Here — one, two, three, four — are some break-downs of the numbers between the Xbox 360 specs and the published PS3 specs. Note, these are from Microsoft so they have a decided Microsoft spin. However, they seem to have a lot of truth and jive a lot with what I’ve been figuring based on my own knowledge of development and hardware.
Here’s what I commented in that article:
Personally I think Microsoft has it more right than Sony this time. With Microsoft’s three general purpose cores all running at 3.2GHz you’re talking about a lot of general purpose processing power to throw at a game. Sony’s SPEs would be pure hell if those machines were, for instance, crunching a bunch of SETI@Home packets doing fast fourier transforms or something, but they really will mean very little for processing things like game logic or AI. Will they be useful for real-time 5.1 encoding? Quite likely. Can they do dot-products? Damn skippy. But the real key is you have to keep those units fed with data… they’re meant to be streaming inputs and mathematical operations so you need to keep them fed with operands at a high rate of speed. I’m sure there will be some gaming utility there — perhaps as something like “extra vertex shaders” calculating deformable terrain on a mass of vertices — but for regular game processing, I don’t see it.
But, Sony can claim they can crunch more floating point numbers and that seems to satisfy the likes of the talking heads at G4 and Gamespot. They’re a bit like the movie Roxanne: “A few frilly words and you’re counting ceiling tiles.” Though in this case “a few prerenders and some floating point numbers and you’re declaring a winner.”
Personally, as I said above, I think Microsoft knocked this one out of the park in everything from industrial design to architecture to the concrete plans for the next-gen Xbox Live features.
Heather Says:September 5th, 2006 at 10:20 am
Hello! I just wanted to clear things up before I spent $100 extra dollars getting the 60GB model:
1) As the 20GB model does not come with HDMI input, does that mean that you can still have High Defenition gaming (with use of a cable - i.e. DVI-to-HDMI) or not?
2) Sony have stated that the hard drive in the PS3s can be upgraded, is there a limit to 60GB (i.e. the 60GB PS3 cannot be upgraded) or can we buy a 250GB and put that in there?
3) Is there any images showing boxart of any games?
Thanks
Gino Says:February 16th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
All I have to say is I thought PS3 would grow to be pretty much better than 360 because the PS3 footage of fight night looked great to me and unmatchable. The first footage I saw of fight night for 360 looked kinda bad, but I believe developers were not ready for 360 programing because of the late developing kits. Now latest footage of fight night for 360 looks awesome. Even though PS3 looks great something about 360’s version looks more realistic.So gamers remember, Microsoft spent as much time as Sony on their system.Microsoft just rushed the launch to be first out the gate which in turn rushed games and forced developers to stick to the basics of what 360 could do to meet the deadline.Watch out for later 360 games with Amazing graphics,physics, and AI. If Microsoft wanted too, they could of just waited and copied PS3 to make sure 360 is better (like I think happened with Xbox and PS2)and still be second to market and still make alot of money but they didn’t.Why? Because they think they can top PS3 and its technology with their own. As you can see, Nintendo is not even trying to compete because they know they can’t and would look foolish saying Revolution is more powerful than 360 and PS3 because the truth would be so noticeable.Instead Nintendo focuses on other selling points. If Microsoft couldn’t compare you would know because they know they can’t dissapoint people with an outright lie which is so obvious(although I couldn’t put it past a maybe secretly worried Sony, because for some reason, what sony says people believe even though they have a rep for exagerating). And for the record, when has there ever been a game launch where systems specs were not basically identical when played(Accept for systems like Revolution who offer a different approach of why their system is next gen apposed from the norm of graphics, clockspeed ect.. Mostly its based on your personal preference. So get the system you want they all will be the latest technology for right now. Though I always have had playstation, I believe Xbox to take the market and I now have a 360 and love it I see its potential. One things for sure this war can be compared to nothing less than Sega Genesis VS. Super Nintendo. Thanks for reading my opinion feel free to comment I would love to know what my views are doing to your brain right now. PS Excuse my grammer, punctuation, run ons ect.. I’m not stupid lol