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.â€
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.
22 Comments