ATI: not all GPUs are created equal

Microsoft most likely WILL be taking a massive loss on 360 hardware, as will Sony on PS3, and Nintendo on Revolution. Consoles have always been loss leaders for their manufacturers, since the real money is in 1st party games, licensing for 3rd party games, official accessories, licensing for 3rd party accessories, and subscription services (ala Xbox Live! Gold). When the Xbox was first released, Microsoft was losing more than $100 per unit on pure hardware cost (not including logistics costs). If you know any Microsoft employees, you can ask them, and they'll tell you that the Xbox is the only Microsoft product that they can't buy at a discount, and it is for this very reason. Xbox 360 has more announced revenue streams than PS3 and Revolution with features such as Xbox Live! Arcade and Xbox Live! Marketplace, which let game developers and players to sell additional mini-games and content, all with MS getting a cut along the way, and sponsorship for Xbox Live! events, so Microsoft is even more likely to be willing to take a bath on the price of the console itself.

As for ATI's statements, it may just be spreading of FUD against NVidia for their PS3 chip, and since everyone already knows that the Revolution is going to be woefully underpowered as compared to the other next-gen consoles, ATI doesn't really have anything to lose by putting it down, while they have a lot to gain from strong 360 sales. It's not unlikely that the 360's graphics chip will rock anything available in a PC video card for a while... remember that the Xbox's mutant GeForce3 from Nvidia was better than anything widely available until the GeForce4 shipped a year later. The integrated nature of the hardware, such as the onboard direct-attached nature of the GPU and the sharing of system and video RAM in the Xbox (360) helps the video chips outperform their desktop counterparts. Is ATI tooting their own horn? Definitely. Is it justified? Maybe. Do we actually know if it WILL outperform the NVidia chip in the PS3? No.

As always, it's going to be games, not hardware, that determines the long-term commercial success of the consoles. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are both, without a doubt, going to have amazing hardware performance. Of course, this time, Microsoft has thrown a monkey wrench into the system by providing both free and paid versions of Xbox Live!, making services also an important part of the console success equation. Unless Sony can compete with the standardized online gameplay system that Live! provides, they're going to be starting from behind in a lot of gamers' eyes, even if their hardware is more powerful. So, more accurately, this generation of the console wars will be won by games and services, not hardware.

I don't think that Nintendo (N) fans will care too much. N fans buy their systems strictly for N games not because of their graphical power, clock speed, etc. Now I dont believe that N's graphics will be too far off but I think it is a completely different structure for the N than the 360 setup. If I am wrong about that I'm sure someone will say something about it and correct me.

ATI really bites the big one. Nvidia is going to own them.

The new ATI chip isn't going to be five times more powerful than Nvidia's RSX. ATI and Microsoft are lying once again.

nVIDIA are not going to own ATi, at least not with the PS3 anyway, nvidia have admitted that by the time the PS3 is out they will already have a superior PC chipset out and guess what? No doubt it'll have unified pipelines just like the Xenos chipset, Unified is superior and add to that Xenos also has hardware support for directly accessing memory from within the shader units. The PS3 is based on the RX7800 GTX but with a higher clock speed and whilst nice is not going to stnad up to the Xenos.
ATi has also advised that the Revolution chipset will not be using any of the features that they and Microsoft developed. MS owns the IP on the Xenon chipset.
I'm getting both the 360 and the Revolution, am not at all interested in the over hyped PS3.

Gina and Rock 123:

You are both goons. All your statements are unfounded. For example, Rock, please provide proof that unified pipelines are better. Everything I know about computers says they will probably be worse.

Typically general purpose hardware is not as good at a specific task as hardware constructed to do that specific task is. Why do you have a video card, why don't you just offload all that video processing to the main CPU? Same reason. Therefore unified shaders/vertex processors will probably be slower.

Rock 123:

Of course they'll have a more powerful GPU out when the PS3 is available. The PS3 is still a year away. Both companies had better have new chipsets out by then. Do you expect Nvidia to just hold off on development and production of GPU's until the PS3 comes out??

Ok Admiral, say it like it is ;)

The use of a unified pipeline WILL be slower than a dedicated pixel/vertex shader architecture BUT a unifified pipelines *could* balance the load much better than a seperate pixel/vertex shader part.

Of course, we will only know for sure when the parts are released, otherwise the whole debate is either moot or typical pre-teen fanboy bashing ;)

ATI is stupid to think they are better than Nvidia. Nvidia owns the business thus owning ATI. Nvidia is also the number one maker of GPU's. So there is no way ATI is better.

Hey Gina, you should read that post from yesterday about fanboys. Here's the gamespot link.
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6128136/p-18.html
It's an absolutly fascinating read. And BTW, way to backup your claims with facts. I applaud you.

From what I've heard, the power behind the Xbox 360 are seriously underwhelming. At best, it's just twice the power of the original Xbox. Graphics don't mean squat if your games aren't any good anyway.

M$ vs Sony
ATi vs nVidia

This war will continue to rage on.

Jason
http://www.xboxsoftmods.com - FINALLY UPDATED!

This is the most confusing thing I've seen in the console wars for quite some time. Is ATI really undermining one of their own future products? Maybe the XBOX 360 GPU people don't know that the Revolution GPU people are doing. That's certainly plausable with the level of secrecy Nintendo likes to keep. I also don't know how ATI knows how powerful the PS3 will be considering NVIDIA's GPU isn't finished yet.

Just freaking strange. I wouldn't trust anything that they at this point.

However Nintendo ought to get on the horn to ATI, remind them of their rather large contracts in recent years, and tell them to shut the fuck up.

Matt: "at best, it's just twice the power of the original Xbox"? Have you been listening to Sony's FUD? Calling it "Xbox 1.5"? The Xbox 360's main CPU is a 3-core PowerPC running at 3.2 GHz. If you compare just clock speed, each core is 4.37 times as fast as than the Xbox's single 733 MHz mutant Celeron. When you take into account that there's 3 of them, that means that the 360 has to have 13 times the power of the original. And that doesn't take into account the better CPU architecture, faster memory, more memory, or new GPU. Saying that it will only be twice as fast is na?, and makes you sound like Ken Kutaragi.

Yet more hardware dick-waving that doesn't mean dick. It's all about the games. Until we see the games, STFU.

The big speed numbers MSoft and ATi always focus on just refers to some very specialized logic that only has 10Mb of memory that anti-aliases the image in real time by itself (but needs help if its in HD, sigh).

They try to imply the bandwidth in this one process is the bandwidth throughout the GPU. pretty misleading i'd say, but nothing i wouldn't expect from Sony.

bangfalse is talking serious sense here, and he's obviously not some PR guy or wannabe PR guy like all you retarded fanboys.

don't believe ANYONE'S hype until actual experts NOT affiliated with sony, microsoft, ati, or nvidia get their hands on BOTH systems and COMPARE them with LOTS of benchmark tests.

(for the record, i own a ps2 and an xbox and see advantages to both)

Funny that ATI & MS has provided the specs to prove their next gen consoles superiority, yet Ken has just shot his mouth off. Regardless of how powerful a system is, it can only crank that info out at the pace of the bottleneck which is the video card. MS & ATI obviosly have the better card and have the figures to back it up.

Anyone can look up hardware specs. And my source comes from someone who KNOWS people working on the Xbox 360. But Knight37 says it best. Hardware doesn't mean ANYTHING without the games.

the 360 being "only twice as powerful as the xbox," from a computing standpoint, is not even remotely possible.

whether it's games will produce twice the graphics on a standard tv at launch is another story. ;)

Yeah Matt, anyone can look up the hardware specs, in fact, they're at http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox360/factsheet.htm

I'm just wondering how 3 CPU cores running at 3.2 GHz vs a single-core 733MHz, a GPU with 4 times the polygon fill rate (500 vs. 125 million triangles/sec) and pixel fill rate (16 vs. 4 gigasamples/sec), and 8 times the unified system RAM (512 MB vs 64 MB) running at 3.5x the speed (700 MHz vs 200 MHz) can be only twice as fast.

Oh, and for the record, I work for Microsoft, but outside of the Xbox division, and I've yet to see a 360 or learn anything about it that wasn't publicly announced.

ITS quite obvious that the Ps3 is stronger than the xbox 360. Most game devolopers have given their opinions about each system, and they all agree that GRAPHICALLY psy is the most powerful. The chip that Ati is putting out is also known as R500 whereas by the time xbox 360 will be released, amore powerful chip known as the R550 will already be in market.

According to ATI, the R500 Xenos and the R5500 PC GPU share nothing in common except model numbers. In fact they even started calling the Xenos by a different madel number in order to curb rumors such as the one you just posted. The Xenos architecture is much different than the R5500 and is a far cry from inferior to it.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2461&p=3

The Xbox 360 and PS3. When only speaking about PS3 and 360 CPU's it is fair to say they are around 2-3x faster than the original Xbox. There are simple reasons for this that have been revealed by all the gmes designers for these new systems.
Whilst you may believe that because there are 3.2ghz x 3 and 3.2ghz + SPU's (the uselessness of which I will come to) the processors are fster, his is not true. Microsoft originally were going to go Athlon 64, this was also considered by Sony - but costs were too high for both to gte custom chips... so in a bid to look good both designed thei own chips with IBM. The xbox 360 chip is based on the most lossy architecture in the game... with some 48 stages in its pipeline it takes an age to flush out, which is bad for gaming. The athlon 64 has a simple 12 stage pipeline (shorter is generally better, but restricts clock speed somewhat.) Then Sony have virtually the same core as Microsoft, with the spu's at teh side. These SPU's are pretty useless - they are very specialised and are not ideal for most of the game code, so they go pretty much unused (dont believe me go read the 100-page brief and reviews from games designers elsewhere.) These deep pipelines and poor, poooooor! architechtures make them slow... the numbers do not ring true in real world performance. There have been many designers admitting that id any had had an athlon 64 cpu inside (single core) they would be ahead of the game already. PC's are already as fast as these unreleased consoles....

Now the xbox had a p3/celeron with a 10 stage pipeline, nic short pipe works well....

On the graphics side it goes something like this.

nVidia RSX = Overclocked 7800gtx (posssibly with 32 pipes)

ATi (xbox 360 chip...) = r420 with 24-32 pipelines... the power is not more than that.

lol, im just reading this article and lmfao. wow, first of all, while the RSX will be based off of the G70 Core which powers the Geforce 7800 GTX, the current fastest PC card, it is only about 30% faster than the 6800 Ultra. Furthermore, in PC-land we have this thing called SLI (Crossfire for ATI Cards) that allows you to have 2 graphics cards running in tandem to lighten the load on both and achieve higher frame rates. Right now, two 6800 Ultras in SLI is faster than a 7800 GTX so if you think about it that way PCs are already much faster than the PS3 and Xbox 360 simply because they can use dual graphics cards. Now the fact that 2 6800 Ultras and an SLI motherboard cost nearly twice my entire computer is another story. Oh, and whoever said that integrated system and graphics memory is a good thing is absolutely barking mad. Integrated memory kills bandwidth. I should know, I used to run integrated graphics on the abovesaid budget PC at home, and they reduced memory bandwidth by 50%.

Oh, and regarding the 256 gigabytes/s bandwidth, that could mean a number of things and is most likely just a total of all the bandwidth in the system, not the speed of the graphics memory. Even the N64 is a misnomer, since the only thing 64-bit about it is the memory I'm assuming, since 64-bit CPUs have only just come out.

All you Nvidia fans should read more than just the Nvidia Forums. I was reading about the 7800gt, which Nvidia released after Crossfire kicked the living hoohah out of SLI, and I will admit it has 2x the power of the 6800gt. But, the R550 from ATI was the only card, thats right "only", to get over 10k on 3DMark05. It also will have a crossfire edition and all I know is that ATI keeps drooping the bomb on Nvidia.
First it was the 9500/9700 pro which made the 440/4800 look like a 440mx. Then the 9800 series, including mine the 9800XT, which still whooped Nvidia. And after Nvidia released the 6800 series, ATI fired baxk with the X800/X850s which used less power than ANY Nvidia, and previous 9800 series and created less heat. So they didnt need a blow dryer to cool them.
The PS3 already has heat issues due to 4 3.2 ghz cell processors, and a Nvidia video chipset, who are notorious for causing a lot of heat, will just kill the console. Im not defending the 360. I think they will both end up outdated by the time come out. The PC will pull ahead, just like it did when the PS2 and XBox came out.
And besides the fact that with the newer PCs, you can run other things in almost all games such as MP3s, they will also be able to be upgraded and can run around 4gigs of Dual Cahnnel 1066(the fastest out for now). The so called "consoles",which havent been a console probably since the super nintendo, wont have upgradeability, except the hard drive if you want to void your warranty, and wont be able to handle as much ram without getting even hotter.
If they want to make a good system, they should design a case that allows cooling and try to design so that it wont be outdated by the time of release.
Peace out, PCS rule and ATI so owns Nvidia