTATION 3 SDK units. Not only that, but they gave the public insight into some issues developers are having while programming for the PS3.

Sony had announced a while back that the SDK unit to be shown at TGS would be the final version. However, instead of SDK v1.0, the model shown at TGS was v0.93. This is also the model that most developers are using to program their games on. While some may be concerned about Sony's delaying of the final SDK unit, some may also be pleased that Sony still has a chance to add to the final PS3 specifications. Either way, the PS3 is so close to its launch date that if Sony does change the PS3 specifications, it will not be anything drastic.

[OC_MurphysLaw]

It was refreshing to see them address the "issues" that have been circulating around development for the PS3. Certainly I think the higher end studios will find/use the work arounds with regards to the "bottle-neck". It will be interesting to see how well the smaller studios do with it.

I truly hope the cell and PS3 are able to perform on the level all expect. I won't be an early adopter but I do expect to get one down the road assuming all is as stated from Sony.

[Silverwolf]

I think the real problem will be with smaller studios not having or wanting to invest the resources or money to find better ways to exploit the hardware on the PS3. Time is money and game programmers don't come cheap.

[TheMART]

"Developers are also dealing with certain restrictions revolving around the Cell processor. For instance, out of the 256kbs of memory allocated to each SPE on the Cell, only 128kbs can be used due to buffering.

The downside to the current RSX specifications is that it has a 128-bit memory interface and 8 ROP (Rasterizing Operation). So there within lies a current hurdle for developers. How can they get the most out of the RSX's shading abilities without dealing with the bottleneck to the ROP memory? While that's a minor hurdle needing to be jumped, the biggest issue facing PS3 developers is HDR and FSAA. With the memory bottleneck, it becomes hard for developers to achieve PC level HDR and FSAA."

I don't know how you Sony fans feel, but this is just all not sounding right. The bottleneck, have to use 'workarounds???' and a problem to achieve PC level HDR and FSAA? 360 is already doing those on the fly

[specialguest]

"Yet thanks to the flexibility of the Cell processor, developers are using Cell memory for textures and FlexIO for a texture lead. This greatly frees up GPU bandwidth."

you remind me of a dirty politician, campaigning against the rival. Lol.

[Marty8370]

The X360 has loads of bottlenecks also.like Edram too small for Hi Def images.Bandwidth problems.These all have to be worked round also.

[shotty]

Who said it too small. The last thing I remember is my xbox 360 showing high definition "images" on my TV.

[TheMART]

Explain that. The 512 MB ram is flexible. The 10 MB embedded extra fast ram is only for doing FSAA on the fly, let's say for free. That's a buffer. What you are telling, hi def images are totally nonsense in this context. Bandwidth problems? Do you even know the numbers?

"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."

That's the RSX you're talking about not the 360 GPU.

"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."

http://xbox360.ign.com/arti...

"Frame Buffer Bandwidth
Xbox 360 - 256.0 GB/sec (dedicated for frame buffer rendering)
PS3 - 20.8 GB/sec (shared with other graphics data: textures and vertices)
PS3 - 10.8 GB/sec (with 10.0 GB/sec subtracted for textures and vertices)
PS3 - 8.4 GB/sec (with 12.4 GB/sec subtracted for textures and vertices)

Texture/Vertex Memory Bandwidth
Xbox 360 - 22.4 GB/sec (shared with CPU)
Xbox 360 - 14.4 GB/sec (with 8.0 GB/sec subtracted for CPU)
Xbox 360 - 12.4 GB/sec (with 10.0 GB/sec subtracted for CPU)
PS3 - 20.8 GB/sec (shared with frame buffer)
PS3 - 10.8 GB/sec (with 10.0 GB/sec subtracted for frame buffer)
PS3 - 8.4 GB/sec (with 12.4 GB/sec subtracted for frame buffer)"

http://forum.pcvsconsole.co...

The 360 is the stronger GPU, that's why Sony didn't release the spec's 'offically'. But we all know it's just not that good. Otherwise they would have got the spec's on paper sh!t they always do.

Just face it. The PS3 GPU was bought in a hurry, Sony thought Cell could do the job of CPU & GPU. Then they found out it couldn't, and knocked on Nvidia's door to buy something that was laying on the shelfs. There you are. 360 has a special designed GPU. It's the strongest thing out there. There isn't even a PC card with 10 MB extra fast ram embedded with 48 unified pipelines

[kmis87]

I found this on the internet:
"So when Microsoft sent out a "detailed analysis" of how the two consoles will perform (probably in response to Sony’s ridiculous 2 Teraflop claim), we knew the PR war had begun for good. According to Microsoft, “XBOX 360 has provably [sic] more performance than PS3”. Their longwinded analysis has been posted in its entirety by many "reputable" websites. The contents can be more or less summarised in one word: hogwash.

Among its many outlandish claims is that the XBOX 360 has five times the memory bandwidth of the PS3. The XBOX 360 has one pool of 700MHz GDDR3 memory providing 22.4GB/s of bandwidth. Both the CPU and GPU share this memory. The PS3 on the other hand has two pools of memory; 256MB of XDR memory providing 25.6GB/s of bandwidth and 256MB of GDDR3 providing 22.4GB/s of bandwidth. Both pools can be accessed transparently by the CPU and GPU. The total available bandwidth is 48GB/s. How did Microsoft manage to change their half-as-fast bus to something five times faster?"

It was written as a direct response to one of the claims in the link you posted (Which claimed that the 360 had 5 times the bandwidth of the ps3).

Since you're such an expert about all of this, and you wouldn't post something that you didn't understand (how would you tell if it's biased or not towards either side?), maybe you can enlighten us all as to how the analysis I just provided is wrong since you'd obviously disagree with it.

[TheMART]

Well you should just read the txt.

"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."

I am not making up any facts. These are hardware restricted numbers. If you give quotes from the internet, share the links with us. So we can verify and read if you are not taking parts out of a bigger part. You just got the links I gave. And yeah, both sides will probably try to make the story as good as it sounds. But some things are just hardware restricted and visible for us all.

[kmis87]

That 256 Gigs/sec eDRAM can't be included as general purpose memory!

"The XBOX GPU has 10MB of embedded DRAM (eDRAM) which the GPU can access for accelerated blending and anti-aliasing. Because the module is on the same package as the GPU (but not ‘on’ the GPU), it can be clocked very high -- at around 2GHz. On a 128-bit bus, this provides 32GB/s of bandwidth between the GPU and the eDRAM. Adding this figure to the "system memory bandwidth" would be ridiculous since this memory is not what programmers would consider general-purpose memory; it would be akin to Intel claiming that the L2 cache can be included in system memory bandwidth. But this wasn’t enough. Microsoft claims the eDRAM provides not just 32GB/s of bandwidth, but 256GB/s. How they arrived at this figure they do not explain.

The 256GB/s figure comes from the internal bandwidth of the eDRAM module. That’s to say, in the eDRAM chip itself, it can move data at 256GB/s. But where it counts, the wires between the GPU and the eDRAM, it has 32GB/s of bandwidth. By Microsoft’s convention, Sony can claim that the PS3 has 358.4GB/s of memory bandwidth on the CPU alone!"

That still means that the GPU and CPU on the 360 need to share the 22.4 Gigs/sec of bandwidth while the ps3 has 48 Gigs/sec to share between the CPU and GPU. Here is my link:
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au...
HMMMM It seems like plain hardware specs CAN be distorted to make outrageous claims (360 has 5 times the general purpose bandwidth of ps3). Maybe we should stop using the 18 month old spec comparison that MICROSOFT (I can't emphasize this enough) gave IGN as the basis for our comparisons.

[Marty8370]

U hav'nt got a clue.

[Aflac]

...about how to lie like u do, hypocrite

[PS3OWNESXBOX360]

His opinions are worthless!

[Deceased]

PS3 fanboys don't know jack. He posted facts, I for one believe them, I know for a fact the PS3 has a large bottleneck and an unorthadox cpu which is not for GAMING. Good luck down the road when the 360 smokes the PS3's GPU. The PS3 is nascar and the 360 is an F1. Get used to it, me and the mart both know the TRUTH.

[THE TRUTH]

Mart you should lose bubbles for trying to be knowlegdable on a subject YOU HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE IN! Do you even know WHAT your talking about? Explain to us exactly what those numbers mean........

The BIGGEST news from the article is that RSX= G70!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you don't know what your talking about please refrain from posting mindless babble!! Bottlenecks happen in ALL NEW TECHNOLOGY and the PS3 can definetly be determined as NEW TECH. so calm your hormones Mart because your ignorance in this subject is very VERY visible

[Deceased]

Good excuse!!! LOL

[TheMART]

I just gave you the numbers, I just gave you the links.

The numbers are clear, as also visible in the graphical schedules on the links. So Truth anyone can have an idea where the power is.

RSX=G70? I thought Sony hasn't brought any official spec's out yet and now suddenly you know?

Strange, very strange.

[THE TRUTH]

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.

show me a game ANY game that PROVES the 360 HAS THIS MUCH POWER!!!! Prove that these numbers are correct through unbiased developer analyst! Surely there's a developer out there that has SOMETHING to say about such numbers............ Explain what this statement means about games and exactly what we "should" excpect to see from them as drawn from these numbers!! No more BS just prove it STFU

Here's how I KNOW RSX is = to G70!!!

RSX Memory Bottleneck

Developers were using 7800GTX for development, The RSX uses Nvidia’s G70 and performance programmable shader performance is very high

here's somemore nice statements!!
----------------------------- -----------

But the memory interface is 128-bit, in addition 8 ROP (Rasterizing Operation). It can be said that the RSX has a shader equivalent of a high-end PC with mid-range memory bandwidth. For that reason, due to the GPU high shader performance there is a bottleneck to the ROP memory and is causing a bottleneck. “For lower resolutions it is a fantastic GPU, but it gets difficult for high end HDTV resolutions”, says a developer.

The biggest impact is the HDR and FSAA, the memory bottleneck becomes hard for PC levels of HDR and FSAA, to overcome this hurdle developers are using memory from the Cell for textures, and using FlexIO as a texture lead to reduce GPU bandwidth issues.

----------------------------- ---------

Developers are having exactly opposite problems then that of the PS3 and 360 as far as GPU performance is concerned. While there memory bandwidth issues with the PS3, they have great shader performance. For the 360, they have little memory bandwidth issues with the 10MB eDRAM, and less FSAA issues. But some developers are having issues with a lack of shader ALU performance and threading resources, however performance will increase as developers get more familiar with unified shader architecture.

However, all hardware has its limitations, and the real difference should be felt as the two systems get mature

----------------------------- -----------------

TGS: Progress in game development

Many of the concerns and criticisms for the PS3 including price, technical difficulties are similar to the PS2 when it was first released. Many in the industry had expected the PS2 to fail before its release, but the contrary became true. A lot of the concerns have been reduced due to the change in spec and reduction in price of the PS3. It is unclear if price reduction and its impact on long term success.

After PS3, developers are more aware how other PS3 games are shaping up. Before TGS developers were largely unaware of how other PS3 software was in terms of development and quality. One developers says “we were surprised that the hurdles we had in development were also overcome by other developers”, others had praises and complaints on where their rivals were along on PS3 titles. At this pre-launch stage there were high and low points especially with the new hardware.

The PS3 technical issues are growing pains that all hardware goes through. The complexity of next-gen hardware means that time for developers to get used to the hardware would be much longer then previous generation. Even looking at the Xbox 360, one is able to see improvements in development in first-gen and upcoming second-gen games after a year since its release. In other words, for this generation, it will be more evident the difference in games with more work put into them due to the complexity of the architecture. It has become harder to judge a system by its launch titles.

----------------------------- ------------

Hurdles involving the Performance of the Cell:

There are some challenges involving the architecture of the Cell, the cell consists of PPE and SPE cores. A developer states, "It is impossible to extract the full performance of the Cell on launch titles, it will take time get familiar with it". Another developer states that they are having difficulties with the 256KB memory of each SPE core. The actual useable area of the 256KB is closer to 128KB when buffering is considered with accessing external DRAM. "It would have been much different situation if there was 1MB of local memory”. There is however a benefit for these restrictions on local memory, since latency can be reduced, and latency cycles are more easily read. This is an advantage for real-time gaming applications.

Till now, developers were stingy with programming and memory usage, and this will not change with the PS3, in fact, the Cell will reward developers that put more effort into programming. While that may not be a negative, it is a hurdle that will take larger developer resources and time. For the Cell it has changed from extracting performance from the hardware, but more towards multi-threaded performance and takes a different skill set then the previously.

----------------------------- ----------------

Another good place to get an even better idea of the Cell/RSX is reading the Lair interview on IGN: http://uk.ps3.ign.com/artic...
Quote:
he PS3 challenges the developer on all levels -- and I mean that in a positive sense: There is this massively new CPU that seems to have almost unlimited power -- the more programming time you throw at it the more power you get. There is the GPU, which is so flexible due to the parallel Vertex and Shader units that you can implement any effect ever dreamt of in several ways. The hard drive and Blu-ray can be used to stream enormous amounts of data. All of these things add up to a completely new paradigm already, even before you start exploring the endless possibilities of motion control, be it simple tilt, yaw, and roll, or much more advanced gesture recognition and position in space computations.

----------------------------- -----------------

Another recent point of view from 1UP site following TGS:

It was kind of like the difference between, dare I say it, the PS2 and the Dreamcast. Which, as you know, wasn't that big a deal at first -- the Dreamcast had some fantastic looking second gen games -- but you could still tell the PS2 was a more powerful system (and to reiterate, I'm only talking hardware here -- I know the 360 is in a much different place software-wise). I think that's a rather fair comparison, to be honest -- similarly, as with the PS2, the PS3 is a platform that will distance itself even further once developers get more familiar with the hardware. Julian Eggebrecht of Factor 5 told me that they've only just scratched the surface of what they can do on PS3, and he fully expects all second gen PS3 games -- or certainly all third gen PS3 games -- to run in 1080p.

links:
http://pc.watch.impress.co.... http://pc.watch.impress.co....
you are going to have to translate it yourself or go to this very informative link about "The RSX Conspiracy - RSX <-> G80 Connection ?"

link: http://ps3forums.com/showth...

link to other sources

http://www.1up.com/do/my1Up...

http://uk.ps3.ign.com/artic...

now Come Back with info that PROVES what YOU SAY MART I have proved my words are TRUTH YET AGAIN NOW IT"S UP TO YOU! That goes for you too C4 since you openned your big mouth

[Aflac]

show me a game ANY game that PROVES the 360 HAS THIS MUCH POWER!!!! Prove that these numbers are correct through unbiased developer analyst! "Surely there's a developer out there that has SOMETHING to say about such numbers............ Explain what this statement means about games and exactly what we "should" excpect to see from them as drawn from these numbers!! No more BS just prove it STFU"

u really believe that a developer can master all that power overnight?! gimme a break. If those specs were lies, M$ would be ina lot of trouble, they would b publicly exposed for lying, n possibly worse. those specs and calculations are proven fact, ur just a pathetic, jealous little pinhead.

I dont get how u have the nerve to call urself "THE TRUTH", u lying hypocrite. o ya, i fergot, if u dont continue spreading lies, ken kutaragi will come to u in spirit form and torture u in ur sleep-ok, i understand.

[Watapata]

I will tell you this, if those spec WEREN'T lies than the 360 would be producing graphics many times better than what is available on ANY consumer PC today, and obviously that is not the case...

[kewlkat007]

That was a weak attemp..Too much copy and Pasting bro. I doubt you understand what you copy and paste.

[THE TRUTH]

this link: http://techreport.com/revie...

"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"

Those numbers you are so proud of just aren't possible!!

COME ON Mart and C4 PROVE IT!

[Aflac]

...u? ha! The 360 gpu is CUSTOM MADE, it isnt an exact copy of any of those on that site, einstein. just take the numbers for wat they are, specs are specs, calculations based on thos specs r wat they r, so STFU, n quit b!tching over ur denial.

[drewdrakes]

First of all, i hope the get a final version soon. Im happy that they werent lying in the end, they are actually supplying what they said about HDMI ports. And how about you _all_ stop talking like youre developers. These are just numbers, without the games to back them up, they mean nothing, absolutely nothing. I could make the fastest computer in the world, if someone doesnt make a good game to take advantage of it, it is totally worthless. And who says we need all of that power to get good games? Sure, it helps with graphics and physics, but that really helps only if your going for a realistic game. Lego Star Wars? Come on, that is a fun game and guess what, im sure that both of these machines could run like 3 instances of the game simultaneously (exxageration). Not to mention games like Doom and Monkey Island, both absolutely fantastic games, and could be done easily by both machines. One example of a solid game that actually uses a tonne of mathematic calculations? Can you guess it? Geometry Wars. Look at all of the calculations going on in the background of that game, honestly.

[THE TRUTH]

I give you facts SUPPORTED by links and your reply with STFU?

I did the work to PROVE what I said was true and I called out your favorite consoles #1 fanboy and but him to bed!

"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"

Show me any GPU made before the launch of 360 that has 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth!!! Not to mention an affordable on that could be mass produced and put inside the 360!

Based on this chart do you really think that that type of total system bandwidth is even possible?

http://techreport.com/revie...

Come on and PROVE those numbers are real or JUST SAY THAT MS LIED TO YOU!! Either way I don't like the way you respond with NO FACTS OR LINKS anyone can "Say STFU"

"The 360 gpu is CUSTOM MADE, it isnt an exact copy of any of those on that site, einstein."

And THAT WAS/IS THE BEST THE INDUSTRY HAD TO OFFER AROUND THE TIME OF 360 So how is it that the 360's cutsom made GPU is 6X's better than THE BEST THE INDUSTRY HAS TO OFFER? And explain to me why 360 has so many PC ports? These numbers just don't add up and if you can prove anything I'd love to see it! With links and facts only!

[BenzMoney]

On a purely hardware level, 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.

http://www.anandtech.com/sh...

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.

Pwnd.

[PS3 Ultimate]

TheMART got pwned because he's not answering back. Welp, one thing's for sure. The PLAYSTATION 3 is the best!

[xrobbanx]

Not having the nicest online service not having most games thats for sure

[EnforcerOfTheTruth]

Well, more powerful and better looking games ;-)
I don't know about you, but a free online service is better. I already pay for the games so just like on the PC I wanna play multiplayer for free ;-)
Tell me please how can the PS3 have more games than 360, when it's even not released yet? Fact is PS3 has much more launch games than 360 and most of your 360 games people can get on PC. Nevertheless I wish you fun with this ripp off aka 360 :-D

[Silver360]

That is the reason he stopped replying. Come on people use some common sense here. I guess though it is more important to dis someone than talk about the issue.

[EnforcerOfTheTruth]

...this picture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
Any with sense notices that when it comes to tasks between CPU/GPU/RAM/EDARM the bandwidth ain't high. The EDRAM has 256GB/s only INTERNALLY and when it comes to tasks between EDRAM and GPU, the bandwidth is only 32GB/s. It's same like with the GDDR3 bandwidth, the only bandwidth that counts is the 22.4GB between GDDR3 and GPU. God is it so hard to understand? MS fanboys, where is your common sense? MS just sold you one of the biggest lies of the century and you can't even notice it. Funny how you state that what MS says is the truth, but every developer that says PS3 is more powerful or any site that states PS3 games look better are biased. Is there any sense in such thinking? Nope

[Deceased]

Mr. Carmack a gaming legend, the creator of the first FPS, Wolfenstein, and Doom, said the 360 GPU is stronger and that the Cell was stronger than the 360 CPU. So, in other words the 360 has a stronger GPU, which will show in the next few years. I will believe a programming legend before any fanboy on this site. If you want a link to the video ask the mart for it, and Mr. Carmack is not biased he plans on making Quake Wars for both the 360 and PS3.

[D3acon]

I use to think that about Carmack, until I read an interview and saw the video interview at E3'06. Carmack is a pc programmer set in his ways. He doesn't welcome new technology and programming for the PS3 makes him squirm because it will take extra time and work. That was the general feel of the interview, I don't recall him saying that the 360 was more powerful only that it was easier to program for.

And in my opinion his stuff is becoming a bit dated. Developers like Epic and Cliffy B are the future.

I don't have a link to the interview but I'm sure you can find it easily.

[nambo]

You all sound like a bunch of tech geek momma’s boys. Who cares about the actual specs of game systems: it comes down to games and service. And from what I see, the PS3 is lagging behind the 360. Sony doesn’t even have a coherent online strategy (except the smoke they’re blowing up peoples a$$e$). Both systems have the ability to produce great graphics, but where Microsoft excels ahead of Sony is in their online strategy and support for developers. And all you Sony Fanboys should pull Sony’s dik out of your mouths, and wait till you play a PS3 game before saying how great it is.

[DJ]

'Cause from what we saw at TGS, the PS3 is blowing away 2nd-gen 360 titles, so it obviously has a better CPU and GPU. We already saw the final RSX specs, and it has some crazy custom architecture to fight memory bottlenecks and give it easy access to the XDR memory pool.

Total Texture Cache Per Quad of Pixel Pipes (L1 & L2) - 96KB [double that of Xenos]
Post Transform & Lighting Cache - 63 Max Vertices (a 7800GTX does 45 Max, which was already more powerful than the Xenos GPU. This, coupled with Cell's GPU capabilities, explains the very high polygon counts seen in many PS3 titles.)
*Extra shader instructions - Extra Texture Lookup Logic & Fast Vector Normalize
*FLEX IO interface to CPU (35 GB/s)
Texture Lookup Logic to help RSX transport data from XDR

"The increased texture cache and post-transform vertex cache are much larger than on Xenos and can directly lead to performance gains."

The 360 architecture is heavily flawed, and very slow compared to the PS3's. Only 10GB/s connections from the CPU and GPU to the system ram, and high-latency ram at that since they're using GPU ram for the CPU. The PS3 on the other hand has a total of 48GB/s of bandwidth dedicated strictly to RAM. Explains a lot. While the Xenos as ED-RAM with extremely high internal bandwidth, it can only do framebuffers and that's it. The RSX has custom architecture anyway, so it's obviously not just something that nVidia threw together.

[THELANDSOFSAND]

are you kidding? PS3 games at TGS were a joke!

[Balance]

responding to this comment only you obviously aren't objective. look at what sony put up at TGS and compare that to the actual game play shown at X06. I am sick of pre-rendered trailers and showing the actual game with someone actually playing it and it looks like the pre-rendered stuff. granted not all games but at x06 there were alot more playable games and they were alot better than anything i saw from tgs. And yes i watched as much from both as i could.

[Watapata]

Many of the games shown for PS3 at TGS were playable, that means gameplay and many of them looked noticably better than most of what the 360 has offerreed to date. This is backed up on numerous sites with links strewn across this very website...

[THELANDSOFSAND]

"Developers are also dealing with certain restrictions revolving around the Cell processor. For instance, out of the 256kbs of memory allocated to each SPE on the Cell, only 128kbs can be used due to buffering."

uh-oh.

back to the drawing board sony!

[NextGen24Gamer]

The embedded ram for the 360's gpu free's up the bandwidth for the 360...it does the most memory intensive HDR And AA internally...Thats the problem the ps3 is having now. Not enough memory bandwidth to do the HDR and AA. This article doesn't tell the whole story...its from ps3land and they are trying to do damage control. Its much worse than they let on. All those games shown and TGS weren't even running on the actual PS3's. I haven't been wrong yet. Using common sense helps with this. Sony fans rely on HOPE and I use common sense. There is no nvidia card on the PC market that can do HDR and AA while running high resolutions. NONE. Nvidia as of now doesn't have the tech to do it. That is something ATI specializes in. And it makes a huge difference in how a game looks in the end. Thats what the embedded ram on the 360 is for with NO hit to system performance. Ps3 games will struggle with frame rates and jaggies when its running on final ps3 hardware. Watch and see. Also the unified shaders that the 360 has is far superior tech than the standard PC architecture Nvidia gave sony. In 2007 all pc video cards will copy what the 360 does now. Unified shades and direct x 10 capabilities. No, not actually direct x 10, but the 360 does many of the same things Direct x 10 is suppose to do and then some. The ps3 isn't a bad system...it was just made all wrong and developers are the ones who suffer...Its expensive and difficult to get the most out of it. And once the games are running on the final hardware they will have to work out the problems that they will face with bottle necking...

See, you have to understand how the embedded ram and the unified shaders benefit with memory bandwidth. It free's it up for other things. Who can't understand that? Those two features revolutionize gaming. Those two features free's up the system for complicated tasks that usually take up A WHOLE bunch of bandwidth. But not with the 360. Its all done internally and effeciantly. Sony fans for some reason can't see that.

Just like MS said a while back...The Cell is not optimized for game code. Sure you can struggle with the hardware and make it work. But you have to deal with a lot of un needed head aches and problems. That will in the end effect the final games. Watch and see folks. So yes, the ps3 games looked good at this point at TGS. But watch when they actually get them going on ps3 hardware. Surprised you will be. And not a good surprised either.

[Watapata]

Simply put Top Gamer, you've been wrong, and you've been wrong numerous times. The sites that you have linked in the past are typically very old, very out of date, and in addition to that admittedly bias. You simply can't put up a response from Microsoft and expect people to take it seriously. To put it in perspective, how would you feel about a response presented by Sony. You'd say they were lying about everything and horribly bias. When it comes to hardware comparisons, you cannot take the manufacturer's word on it just because they made a product. You have to have some seperate, universal, way of testing things and unfortunately in the console gaming industry this does not exist. You can't just look at multiplatform games because the game code is not the same on each platform and never will be. Of course the C++ that is written might be identical for each platform, but the instruction sets for each architecture are not and so you can't adequately compare the two. I'm stating all this as my opinion, and though I profess to be well informed regarding computer hardware and architecture, its up to you whether or not to believe me. All I can say is that I work with hardware on a daily basis and have had to design my own processor to fit a particular instruction set, and so I'd like to think the training I've had for my major wasn't a complete waste. Simply put, no one has anything to back up what they are saying about performance right now, but I think when the PS3 is released and the games start flowing out for it just as they have for the 360, you are going to notice a difference between the two consoles maybe even on the same order of magnitude as the Xbox vs. PS2 and likely in the favor of the PS3, but only time will tell...

[lalaland]

Didn't Ridge Racer 7 run at 60fps in 1080p at TGS? Are there any games for X360 in 1080p resolution?

To say the Cell isn't well suited for gamecode is ridiculous and is taken directly from a MS PR-stunt. There are a lot of games to prove that, and quite a few which are supposed to be superior to their X360 cousins: Virtua Tennis 3, Blazing Angels, Full Auto 2 etc.

In the old days when physics and dynamic graphic effects didn't play a big role in games programming, and AI was one of the most tasking part of the gamecode, your statement was maybe correct (but most likely because of the limited amount of processor power available for anything but that generic mainloop and AI). Today the most processor intensive parts of code aren't the AI anymore. Now it is more likely the physics and other vector intesive tasks, and the Cell excels at those.

Think about it... For the X360 to make a random physics effect it has to use a lot processing time compared to what one of the Cell's SPEs would need to use. In that respect each of the PPU cores on the X360 quickly gets starved on power once they have to do modern gaming complex math effects.

[whateva]

When Carmack said that bullsh!t PS3 wasn't even finish so how can he say 360 GPU is stronger and that the Cell was stronger than the 360 CPU, He didn't know then and he might not know now! wow he created Wolfenstein, and Doom so now he Know everthing get real.I can mod xboxs do that mean I know how to make them No!

[THAMMER1]

Your 100% correct.

*Every one else*
It is imposable to tell which is better based on specs sheets. And Sony wants you to hang on as long as possible so they will keep your cash. And MS dose have the better services and game titles right now. What do you expect they have been out for a year, and they want your cash too?

I have been gaming for 21 years and the 360 is awesome in my opinion the 360 is perfect for gamers who are picky about graphics and online play. We do not have a re way to judge the PS3 yet. To be real I'm turned off by the price and the limited games that are exclusive and the almost absent online service.

[Watapata]

For the most part I agree with you, though online is not the biggest deal to me. I prefer to either play games on my own or with my friends in person, because its just that much mroe fun to have my friends right there with me.

[PS3alltheway]

http://www.techzonept.com/s...

read the interview heavenly swords
PS3 has to 2 buses not 1
in TGS they only use one bus imagine if they use 2 buses

[THELANDSOFSAND]

yes, imagine, a good game!

it could have next gen graphics, online play and rumble!

keep on imagining. or buy a 360 and quit dreaming.

[NextGen24Gamer]

ATI: So we have 48 shaders, each one of them does 4 floating-point ops per cycle, so 196 floating ops per clock.

On the embedded memory, I call it intelligent embedded memory or intelligent DRAM, because we actually have a lot of the [pauses] well the graphics pipeline continues into the memory. So we actually have a parent die and a daughter die on one substrate inside of the package. So if you look at the Xbox 360, and you open it up you’ll see that there’s one VPU package, but inside there are two different dies and the pipeline continues across those dies.

The part of the pipeline that’s in the daughter die, that lives with the memory is the z, the alpha, the stencil, the processors to do the resolve from multisample AA, the one that gives you AA for free, well 4x or 2x multisampling, and really what that does is it breaks one of the traditional bandwidth problems inside traditional graphics architectures. It keeps all that data so you don’t have to do a read or a write..Well you don’t have to read it into the general purpose, across the bus, process it and then write it back out to the memory. It all happens within the memory, and this just gives you phenomenally more bandwidth. And that’s how we get the anti-aliasing for free. The result for the anti-aliasing, you have 4 samples for every pixel, you ultimately end up with and the resolve is done right within that memory, so it doesn’t have to be read back into the parent die.

On the intelligent memory there’s something that we call internally the, well it’s a memory export path. So anywhere down the pipeline that you put data into the pipeline you can export that data out back to EDRAM or Level Two cache and then use that data again. So, and we really haven’t been able to do that before, so it allows you to do things like higher order surfaces for real this time, so it’s just another feature that gives us a lot of flexibility in the system.

FiringSquad: So the daughter die is where the embedded memory is?

ATI: Yes, the memory is there. There’s 10MB of embedded memory surrounded by “intelligence”. That’s the 192 component processors in there that do the work on the embedded memory data. There’s also a very high speed connection between the parent and daughter die, in case you do get have to get data back and forth, and that connection is, well there’s a 2GHz wide bus connection between them.

FiringSquad: Where does the 2-terabit number that’s been floating around come from?

ATI: The 2-terabit (256GB/sec) number comes from within the EDRAM, that’s the kind of bandwidth inside that RAM, inside the chip, the daughter die. But between the parent and daughter die there’s a 236Gbit connection on a bus that’s running in excess of 2GHz. It has more than one bit obviously between them.

Also we’re the memory controller for the system, so we have bandwidth between the CPU and the graphics engine, we have bandwidth between the memory, the DDR3 memory, which is also, well the DDR3 is the system memory so all these numbers are sometimes close to each other so things start to blur together

FiringSquad: And then 22.4GB/sec to the system memory?

ATI: 25GB/sec to the system memory, and 22GB/sec between the CPU and the GPU. Which, or in this case we’re more than the GPU, we’re the system memory controller too, so the bus between the CPU and GPU is 22GB. It’s really 11 in both directions, so 11 input and 11 output.

FiringSquad: And this is a 128-bit memory interface or 256-bit?

ATI: 128-bit, 700MHz interface.

FiringSquad: What types of operations do the EDRAMs 192 processors perform?

ATI: Well they do z-compares, they do alpha blends, they do blends of samples to make a pixel. That kind of thing. They do stencil operations also. And this is the first time memory has access to something like this, right in the memory, so it never leaves the memory die. The memory and the logic is all built into one die. And it’s also a power savings by the way.

One of the big uses of power is actually driving I/O pins. In this case, you never have to go off chip so everything is just internal there. So power is important you know, of course, it’s not quite like the handheld or mobile space but it’s still important and you want to reduce it as much as possible because we are going pretty fast. You know we have a lot of logic going pretty fast in memory, a lot of CPU logic going fast, so you want to reduce power wherever you can.

FiringSquad: With the unified memory architecture, do you feel the VPU and CPU will be fighting over the available bandwidth?

ATI: We’ve optimized everything enough where it’s not going to be a problem. You know, we’ve had silicon since November so I can tell you it’s not going to be a problem. We were worried, you know obviously when you integrate the unified shaders and the EDRAM, we were a bit worried that there could be efficiency problems in the unified shaders, that there could just be general problems with EDRAM. And of course we’re still looking, but so far it has all worked out, it isn’t a problem. So we’ve had this debate for awhile. Not that we didn’t have bugs. [laughs] None of them were our fault.

FiringSquad: How does Xbox 360 GPU compare in size to the RSX?

ATI: In terms of size, we’re a bit smaller. Of course, I’m not sure if that’s a good way to compare things, and to be honest I can’t talk about the number of transistors for this design. Microsoft owns the IP and that has a lot to do with their cost model and all that sort of stuff. But we’re a very efficient engine and we feel very good about our design. You know, the bang for the buck is awesome. The power of the platform [pauses] we’re going to be the most powerful platform out there, we’ve got a lot of innovation in there, we’re not just a PC chip.

I think the Sony chip is going to be more expensive and awkward. We make efficient use of our shaders, we have 64 threads that we can have on the processor at once. We have a thread buffer inside to keep the [inaudible]. The threads consist of 64 vertices or 64 pixels. We have a lot of work that we can do, a lot of sophistication that the developer never has to see.

FiringSquad: Looking at the parent die, what consumes the majority of the space?

ATI: The shaders consume a lot of the space. They don’t own 50% of the chip, but any one thing would be the shaders. 48 shaders, but again, they’re not 50% of the chip. We have texture units, we have shaders, we have caches, we have all kinds of things on the chip. We have a sequencer that controls the threads, we have lots of latency-reducing buffers. So the chip is complex.

FiringSquad: Which feature, or I guess group of features, really sets the Xbox 360 VPU apart from anything else?

ATI: Well, there can’t be one, I’ve got to go with two. The unified shader and the embedded DRAM are both unique and just really important to the success of the platform. They’re both powerful features that just allow you to do things you couldn’t otherwise do. They save bandwidth, they give you a richness. Did we talk with you about fluid reality yesterday?

FiringSquad: No, I don’t think so.

ATI: Well, what we’ve been trying to achieve in this particular go around is, well, realism, you can see it in games like Half-Life 2 where the walls, the environment, it all looks really good and you get a good sense of realism. But the next big hurdle is this fluid reality. The idea that characters in motion, lets say humans in motion, the joints look natural as they move along. That’s involves a lot of vertex processing, and with this unified shader we can put all these shaders towards vertex processing. Cloth, as it’s flying in the wind, like a flag for example, when it drops down on top of something, how that looks as it ripples.

Fur and feathers, the wind blows through them, grass, all that is where this idea of where fluid reality comes from. I’d say we’ve had static quality up until now, but now the fluid rhythm, the motion quality is this next realism that we’re really bringing.

Again, lots of power to devote to vertex processing, generating lots of pixels, to drive HD. HD is the platform of choice for this.

http://www.firingsquad.com/...

[PS3alltheway]

didn't you Read the Rules no posting Facts lol again your Facts it old its getting Old .

all i know is 1ST GEN GAME of PS3 OWNED 2ND GEN of 360 .

[THELANDSOFSAND]

OMG. He posted some FACTS, not just demented opinion on how despite having worse looking games, huge cost, weak online, delays and unhappy developers, the PS3 is just great.

if you use you eyeballs and whats left of your sony-washed brain, you would see that Gears Of War, Lost Odessey, Halo 3 and Mass Effect all look infinately better than anything those poor developers have coughed up onto the PS3. TGS gameplay was a joke! X06 blew away the PS3 for the final time. now all thats left defending sony are the truely blind.

[beans]

And don't forget Alan Wake a game that made me forget TGS or anything before it that ever occured! And thats crazy because Motostorm made me forget any rally game before TGS!

[PS3alltheway]

click the link
its ok we all know how you feel don't cry

[NextGen24Gamer]

ATI has been working on the Xbox 360 GPU for approximately two years, and it has been developed independently of any PC GPU. So despite what you may have heard elsewhere, the Xbox 360 GPU is not based on ATI's R5xx architecture.

Unlike any of their current-gen desktop GPUs, the 360 GPU supports FP32 from start to finish (as opposed to the current FP24 spec that ATI has implemented). Full FP32 support puts this aspect of the 360 GPU on par with NVIDIA's RSX.

ATI was very light on details of their pipeline implementation on the 360's GPU, but we were able to get some more clarification on some items. Each of the 48 shader pipelines is able to process two shader operations per cycle (one scalar and one vector), offering a total of 96 shader ops per cycle across the entire array. Remember that because the GPU implements a Unified Shader Architecture, each of these pipelines features execution units that can operate on either pixel or vertex shader instructions.

Both consoles are built on a 90nm process, and thus ATI's GPU is also built on a 90nm process at TSMC. ATI isn't talking transistor counts just yet, but given that the chip has a full 10MB of DRAM on it, we'd expect the chip to be fairly large.

One thing that ATI did shed some light on is that the Xbox 360 GPU is actually a multi-die design, referring to it as a parent-daughter die relationship. Because the GPU's die is so big, ATI had to split it into two separate die on the same package - connected by a "very wide" bus operating at 2GHz.

The daughter die is where the 10MB of embedded DRAM resides, but there is also a great deal of logic on the daughter die alongside the memory. The daughter die features 192 floating point units that are responsible for a lot of the work in sampling for AA among other things.

Remember the 256GB/s bandwidth figure from earlier? It turns out that that's not how much bandwidth is between the parent and daughter die, but rather the bandwidth available to this array of 192 floating point units on the daughter die itself. Clever use of words, no?

Because of the extremely large amount of bandwidth available both between the parent and daughter die as well as between the embedded DRAM and its FPUs, multi-sample AA is essentially free at 720p and 1080p in the Xbox 360. If you're wondering why Microsoft is insisting that all games will have AA enabled, this is why.

ATI did clarify that although Microsoft isn't targetting 1080p (1920 x 1080) as a resolution for games, their GPU would be able to handle the resolution with 4X AA enabled at no performance penalty.

ATI has also implemented a number of intelligent algorithms on the daughter die to handle situations where you need more memory than the 10MB of DRAM on-die. The daughter die has the ability to split the frame into two sections if the frame itself can't fit into the embedded memory. A z-pass is done to determine the location of all of the pixels of the screen and the daughter die then fetches only what is going to be a part of the scene that is being drawn at that particular time.

On the physical side, unlike ATI's Flipper GPU in the Gamecube, the 360 GPU does not use 1T-SRAM for its on-die memory. The memory on-die is actually DRAM. By using regular DRAM on-die, latencies are higher than SRAM or 1T-SRAM but costs should be kept to a minimum thanks to a smaller die than either of the aforementioned technologies.

Remember that in addition to functioning as a GPU, ATI's chip must also function as a memory controller for the 3-core PPC CPU in the Xbox 360. The memory controller services both the GPU and the CPU's needs, and as we mentioned before the controller is 256-bits wide and interfaces to 512MB of unified GDDR3 memory running at 700MHz. The memory controller resides on the parent die.

Scratching the Surface of NVIDIA's RSX
As we mentioned before, NVIDIA's RSX is the more PC-like of the two GPU solutions. Unlike ATI's offering, the RSX is based on a NVIDIA GPU, the upcoming G70 (the successor to the GeForce 6).

The RSX is a 90nm GPU weighing in at over 300 million transistors and fabbed by Sony at two plants, their Nagasaki plant and their joint fab with Toshiba.

The RSX follows a more conventional dataflow, with discrete pixel and vertex shader units. Sony has yet to announce the exact number of pixel and vertex shader units, potentially because that number may change as time goes by depending on yields. This time around Sony seems to be very careful not to let too many specs out that are subject to change to avoid any sort of backlash as they did back with the PS2. Given the transistor count and 90nm process, you can definitely expect the RSX to feature more than the 16 pipes of the present day GeForce 6800 Ultra. As for how many, we'll have to wait for Sony on that.

NVIDIA confirmed that the RSX is features full FP32 support, like the current generation GeForce 6 as well as ATI's Xbox 360 GPU. NVIDIA did announce that the RSX would be able to execute 136 shader operations per cycle, a number that is greater than ATI's announced 96 shader ops per cycle. Given that we don't know anything more about where NVIDIA derived this value from, we can't be certain if we are able to make a direct comparison to ATI's 96 shader ops per cycle.

Given that the RSX is based off of NVIDIA's G70 architecture, you can expect to have a similar feature set later this year on the PC. In fact, NVIDIA stated that by the time PS3 ships there will be a more powerful GPU available on the desktop. This is in stark contrast to ATI's stance that a number of the features of the Xbox 360 GPU won't make it to the desktop for a matter of years (potentially unified shader architecture), while others will never be seen on the desktop (embedded DRAM?).

http://www.anandtech.com/tr...

[TheThinker]

Isn't the PS3 using a multi-core Vector processor, and the 360 uses a multi-core Scalar processor? If true, this explains why some of you don't understand what you're talking about.

We're dealing with two different archetypes, which means two different schools of computing. Therefor, the only ground-facts we can all agree on are ones based on observations, not specifications written on paper.

So, for now we're going to have to judge the PS3's tech when it arrives and shows off its stuff. The rest of you can speculate, just don't assume.

[Raist]

I can't believe people are still using this lame ign article or interviews from ATI as facts.

Adding those kind of bandwith, roflmao.

[EnforcerOfTheTruth]

...this guy is pure comedy. Since months he copy pastes this old comparisons from ATI and MS. Does he really think that anybody besides his MS brothers buys it? Sorry Real Freakio, but the manufacturers ain't an unbiased source ;-) Here is again this nice pic, exclusively for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
Real Freakio, besides your MS brothers any with sense laughs at the MS comparison when seeing this picture. You are a man on a mission, you go to the PS3 section and try everything to win some people for the 360. But as sad as it maybe sound, your manufacturer comparsions won't help, your other accounts with which you play the converted Sony fan won't help. And since you love to sell people some fake facts and bomb this site with your useless quotes, I'll post some real facts. Facts that count. Things what 3rd party devs say, things what unbiased journalists say, journalists that ain't pro Sony, journalists that were critical when they had to be:

Mark Rein - PC/360/PS3 dev:
"One thing AGEIA's done that's really smart is that--well, if you've seen our PS3 demo, and this is really version .1, really not a finished performance at all, but we've got some really great cool physics things going on PS3. They've done a really good job of optimizing their library to work well with the SPUs in the Cell processor, which means we're going to be able to get a lot of physics performance out of PlayStation 3. Also on Xbox 360 to some extent, but definitely on PS3 we're going to be able to get a lot of physics capabilities out of that. Which means that, to bring [games using those methods] to a PC, you're probably going to need the hardware."
http://www.shacknews.com/ex...
Epic CEO Sweeney:
"he was very positive on Sony's open attitude to networked content compared to the Xbox 360 - he commented of Microsoft's platform: "Unfortunately it's more of a closed platform," and even noted that Microsoft seems to be "quite negative toward user-created content" under certain circumstances Epic has encountered."
http://www.gamasutra.com/ph...
Factor 5 President Julian Eggebrecht:
"It's amazing to work on the most powerful real-time hardware platform ever created without having to worry about porting to other systems."
http://ps3.ign.com/articles...
Itagaki:
"The infamous Team Ninja front man has a thing or two to say about Microsoft's decision to assign standard DVD format to the Xbox 360. Limiting his development team to a measly 9GB does not sit well with Itagaki, especially when Team Ninja is looking to include any number of (MS-coveted) HD cut scenes.
http://www.joystiq.com/2005...
Carmack:
"Though Carmack expresses a "preference" for the Xbox 360's CPU design, he admits that the PS3 "will have a bit more peak power." "
http://www.gamepro.com/news...
Even the PC dev admitts it, he just prefers 360, cause for him as a PC dev it's easier to develope for. If PS3 developing would be really that hard, 1st gen PS3 games would never look better than 2nd gen 360 games. If PS3 developing would be really that hard, devs wouldn't be able to deliver ports with updated graphics, cause they would invest all their energy to just make the ports run on the PS3.

MS fanboys bash Sony for having manufacturing problems, funny that MS has the same problems:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/new...
Best TGS games, voted by gamers:
http://xbox360.qj.net/TGS-2...
WOW Sony completely destryoed the compertition. 7 out of 11 games were for the Sony consoles.

Sam Kennedy:
"Virtua Fighter 5, White Knight Story, and especially MotorStorm (OMG) were well beyond anything I've seen on the 360.
It was kind of like the difference between, dare I say it, the PS2 and the Dreamcast. Which, as you know, wasn't that big a deal at first -- the Dreamcast had some fantastic looking second gen games -- but you could still tell the PS2 was a more powerful system (and to reiterate, I'm only talking hardware here -- I know the 360 is in a much different place software-wise). I think that's a rather fair comparison, to be honest -- similarly, as with the PS2, the PS3 is a platform that will distance itself even further once developers get more familiar with the hardware. Julian Eggebrecht of Factor 5 told me that they've only just scratched the surface of what they can do on PS3, and he fully expects all second gen PS3 games -- or certainly all third gen PS3 games -- to run in 1080p.
So yeah, there's a tangible difference in the visual quality between PS3 and the Xbox 360.
PS3 is a better piece of hardware"

You heard it, 1080p and already 1st gen PS3 titles are delivering it. Do any remember of the MS 1080p announcement? It's nice to hear 360 supports it, but where are the games? Where are some announcements of native 1080p 360 titles? As sad as it is, there are none. Sure, 360 can support 1080p native, but the question is, does it have enough power to run such games in acceptable framerates? GF5200 also supports dx9, but you can forget to play dx9 games in acceptable framerates with such GPU.
All ATI and MS can do is talk, but as sad as it is they can't walk the talk. They say 360 has 5 times the bandwidth than the PS3, but why do 99% of second 360 games look worse than 1st gen PS3 games? Isn't that strange?
Xbox's Director of the Game Technology Group Scott Henson:
"I think 1080p, just to address that directly, will be basically impossible. I think if you talk to any developer they will tell you that they will not have a performing game at 1080p."

LOL how come this folks are even making a PS3 360 comparison? It appears they even don't have a clue about the PS3 hardware, otherwise they wouldn't make such ridiculous statements. Unlike them, Sony walks the talk and delivers with their games.

Now after the truth was enforced, I come to my favorite part and this is how MS is ripping it's fanbase off.
The MS fanboys like to cry PS3 is way too expensive, but in fact it's very cheap for the things it offers, much cheaper than the 360. Let's see what Xbox360 would cost if it would only offer just the not so future proof HD movie playback:

$399 Xbox360 premium + $199 HD-DVD addon = $598
Almoust the price of the future proof 60GB PS3. Xbox 360 sadly still lacks Wi-Fi, HDMI and offers only a 20GB HDD.
If you don't care about Wi-Fi and can live with a smaller HDD, you can buy the 20GB PS3, which offers exactly the same what Xbox360 with HD movie playback offers, but for almoust $100 less and unlike 360 it's future proof.

$399 Xbox360 premium + $199 HD-DVD addon + $99 Wi-Fi = $697
Still not future proof, no HDMI and no 60GB HDD, but costs almost $100 more, what a ripp off.

MS fanboys like to say Sony is forcing us to buy Blu-Ray and MS is giving them choice. I'm askin myself what choice? Choice to get ripped off? Choice to buy way too overpriced products?
$99 for Wi-Fi is a ripp off. No thanks MS, in the PC market we get such an adapter for half the price.
$99 for a 20GB HDD is a ripp off. No thanks MS, for the PS3 we can buy an usual 2.5inch HDD for half the price, but twice the size. WOW thanks Sony.
MS just wanna milk their poor fanboys, that's why they made it impossible to use an internal 2.5 HDD. And please don't come up with that you can use external drives. Who wants to use external drives? Not only that it looks ugly, it also takes more room. That's another advantage of the PS3. It takes just less room and looks much better if you have everything in one device than having an external HDD and external HD-DVD connected. And how dare MS even to release a HD-DVD addon without HDMI? Most of the buyers won't even know that this device can be only used for a limited time. So how will all the addon buyers feel when after some time they will find out that they can't watch HD movies on it anymore? They will feel ripped off, or do you think MS will advertise it's HD-DVD addon as a HD player with a limited usage time? As a liars, as a thieves they are, I can guarantee you they won't.

Sony isn't forcing people to buy Blu. If you wanna experience real next gen games without any cuts, Blu is nescessary. Why should people give up on spectacular CGI, something that was already standard in the last gen? This would be a step back and next gen shouldn't make a step back in any area. The next gen isn't about making a step back, it's about making a step forward. Many gamers love spectacular CGI's and the devs are very happy with Blu, so Blu is nescessary.

Another negative side of Xbox360 are the additional costs for recharging the controllers. While Xbox360 owners have to buy a Charge Kit, the PS3 owners can do it with a simple USB cable.
This shows that Sony thought about everything to make it as cheap as possible for their fanbase and this shows that MS thought about everything to milk their fanbase as much they only can.
MS just doesn't care about gamers and their fanbase. Also the very short(only 4 years) Xbox support demonstrates it perfectly. They killed Xbox right after the 360 was released and this was an awful move. With such a decision they showed how much they care about the Xbox fanbase. From the Xbox owners I know, only 1 bought the 360. The rest is very pissed and some of them don't wanna buy a MS console again. Truth is, many gamers don't buy the new console right at launch. They want to wait 1-2 years for a price drop or for some games that really interest them. But MS doesn't care what they want, all they care is how to milk people of their money.
What makes all these even badder, is that MS is the richest company in the world. They could very well still support Xbox, they could very well sell the Xbox360 accessories at a lower and more reasonable price and they could very well make even a console that offers more than the PS3 but is cheaper. As the richest company in the world, sure they could, but that's not what they want. All they want is to milk people, same goes for the PC gamers. Why do you think they release dx10 only for Vista? The answer is simple, as greedy they are, they wanna force all PC gamers to buy Vista.

The truth was enforced about the greedy and lieing company MS. I'm not Real Freakio, I'm not going to the 360 section. I don't care about 360, it's fanboys and I don't want to convert any them. I only visit places that interest me, but when I meat some ridiculous folks that spread lies, I can't help it and enforce the truth about 360 and it's manufacturer.

[NextGen24Gamer]

I flagged you as spam...The name calling has got to stop on this board. But I see you only have 4 bubbles left so the mod is catching on to you. Thanks Mod.

[EnforcerOfTheTruth]

...you had 3 bubbles. Don't worry, if I lose some more I'll just do what you did: register a new account ;-)
BTW I wasn't dissing you or anything, just stating the simple truth. Don't forget, I'm the Enforcer of the Truth ;-)

[DIGITALDREAMKID]

You know the PS3 will always be better and it hurts you...