Mistwalker's Xbox 360 RPG duo

Check out that 80's moustache. That almost GUARANTEES success of these games!

80s moustache, 80s 'butt cut' hair cut, and 80s denim shirt. I'm guessing this picture was taken in the 80s.

I’m wondering why Joystiq is not reporting the excellent breakdown of performance specs for the Xbox 360 on Major Nelson’s site. Here’s some of it:

CONCLUSION

When you break down the numbers, Xbox 360 has provably more performance than PS3. Keep in mind that Sony has a track record of over promising and under delivering on technical performance. The truth is that both systems pack a lot of power for high definition games and entertainment.

However, hardware performance, while important, is only a third of the puzzle. Xbox 360 is a fusion of hardware, software and services. Without the software and services to power it, even the most powerful hardware becomes inconsequential. Xbox 360 games—by leveraging cutting-edge hardware, software, and services—will outperform the PlayStation 3.

He goes on to say:

Even ignoring the bandwidth limitations the PS3’s GPU is not as powerful as the Xbox 360’s GPU.

And…

The PS3 does have the additional 7 DSPs on the Cell to add more floating point ops for graphics rendering, but the Xbox 360’s three general purpose cores with custom D3D and dot product instructions are more customized for true graphics related calculations.

DETAILED ANALYSIS OF PERFORMANCE SPECIFICATIONS

CPU
The Xbox 360 processor was designed to give game developers the power that they actually need, in an easy to use form. The Cell processor has impressive streaming floating-point power that is of limited use for games.

The majority of game code is a mixture of integer, floating-point, and vector math, with lots of branches and random memory accesses. This code is best handled by a general purpose CPU with a cache, branch predictor, and vector unit.

The Cell’s seven DSPs (what Sony calls SPEs) have no cache, no direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and a different instruction set from the PS3’s main CPU. They are not designed for or efficient at general purpose computing. DSPs are not appropriate for game programming.

Xbox 360 has three general purpose CPU cores. The Cell processor has only one.

Xbox 360’s CPUs has vector processing power on each CPU core. Each Xbox 360 core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread, with a dot product instruction, and a shared 1-MB L2 cache. The Cell processor’s vector processing power is mostly on the seven DSPs.

Dot products are critical to games because they are used in 3D math to calculate vector lengths, projections, transformations, and more. The Xbox 360 CPU has a dot product instruction, where other CPUs such as Cell must emulate dot product using multiple instructions.

Cell’s streaming floating-point work is done on its seven DSP processors. Since geometry processing is moved to the GPU, the need for streaming floating-point work and other DSP style programming in games has dropped dramatically.

Just like with the PS2’s Emotion Engine, with its missing L2 cache, the Cell is designed for a type of game programming that accounts for a minor percentage of processing time.

Sony’s CPU is ideal for an environment where 12.5% of the work is general-purpose computing and 87.5% of the work is DSP calculations. That sort of mix makes sense for video playback or networked waveform analysis, but not for games. In fact, when analyzing real games one finds almost the opposite distribution of general purpose computing and DSP calculation requirements. A relatively small percentage of instructions are actually floating point. Of those instructions which are floating-point, very few involve processing continuous streams of numbers. Instead they are used in tasks like AI and path-finding, which require random access to memory and frequent branches, which the DSPs are ill-suited to.

Based on measurements of running next generation games, only ~10-30% of the instructions executed are floating point. The remainders of the instructions are load, store, integer, branch, etc. Even fewer of the instructions executed are streaming floating point—probably ~5-10%. Cell is optimized for streaming floating-point, with 87.5% of its cores good for streaming floating-point and nothing else.

It goes on and on and, in fairness, which is what you guys say you believe in, should be reported.

Are the battles turn-based? Don't even bother trying to get my attention if they're not.

Hey Doug,

That was completely off topic but informative none the less. But why post it here?

As long as we are off topic, that same site also states the the xbox 360 will be backwards compatible without a recompile. You don't need to re-purchase your current games. THey will emulate the xbox hardware. All the top games WILL work. Their goal is to get ALL games to work - they just won't make a promise on that though (there will always be some strange thing that won't work quite right I'm sure).

Doug, you do realize you can submit news to the editors on the site? It's usually preferrable that you do that rather than dropping your pants and showing your all to everybody in a completely irrelevant topic.

Doug you M$ fanboy, stop posting the same shit on every topic.

Fu**, thought this pic is for amusement - but it's really actual footage :-/
I don't think any game of such a person can be good, i won't buy it. : )
Attention, it's irony.

Is he stuck in the 80's? Someone should get him back. Anyway, i hope Microsoft will fail to get a hold of the japanese market. Box-Bastards. Hey Ho, paint my dell pc white and now it's a Xbox 360.

Yeah that's right, all great game designers are good looking men with style and groove. They were usually the best looking people, all born to become male supermodels and Hollywood actors, yet for their love of gaming, turned to designing games!

So this guy must be a crap designer. Forget Xbox 360 lads, this guy will ruin it.

Doug, I sincerely hope that you are getting paid for this B$ maneuver. Maybe more Microsoft 'viral marketing?' Spam all blogs!

I read Major Nelson's blog. While it is a great blog, are you sure that (Microsoft Employee) Major Nelson would say anything BUT 'the 360 is provably more powerful than the PS3?' Is he saying 'provably' because that statement can also mean 'we only have our own machine to test, the PS3 is not available yet?' And hard, scientific tangeble facts and numbers like:

"Keep in mind that Sony has a track record of over promising and under delivering on technical performance."

That is an opinion... Sony also has a track record of leading the industry in units sold and popularity...

Look, I love my Gamecube, Xbox and my PS2... I'm buying the new boxes, I've said it many times here. I'm only a 'fanboy' of video games themselves. But when some clown like 'Doug' pulls stunts like this, I have to wonder... Who's really responsible? Is 'Doug' some M$ intern who has to go on spin-control?

i went to a website that broke down the specs of both the ps3 and the 360 and just based on numbers the 360 does have more processing power plus a fairly equal graphics engine. when all the numbers are broke down the 360 is the better of the two systems on the hardware side just based on speed, graphics and processing capabilities. and after seeing gears of war i am a huge beliver in the 360 and it graphics and power.

Dear fellows.
Sitting and reading these comments is fascinating. All these talks about CPU, “numbers” and tech porn.

I guess this really is a box discussion.
Still.. it was always the games that made me a games fan.
To me it was a question of how good the game where, how it made me feel and what I could experience and perform inside the game.

I still think some of the Game Cube games are soooo endlessly much more fun, intriguing then most of the x-box games ever was. The first X-box was a tech monster at the release, but the games were not so good. Microsoft’s philosophy was that the game producers should use the tech possibilities to the max, push the box to its limits, and the talk about a good game was left out. I know this for sure, I was there.. I meet with them.
Isn’t that strange ? Its like if a camera producer asked Spielberg to maximize the use of the cameras possibilities instead of shooting a good scene.

No wonder that Microsoft so totally lost the first battle of Japan. In a country where tech is important, as a carrier of a good content, the games from the Sony and Nintendo worlds where so much better for the end user, then the numbers of operations the “enemys” actual box could do.

Really, is it only me who thinks so? Or is the west totally fixated on numbers, horsepower and theoretical possibilities. I love great computers and strong boxes..for sure. But most of all, I like good games, game play and good stories or whatever brings the game to a level where I stop thinking of frame rate, CPU power and other things like that.

Soon there will be a bigger box out there, and after that a box even bigger. I hope the games will be better as well.. or at least as good as they used to be.