PS3 pwns...

[CrONoS]

Good title, heh Asher?

Nice picture, if they are actually in-games, this is beautifull!

Assasin Creed Playstation 3

[Nubclear]

Meh.

[Kuciwalker]

Pretty.

[thesilentone]

Well done. Nice pictures, of a MULTI-PLATFORM TITLE. Seriously, post some pics of the next Final Fantasy, or that White Knight game if you want to show off the PS3.

There are more PC and xbox360 screenshots of Assassin's Creed than PS3 shots, which should tell you something, and none of them look that much different.

[Nubclear]

Such aggression

[Traianvs]

Yup, that game looks promising, and I'm not even talking about the gfx here!

[Asher]

Assassins Creed's primary platform (and initial platform) was the 360 -- called Project Assassin as announced in 2005 at MS' X05. Sony threw some money around for a timed exclusive for PS3, and here we are.

On a related note, it's now been confirm that PS3's graphics chip, RSX, has been downgraded -- GPU clock is now 500MHz, not 550MHz, and memory speed is 650MHz, not 700MHz. It also now has 8 raster operators (things that physically draw the pixels), down from 16.

[Asher]

Those pictures look like they're taken from E3's pre-rendered trailer, BTW.

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Asher
On a related note, it's now been confirm that PS3's graphics chip, RSX, has been downgraded -- GPU clock is now 500MHz, not 550MHz, and memory speed is 650MHz, not 700MHz. It also now has 8 raster operators (things that physically draw the pixels), down from 16.

How does it compare with the 360?

[Asher]

They're very different chips, but everyone considered Xenos (in the 360) to be faster and more fully-featured than RSX (in the PS3) before it was crippled.

By far the biggest bottleneck in modern video chips is the speed in which the framebuffer (consider it the canvas) could be written to. In high-end PC video cards, you get 1.3GHz RAM on a 256-bit bus, giving huge amounts of bandwidth for this.

In the PS3, you have 650MHz RAM on a 128-bit bus, which is literally 25% of that of a high-end PC card.

In the Xbox 360, it has embedded DRAM on the chip -- 10MB of it with an insane 256GB/s memory bandwidth to it. This virtually eliminates the framebuffer bottleneck, meaning the rest of the bandwidth can be used for texture streaming, geometry streaming, etc.

In the PS3, the entire ~20GB/s of memory to RSX is likely to be saturated by the framebuffer requirements. It's going to have to try to hijack memory from the CPU's memory pool to stream in data, which is a development nightmare and has very high latency...

In short, it's not an elegant solution at all. Sony didn't want to pay a lot of money for a custom console GPU, while MS paid half a billion dollars for one, so you get what you give.

[CrONoS]

Settler, 2001 on Offtopic?

Where are you hiding?

Originally posted by thesilentone
Well done. Nice pictures, of a MULTI-PLATFORM TITLE. Seriously, post some pics of the next Final Fantasy, or that White Knight game if you want to show off the PS3.

There are more PC and xbox360 screenshots of Assassin's Creed than PS3 shots, which should tell you something, and none of them look that much different.

[Tattila the Hun]

Someone wrote this on a forum I visit, sounds plausible, though, I don't know if he actually knows what he is talking about.

The primary core of the "Cell" processor is a PowerPC core, and the XBox 360's cores are all PowerPC units. But they are some of IBM's slowest, least-efficient, hottest-running, and most power-hungry cores. They run at so high a clockrate because their performance per clock tick is terrible. The biggest problem is that game engines parallelize across multiple CPUs very poorly, so the other 2 cores end up getting very little done, just tiny helper tasks that only take miniscule burden off the primary core.

The situation with the PS3's CPU is much worse. Sony likes to call it 'rivalling that of supercomputers'. Well, that's sort of true; except that a SuperComputer would only be such because it has many, many, MANY processors. You can have a supercomputer made from thousands of 486DX2-66 processors. The "Cell" is effectively a backwards-designed vector processor. The PowerPC core divvies out instructions to an array of Vector units. What Sony would like you to believe is that this is a well-trained lean mean Processor Army ready to tear into today's latest games. What they don't tell you is that Vector Processing is designed primarily for performing a uniform task across a massive data set, again and again and again.

Suppose you need to take a set of 512,000,000 numbers and square them all. You'd get a vector processor to do it, and it'd be unbelievably fast at it, due to the repetitive workload and giant data set. They're best for 'set it and forget it' tasks, like cryptography, compression, scientific applications, perhaps code-breaking. Does this sound like something you'd do in a console? No. In a console game, you do a lot of dynamic work. Decisions of the player and dynamic and often random actions in the game dictate new instructions every frame. Putting such a workload on a Vector processor makes it run around like a chicken with its head cut off, accomplishing next to nothing. The main PowerPC core is as weak as one of the XBox 360's, so it's in need of all the help it can get.

But that's not the worst part. To feed the screaming little birds that are the Vector units, the main PowerPC core must interrupt its work. Then right away, they will need more instructions, and more, reporting back with tiny bits of completed work that do extremely little good. In the end, it's usually faster to do the work on the main PowerPC core than have it stop everything it is doing to babysit the 'mighty processor army'. To make matters worse, the Vector processors have extremely limited memory access, as well. You thought the GP2X's 940T was bad!

World-renowned 3D game programmer and father of the Quake I/II/III Doom/Doom 3 and Wolfenstein 3D engines reported the XBox 360 and PS3 had roughly the CPU processing power of a Pentium 4 at 1.4 GHz in a real-world scenario. That's much weaker than anything a 729 MHz PowerPC chip can do. (I find it odd the article does not even MENTION the larger SRAM as well-- 1T SRAM is extremely fast, and will provide even more performance gains. The extremely fast GDDR3 memory will also be usable by the CPU-- that's a massive performance boost right there. No desktop PC processor is even capable of using GDDR3 yet.)

The CPU sounds weak clockrate-wise-- but when you take these factors into account, the Wii has the CPU advantage. Graphically? It's not as powerful, certainly. But XBox 360 games and PS3 games, despite a lot of deceptive press filled with workstation-rendered fake videos that hooked lots of buyers, fail to impress visually, falling short of the performance of even the LAST generation of PC 3D accelerators. The Wii's graphical prowess may not be quite as high as the XBox 360 or PS3 in an ideal environment, but until the developers for the other 2 systems are able to make sense of the ridiculous hardware in front of them, it won't matter.

Also things that don't seem to be really making the impact they should-- the GPU will recieve a big performance boost from the enormous memory bandwidth of all that onboard VRAM-- the XBox 360's GPU has a piteously small amount, much too little to actually do much good. As for it being the 'exact same'? With the support and features listed, this cannot be the case. The GPU has clearly been redesigned. I question the validity of this article again ...

And at the end of the day, what really matters-- how many polygons your football player in NFL Roster Update 2009 has, or actual gameplay? ... That's what boils down to for me. I don't see myself buying any of the consoles in the near future, but if I got one, it'd end up being the Wii. It'll be the only machine with interesting and innovative titles from creative and revered game studios-- while the other two machines are teeming with sequels and more rehashes of already-stale formulaic game licenses. No thanks. And there's always the little bonus of the 'virtual console' emulators. Nintendo's hardware has always been strange and hard to emulate. Now that the company that designed it is taking the reins on emulating it, we should see some fantastically accurate emulators for the system that will outclass the experience of playing these games on a PC.

I haven't thought positively of a home game console since the Dreamcast, so I must give the Wii credit for rousing some of my attention. It's not very easy to do in this industry.

[Asher]

He shows himself to be clueless in the second sentence. I stopped reading at that point.

[thesilentone]

Originally posted by cronos_qc
Settler, 2001 on Offtopic?

Where are you hiding?

I'm honestly surprised so many people in the off topic section posted so many posts in the on-topic sections... I've done maybe 5 of so CIV posts, and been happy to just read the rest.

[thesilentone]

Originally posted by Asher
They're very different chips, but everyone considered Xenos (in the 360) to be faster and more fully-featured than RSX (in the PS3) before it was crippled.

By far the biggest bottleneck in modern video chips is the speed in which the framebuffer (consider it the canvas) could be written to. In high-end PC video cards, you get 1.3GHz RAM on a 256-bit bus, giving huge amounts of bandwidth for this.

There's a lot more to it than that, while I definately prefer the 360 right now it doesn't seem to be that clear which machine has more horsepower yet. I've personally just "upgraded" from an agp 6800 (256bit bus) to a pci-e 7600gt (128bitbus) and the 7600gt is by far the better card, even at higher resolutions with anti aliasing.