Ubisoft says Conviction can't be done on PS3

512 meg of Xbox vid RAM!!! PS3 is handicapped. I love it!!

Allright, so Lair couldn't be done on a 360, Conviction can't be done on a PS3, and Wii Sports can't be done on a Dreamcast. Just another day in the daily grind.

360 FTW again!

I love the entire Splinter Cell series. It's my favorite game hands down. With it being exclusive for the 360 I expect it to be top notch. I just hope there's better multiplayer than with Double Agent.

Just PLEEEEASE get the framerate smooth this time. The choppiness almost killed SC:DA for me. Amazing textures and lighting, but what's the point if it's choppy?

These screenshots make me leary of framerate again...

I'm new to the series (!) and it's quickly becoming one of my faves. A shame you can't get acheivements for the Xbox 1 games...

We have Epic and Gears of War to thank for the 512 video memory, not to mention the 1 billion dollars MS spent to make it so.

360 FTW indeed.

What's so hard about saying we were paid not to make a ps3 version of the game.

@7
Because it isn't true?

I was wondering if this article would make it to X360FB. Gawd know the PS3FB blog has been trashing the 360 lately.

Ever since the 2006 E3 when we saw the final specifications for the Playstation 3, it has been common knowledge that the Xbox 360 has more processing power when it comes to what can actually be applied to videogames.

Xbox 360 has more General Purpose CPU power than the Playstation 3, because the PS3 CPU isn't diverse enough; it's ideal use isn't for videogames, which is the reason why Sony originally wanted to have two Cell CPUs in the PS3, but couldn't afford to do so.

Xbox 360 has three CPUs, which is why the Xbox 360 has a lot more General Purpose CPU power. This is the reason why Ubisoft and Tecmo have repeatedly said that games like Assassins Creed will have better artificial intelligence on the Xbox 360.

stephentur, is 100% correct when he talks about the superiority of the Xbox 360 RAM. The Xbox 360 RAM advantage of being able to use up to 512MB of RAM for the CPU at any time is a very large advantage. The Playstation 3 CPU can never access more than 256MB of RAM at a time, which is why so many Playstation 3 games have framerate problems. Games that are perfectly smooth on the Xbox 360, like Call of Duty 3 and F.E.A.R. are terribly choppy on the Playstation 3.

ShaleX, you should know that the developers of Lair were recently interviewed and they pointed out that it is quite easy to port an exclusive PS3 game to the Xbox 360, because the Xbox 360 is more than capable of handling anything designed to run on the Playstation 3. However, those developers also go on to say that it is often very difficult to port an Xbox 360 exclusive game to the Playstation 3, because the Playstation 3 is much more difficult to program games for and doesn't have the necessary hardware resources. An great example is the way the Xbox 360 can display 500,000,000 polygons per second, while the Playstation 3 can only display 275,000,000 polygons per second. Another example is the way an Xbox 360 exclusive game would often have the CPU using a lot more than 256MB of RAM, while the PS3 would always be limited to 256MB. This is one of the reasons why Epic said Gears of War could never be achieved on the Playstation 3.

The Xbox 360 is getting so much more third-party support than the Playstation 3. This really is a great time to be an Xbox 360 owner, and a poor time to be a Playstation 3 owner.

I sure am looking forward to Splinter Cell: Conviction, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Command & Conquer 3, and Two Worlds!

Its not the memory that gives 360 better AI, its the processor.

360 has 3 powerful multi-purpose power pc cores, any of which can handle AI type math pretty easily.

The PS3 only has 1 power pc core, and i think 7 but only 5 active SPE cores? Either way they arnt as multipurpose as the 360s, and thus cant calculate AI as well. But PS3 owners can feel safe in the knowledge that they can run Folding@Home pretty quickly, but not as quick as most decent graphics cards :P.

Id just like to say Williams post at #9 is an excellent explanation of the difference between the consoles, and the exact reason PS3 owners drive me nuts over system performance, they just don't understand!

Well spoken William!

Now, to try your patience, run over to ps3fanboy and repeat it. Be prepared to watch heads spin, mouths foam, and get IP banned for speaking the truth.

thanks william for the explaination. i've been on the fence lately as to what console to purchase but this really sums it up. thanks again!

@ Steven: "Its not the memory that gives 360 better AI, its the processor."

@ William Said: "Xbox 360 has three CPUs, which is why the Xbox 360 has a lot more General Purpose CPU power. This is the reason why Ubisoft and Tecmo have repeatedly said that games like Assassins Creed will have better artificial intelligence on the Xbox 360."

Damn...learn how to read.

*William said:

To add more fuel to Sony's fire, don't forget about the ATI gpu in the 360 that clearly beats the nividia gpu in the PS3. The gpu has an extra 10MB EDRAM on the chip that gives the gpu core a true 256GB/sec bandwidth for compression. The PS3 only has about 25GB/sec to its 256MB VRAM.

Williams novel is good, but it misses some key points

AI:
True, the Xbox can have the cpu use more than 256 MB while the PS3 cannot, but to do this the Xbox will necessarily have to reduce the amount of RAM available for graphics to less than 256. The Xbox allows more flexibility in the tradeoff (a smarter, uglier game or a pretty, stupid game) while the PS3 somewhat mandates a specific performance level for both: 256 for video, 256 for cpu. So if a game is truly doing AI that the PS3 cannot, it is doing so by reducing the graphical quality (a simplification, of course, but generally true).

RAM and development:
Factor 5's statement was more along the lines of: if you code for the PS3, you can port that code to the Xbox fairly easily since you can allocate RAM however you want. The reverse is harder, however, as their is less flexibility in how you use the RAM. They weren't saying the 360 is more powerful, just more flexible, and that multiplatform developers would be smarter to code for the PS3 and port to the 360 rather than the other way around. So when developers say a game couldn't be done on the PS3, it really just means they couldn't simply "port it" or code it in the same way, not that it wouldn't be possible. What Factor 5 said is that if companies are simply porting 360 games to the PS3, they are going to look a bit worse almost by default: developers need to code for the PS3 specifically. Even if many developers remain lazy, having marginally better ports of PC games didn't seem to help the original Xbox against the inferior PS2. This is not too different than multiplatform developers making sure their games fit on a DVD even though they have far more room with Blu-ray: if they code for 25GB+ of space, it will be a bitch to work out on the 360 (and multiple DVDs is not always possible).

Processing Power
That the Xbox can display 500 million polygons per second during gameplay while the PS3 can only display 275 million is simply untrue. Do you have a source for this? Obviously, Gears of War aside (maybe), Resistance and Motorstorm look as good as the best of what the 360 has offered so far. If the Xbox 360 has so much more raw processing power and is so much easier to program for, why do the games for both systems look pretty much the same? Obviously, if the Xbox really had double the RAM and double the processing power, it would be evidenced in the games. My point being that the processing nuances of both systems are not as simplified as you present them. Primarily, for many tasks, the PS3's SPEs ARE more efficient than the 360's general purpose CPU's.

At the end of the day it will all come down to roughly equivalent graphics and thus the games. The Xbox 360 is in a much better position than the original Xbox in this regard, but the same problem of a shooter/PC port heavy lineup that only appeals to a very specific demographic still lingers. Obviously Sony is still in an infant-type phase regarding their lineup, so things seem good for MS right now but if the Wii is proving anything it's that the industry's old style focus on guns and graphics may be a dead end after all. We'll see.

James: does Gears of war have stupid A.I. when it completely owns Resistance or Mortorstorm graphically?

People really need to stop saying that RFOM looks "just as good as the best the 360 has to offer"... the PS3 was in existance just as long as the 360... Sony couldn't make the Blu-Ray tech in time for a launch when the 360 did... The developers were/could write there games years ago... the GPU in the PS3 has been around for a while and is nothing different to program for... the Cell wasn't new... actually the PS3 launch games had TONS of time to get the games together while Sony was trying to get things going. I totally expect the first offering of PS3 games to look good... they had the extra year just to play with their games and make them look better while Sony was trying to jam the Blu-Ray player in and get DRM figured out for it.

I wouldn't expect the PS3 games to look much better then they do now...

Why does James even post here? We all know he hates the Xbox 360...

If it weren't for the fact that I'm not infantile and have a live, I'd start doing the same thing he does on PS3fanboy.com and post negative comments every day of the week.

supposed to act like fanboys all the time, but my point was simply that while Gears looks better than most games, it's not mind-blowingly better, but the information presented above would have one believe it should be blowing 1st gen PS3 games out of the water. Despite your terminology, looking at things without fanboy lenses, it is not. Gears aside, the graphic distinctions start to evaporate between 360's best and PS3's best which just couldn't happen if everything William said was true. In essence, I'm saying the processing power thing is pretty nuanced and complicated and in the end the best for both systems will likely look roughly equivalent so people like us who don't write games for these systems should probably just stay away from armchair software engineering.

And I think you have me confused with another James... this is the first time I've ever posted here, actually. And while I may be dousing the fanboy fires a bit, I'm just trying to make sure that an even-handed opionion was presented. A lot of what William said was correct, just a bit slanted (IMO). If the 360 has "twice the available RAM" and "twice the polygon power" then 360 programmers must be the worst in the world because their games aren't looking that much better than those on a system "half" as powerful. Obviously, the programmers are fine, but the statements about the relative processing power of the two systems was a bit misleading. That's all I'm saying.

I can't wait for this.

Got my 360 recently, and have been playing the heck out of R6V, GRAW2, and SC:DA. I love these games.

My (other) work has suffered :)

@Jason

"I wouldn't expect the PS3 games to look much better then they do now..."

LoL...that's the equivalent of saying you didn't expect 360 games to look much better than the launch games. While the knowledge of the PS3 was in existence as long as the 360 has, the game developers for the PS3 had to deal with changing specifications of the PS3 while it was in the development process and Sony wasn't offering as much development tool s to aid them as Microsoft did with the 360. As a result, the PS3 games haven't been utilizing the PS3's hardware as well as they could have been. Now, game developers have the final specs of the PS3, so they don't have to develop games for a "moving target" and Sony is improving the tools they offer them. If you want me to be honest, I don't think 360 games can improve much after Halo 3. I believe the 360 is near its potential, while the PS3 has greater possibilities fr improvement. The 360 was designed to reach its potential now, the PS3 was designed for long-term potential.

The Guy... Don't forget too that the whole idea of developing "next gen" games isn't platform specific... Studios learned with 360 how to design games with better hardware... regardless of which machine it was... Most likely studios needed new tools to develop higher res graphics for the next gen games... that isn't specific to the 360... and who cares about moving target... they had dev kits... the only final issue was blu-ray and DRM which has nothing to do with games.

And the fact that PS3 developers didn't get much from Sony just helps prove the fact that the 360 is better for game developers... Microsoft is commited to making game development easy on the 360... Sony isn't quite the same.

@Jason

Well...you're probably right about Microsoft being more developer-friendly than Sony. Sony created the PS3 with an engineering focus, which lead to the use of things like Cell which hasn't been easy for game developers to use. For Microsoft, they made the 360 to be more developer-friendly. While that is currently hurting Sony with their games, it'll lead to greater improvements of games in the future than the 360. With more complex software, Sony couldn't offer tools that utilized the hardware as well as the 360 could in the beginning. As I said before, Sony is looking for long-term potential with the PS3.

I think it is kind of funny when ps3 fanboys say that Resistance is a good game. The graphics remind me of Doom 1, though the gameplay is worse...

@TheGuy

Hahaha, that's a good one, do either of you sony fanboys have anything to back any of your crap up? No, you don't. There's no "mysterious, godlike potential" locked away in the PS3. Why don't you do some research before you post something that's just gonna make you look stupid. The FACT is that the 360's GPU is FAR SUPERIOR to the PS3's. Why don't you go back to PS3 Fanboy where ignorance, stupidity, and BLIND LOYALTY is more acceptable.

Could we get this on MS-bashing Slashdot somehow to counter the story today that bashed the 360 in the headline and reserved the caveat that the PS3 caused development difficulties as well for the fine print? Digg this: http://xbox.joystiq.com/2007/05/07/ubisoft-says-conviction-cant-be-done-on-ps3/(Slashdot story: http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/05/07/1528220.shtml )

@The Guy... "Long Term Potential"??? How is that possible with a GPU that was outdated before the machine even launched?

2-3 years from now there will be a new XBOX right around the corner and it will probably cost about the same as the 360... it will be next-next gen and you PS3 fans will still be talking about "long term potential" of the PS3 while we are all getting ready for the true FUTURE of video games. I don't expect a console to last more than 4 or 5 years period... video cards on a PC are outdated before they even get to the shelf...

Sony took the wrong road by cramming expensive tech into the PS3 and skimping on the import part (GPU)... I can justify spending 400 bucks per gen on a console but no 700... Here we are going on two years of the 360 and we are going to get some truley GREAT games in the fall... Then I would expect MS to start working on the next XBOX and getting it out a year or two after this fall... maybe by then your PS3 will finally be reaching its potential and the next-next gen will pass it right by!

When has a console EVER been maxed out in its second years. the best is ALWAYS at the end of the consoles cycle. If 360 only gets 5 years in cool with that, because thats how its always been. No need to start bytching now.

To the Jason and TheGuy, about your conversation-
If developers had dev kits with the final PS3 specs at the time of the 360 launch your arguement would be valid. Alas, I'm not sure if that is true or not. Can anyone say for sure that the devs did have the final dev kits? Anywho, it doesnt matter because I think they both look good.

@Martin

1. You may claim I'm acting like a fanboy, but your the one being immature with that post.

2. While most agree the 360 GPU is better than RSX, it's not "FAR SUPERIOR". In fact, it can be argued that both are relatively equal in that each has their own strengths and weaknesses. But for the sake of this argument, I'll say the 360 GPU is a little better than the RSX. However, the Cell processor is capable of being a lot better than the 360s CPU. I read Lair only used 30% of the capabilities of Cell, while it's around 90% with recent 360 games like Gears of War. Let's not forget, since 360 games are confined to a DVD disk they require greater compression which will require more of the 360s CPU resources to be needed specifically for that, while that won't be necessary for the PS3 with Blu-Ray. PS3 games can also better utilize a hard drive for faster load times, while 360 games have to be made without using it since the "Core" 360 doesn't have a hard drive. I'm not claiming the potential of the PS3 will make PS3 game compare to 360 games like Gears of War vs. Halo 1, but the capability is there for a noticeably greater quality in PS3 games than 360 games.

@Jason

So your saying that it's better to create consoles with short-term life spans than those with long-term life spans. Besides Nintendo, I find that hard to believe. Do you know how expensive the development of a new console is? Console makers want to milk their current console for as much as they can before they go next-gen. That's why Sony incorporated technology like Cell and Blu-Ray into the PS3, so it would last longer as Sony's current-gen console. Besides if that's what your expecting from consoles I think your better-off as a PC gamer, no offense.

I was reading James' post and stumbled on this part:

"Processing Power
That the Xbox can display 500 million polygons per second during gameplay while the PS3 can only display 275 million is simply untrue. Do you have a source for this? Obviously, Gears of War aside (maybe), Resistance and Motorstorm look as good as the best of what the 360 has offered so far."

That's like saying: "Atom bomb aside, what did the US arsenal of weaponry have that the Japanese did not."

I'm not exactly picking a side here, though. I believe it all comes down to exclusivity. A game is deemed exclusive, it is built around the architecture of its one console, and that's that. Six months down the road the company thinks about porting it, but sees that, because they used the console to its fullest by programming for the architecture, the game would have to be utterly re-created to be as good as the original as a port. This happens all the time and is the reason we get crappy ports at launches.

The perfect example of what I am speaking of is Resident Evil 4. It was built around the GameCube's architecture and had stunning visuals, AI, and performance. The game was later ported to the PS2, and while maintaining a lot of the source material well, there were slight differences in the versions.

Ok, RAM and AI have little to do with one-another - there is some ram required to thread tasks, but this is not significant.

RAM is mostly used by resources, textures, models, sounds, music. The PS3 is limited in this split moreso that the 360. If you do not need lots of model data, you can shift some ram to the video pipeline.

As it's based on DX10 technology the 360's video card is able to handle the meshes and their deformations, and it is likely that high end games like gow make use of this.

Both of the core CPUs have their strengths. The PS3's Cell is better for 'predictable' code, things like physics, where something moves along a trajectory are what it does best. Code that is more unpredictable needs to be passed to the PPC chip.

The Blu-Ray debate is void - anyone claiming they need more than DVD9 is pulling your leg. The repeated proof is that PC games rarely come larger than a single layer DVD. the only thing Blu-Ray is useful for is delivering once off HD cut-scenes. Developers don't have the resources to create more data at the current uptake rate of consoles, which is one reason why Live Arcade has taken off so quickly.

Compressed textures / meshes don't make a lick of difference. The videocards in both the PS3 and 360 use compression on textures internally. Leaving your textures uncompressed would only force the PS3 to compress them. This argument actually shows how stupid the blu-ray argument is - the PS3 can only display 256 megs of textures at a time. Streaming textures from blu-ray to the video-card is too slow (even from RAM to VRAM causes problems). So how do these textures actually get used? In a game like GTAIV assets will be streamed as you visit different areas of the map - at every position of the map, only 256 megs of data can be visible. Distance fogging can help here, as can procedural textures. But the limitation remains. In reality far less than 256 megs is available - textures for vehicles and characters and the interface are kept in memory so the game doesn't lag when it has to display objects, some space is kept free to 'stream' data into.

Once you have an idea of how large resources actually are, and how it can stream in, you start to realise how large a game world would have to be to actually use 25 gigs of data and how unfeasable it would be to create.

James,

I suggest you read what William was saying a second time.

William was NOT saying that the Xbox 360 has TWICE the amount of total RAM that the Playstation 3 has. William was simply pointing out how the Xbox 360 has a much better RAM architecture than the Playstation 3.

William specifically said that the Playstation 3 has a bottleneck of only 256MB of CPU RAM. He specifically pointed out that many games currently have a need for more than 256MB of CPU RAM. When needs like that arise, the Xbox 360 has the ability to use its much better 512MB of Unified RAM to help the CPU out, giving it more than 256MB of RAM when the need arises.

Yes, it’s true that when the Xbox 360 CPU has a need for more than 256MB of RAM, it reduces the amount of RAM potentially available for other uses; that goes without saying. But CPU RAM is CRUCIAL! There are MANY times when more than 256MB of CPU RAM is needed, often times when FAR less than 256MB of Video RAM is needed. The Playstation 3’s Non-Unified RAM is NOT efficient and NOT flexible when compared to the superior design of the Xbox 360 Unified RAM.

Think of it like this: The Playstation 3 will never be in a position where all 512MB of RAM are being used in the perfectly balanced way the developers would want; there will always be some RAM that is not being used, which means it is being wasted. But the Xbox 360 will always be in a position where the developers can use all 512MB of RAM in any way they want. No RAM is left unused or wasted with the superior architecture of the Xbox 360.

The lack of CPU RAM is what hurts the Playstation 3 more than anything else when there is all of that slowdown with all of the framerate problems. James, in case you haven't noticed, Motorstorm on the PS3 has a choppy framerate. Motorstorm is considered a disappointment because it didn't live up to the hype. The reviews for Motorstorm specifically point out that "graphics are not the strongpoint of the game."

Resistance: FOM on the Playstation 3 isn't even in the same league as games like Gears of War, Lost Planet, and Crackdown. Resistance was given a 6 out of 10 by some of the reviews; it's not an impressive game. Just look at the way the Independent Playstation Magazine did a side by side comparison of the Playstation 3 games and the Xbox 360 games, and they showed Resistance: FOM next to Gears of War. The editors said Resistance does NOT come close to the best games on the Xbox 360. It showed a side-by-side picture of how Gears of War looks MUCH better than anything on the PS3. Gears of War is a PERFECT example of how the Xbox 360 has access to 500,000,000 polygons per second, while the Playstation 3 only has access to 275,000,000 polygons per second.

There are TWO other reasons why the Xbox 360 has RAM superiority over the Playstation 3.

First, the Xbox 360 Operating System is dedicated to gaming when it is functioning. It takes up only 32MB of RAM. The Playstation 3 Operating System takes up a whopping 96MB of RAM! That is a HUGE waste of RAM! It leaves the PS3 with only 416MB of RAM to work with, while the Xbox 360 has 480MB of RAM. That is one of the reasons why the multi-platform games end up worse on the Playstation 3, particularly with the disappointing framerates. Playstation 3 really is developing a nasty reputation for having poor framerates because of a lack of CPU RAM and a lack of polygon power.

Second, the Xbox 360 has 10MB of eDRAM that is incredibly efficient at helping the Xbox 360 display graphics. Playstation 3 doesn't have anything similar to eDRAM like that; it is a big advantage to help the Xbox 360 with framerates and polygon display smoothness.

I agree with people who say that we just need to look at the performance of the games. The multi-platform third-party games are better on the Xbox 360. Many times, the third-party games released on both systems are a LOT better on the Xbox 360. For proof of this, just look at how awesome the PC and Xbox 360 versions of F.E.A.R. are, but how worthless the Playstation 3 version is. When you look at third-party multiplatform games like F.E.A.R. and Xbox 360 exclusive games like Lost Planet, Crackdown, Gears of War, Mass Effect, and Splinter Cell: Conviction, then there is no doubt that the Xbox 360 offers better graphic performance. And when you look at how much better the online performance of Xbox Live is, it really isn’t even worth a debate. The bottom line is that the Xbox 360 has the best games and Xbox Live is the best online service. If you want the best, the Xbox 360 is the best.

Here is a hyperlink that proves Ubisoft is making the right choice by acknowledging it wouldn't be a good idea to release Splinter Cell: Conviction for the Playstation 3:

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3158930

If the Playstation 3 versions of games like F.E.A.R. are so much inferior to the Xbox 360 and PC versions, it really would be a dumb decision to release a game like Conviction for the Playstation 3.

It would be selfish for PS3 owners to ask for a game like Splinter Cell: Conviction to be released multiplatform, because the PS3 version of the game wouldn't look nearly as good as it does on the Xbox 360, and the developers would be forced to lower the graphic standards in the Xbox 360 version.

I would rather have the game as an exclusive for the Xbox 360 and make sure it stays so incredible in ways that only the Xbox 360 can offer, in terms of both graphics and online play!

You 360 fanyboys are amazing... Dont you guys remember how plain the first 360 games looked whey they released. People were still buying PS2s at that time so what does that they say?..

The only reason Ubisoft is siding with 360 is because they are lazy and more comfortable with developing games right now with the 360 rather than the PS3. Developers were saying how difficult the PS2 was hard to develope for in the beginning too. Remind yourselves that the 360 has been out almost a year and a half while the PS3 has been out not even 6 months. The games isnt that much different besides the frame rate and lighting...

Now, you guys are so stuck on the RAM and etc. Why dont you ask yourselves, how many games do you think will be developed for the 360 in the future when they can only be stored on 9GB DVDs (cough...GTA4).

Trust me, we will not be having this converstion after first year life of the PS3 arrives. GoW maybe the game of 2006 but MGS4 will be the game of 2007...

Its ok though, you guys can keep this little "victory". The war is far from over!!!!

Here's a question... is posting all of this crap about which system is better on a xbox 360 FANBOY site really going to make a difference?... i would say 90% of the readers are already convinced the 360 is better, and the other 10% are most likely going to disagree cuz theyre ps3 fanboys. Oh and i love how we complain about "ps3 fanboys" posting comments on here, and then we start saying stuff like "go post that on the ps3 fanboy site, show em' who's boss." Are they really going to read our arguments and be like "really? oh okay i didn't know that, thanks for letting me know though... i'm gonna go craigs list my ps3 and get a 360 RIGHT NOW! WOO!" ...obviously the answer i'm hoping you guys come up with is no, theyre just going to retaliate with opposing arguments and use Factor 5 and Lair as an example. With all that said... Ubisoft is like +2 points in my eyes after that...i mean, i am a 360 fanboy afterall.

Take that PS3 TROLLS!!!!

Ok I see a lot of arguing about the architecture of the 360. Here is a blog I posted to one of my friends highlighting benefits of the 360's architecture over the PS3 and the positives of xbox's design. Though the info is accurate as I can tell, it is geared towards being pro 360 so keep that in mind. My friend was suppose to do a counter article but never did it so I cannot post a counter and do not feel like researching it at this time. Yes it's a lot but I'm an engineer student and love this stuff. I use citations as well so check out the articles listed if you want to learn more. Take it as it is as I do not outline many of the PS3's benefits. I will say this though, the cell will not fully realized in the PS3's lifetime. IBM, part creators of the cell, cannot write an operation to 100% efficiency of the architecture. They can get the SPE's to 98% efficiency using a optimized parallel Matrix Multiplication, which is extremely linear and very unlike the majority of code used in a game. The system as a whole is less efficient than the 98% stated. Designing a game to come close to said efficiency will never happen. It will certainly improve from where it currently is but designing such a game would take more time and money than any company would ever put into it. Multithreaded operations have been giving engineers and mathematicians are hard time for the last 20 plus years and the cell is harder to work with than what they have been dealing with. It will get better but I believe cell is ahead of it's time. On to the reason I posted. Get ready for a long one.

I think the microprocessors are the most misleading aspect of each machine so I will go through those first. The one thing I hear over and over is the Floating Point Performance of the cell, 204 GFLOPS. Yes this is an impressive number but a few things must be taken into consideration. That number is for a full Cell processor where the1 Power Processor Element (PPE) and ALL 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE's) are active. In the PS3 1 SPE is disabled to improve yields in the event one doesn't work and another SPE is dedicated solely to running the OS of the PS3 and in some cases the OS can and will borrow an extra SPE. Each SPE contributes approximately 25.6 GFLOPS of performance, so factoring the loss of two SPE's we arrive at 152.8 GFLOPS of theoretical performance ( dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=4 ). That's an almost 25% performance hit right of the bat, ouch. Not to mention that IBM has yet to get hit that 204 GFLOPS with a full cell processor even using specialized coding designed for the sole purpose of making that number as high as possible. This meaning of course games will never come close to such theoretical values, though the PS3 should definitely outperform the 360 (115 GFLOPS) in this area. Floating point performance also is not as important as one might think. The PS2 had twice the power of the xbox's celeron in this regard and it certainly didn't seem to hurt the xbox graphically or otherwise now did it. An interesting quote, "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." - www.rojo.com/story/My3j9I-kR-N8Jxw_. MS is aiming for a new kind of coding, namely procedural synthesis, to make up a lot of their games and is getting away from these inefficient and archaic means of programming certain things, textures especially. Such methods or much more efficient on space and has the benefit of creating a more dynamic and realistic background, though I'll explain more on this later.

This though is one of the reason, as well as MS is using more advanced compression schemes ( just like they are in HD movies, VC-1 vs MPEG2) that the PS3 will definitely need a bluray drive, whereas very few games, unless ridden with a good amount of High Def CGI scenes or poor coding should go over one DVD. The Final Fantasy series would probably use at least two DVDs. As you can see I listed integer performance as important, which is good for the 360 as it has over 3x the integer performance of the cell. See those loads and store times I listed up there? The cells SPE's do not have direct access to the memory which makes data storage tight especially when you consider the meager 512kb cache being shared by the PPE and SPE's is used up. Granted there is a performance hit for using the RAM I would suppose it would be nice to have the option. The 360 has 1 MB of cache shared between the 3 cores, which is cache coherent allowing any core or the GPU to pull data from the cache, whereas the PS3 has 8 processors sharing that 512 KB of cache. This will make storing data much more difficult and certainly be a nice challenge for programmers. Game programming for the cpu in general relies much more on the calculation of data, running usually nonlinear code, AI or collision detection than the type of coding the Cell was designed for. Granted the cell does have an on board memory controller which is very nifty and a saving grace of the cell, the latency obtained by there cache setup is going to make it much less efficient than the 360 when it comes to accessing needed data for processing and for the type of code used in games is going to slow down the processor significantly as it cannot read and write the data to efficiently to the cache as it will be filled to the brim in many instances.

On to branch prediction which is going to be quite an extensive bit of code used for any game. Both processors actually inefficient at this compared to the one is your pc, unless it's a dinosaur (Pentium 1 was the last strict order cpu). When an error in data handling occurs, which is inevitable, the PS3 is going to have a more difficult time dealing with said scenario. This just creates more latency and is going to further hinder the performance. One of the worst parts of both processors is they are not out of order execution processors. This hurts AI and other logic oriented coding more than anything and makes both much much harder to write code for as the programmers have to delegate instructions meticulously to the cpu otherwise you are going to get a huge latency issue which corresponds to a huge performance hit which would be worse on a PS3 SPE. The 360 does have a specialized 128 vmx (designed for MS) unit and a 4kb branch history table that at least keep it from being a full out strict unit cpu and is something that will greatly benefit the programmers and should dramatically increase performance compared to the cell when dealing with loops and if statements and the likes of that. Here is a link to some pretty graphs and stuff if you don't believe me on what I'm saying xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p3.html. One more advantage of the 360's cpu's cache, it can be accessed by the gpu which means that RAM (huge bottleneck) can be bypassed completely and makes procedural synthesis (PS) run extremely efficiently. Both cores are going to be difficult for programmers as multi threaded applications development has been going on for over 20 years by some very smart people with not a whole lot of breakthroughs in getting a linear benefit out of them with besides a few exceptions like media encoding. Gaming requires lots of logic, branch predictions and out of order computing that both processors aren't particularly great at, though the 360 should have a decisive victory ( Assassins Creed developers reported the 360 version will have better AI even though it was originally a PS3 exclusive, check www.joystiq.com for link ). The 360 processor is also geared more towards Procedural Synthesis and I'll explain to you how awesome this in after I get down with the GPU as they are related.

Ok, onto the GPU. This is where things get interesting. Now while CPU admittedly does require a good deal of speculation and drawing conclusions based on what I know (and others) about programming and hardware, there is a lot more info on the GPU and can easily be correlated with others produced my NVIDIA and ATI, though more so NVIDIA. A lot of tech journals and blogs and even a NVIDIA spokesperson ( www.theinquirer.net/?article=25838 ) have said the RSX GPU is just a less powerful 7800GTX. This means that you are already getting dated technology in your PS3 as since NVIDIA has launched a 7900 series and currently offer a 8800 series GPU. So your the PS3 is only two generations behind what is currently available for PC the second it debuted. They even recently change the core frequency from 550 MHz to 500 MHz, the same as the Xenos and the Xenos was more powerful than the RSX before it took the hit in clock speed. The Xenos GPU on the other hand uses technology that is yet not available for any GPU on the market today and even some that will not make it into this upcoming generation, like its eDRAM. Talk about cutting edge eh? The PS3 uses DX9 and Shadermodel 3.0 capabilities just like it's 7800 counterpart where as the Xenos uses many DX10 features (unified shader support, shared ram etc ) and Shadermodel 4.0 abilities and the only thing keeping it from being designated as such is missing a few PC abilities not needed for a console. Advanced features of such architecture include a unified architecture for one. The Xenos has direct access to the CPU's 1 MB of cache and RAM, though the unique ability to bypass the RAM as mentioned above, a bottleneck of consequential magnitude I assure you, makes rendering and procedural synthesis run much more efficiently as well as general communication between CPU and GPU takes a huge jump in speed. Not to mention that the 360 has custom D3D and Dot product instructions and also the Xenos handles vector5's or 5 operations per cycle where as the RSX uses verctor4's or four operations per cycle. You add that up and the Xenos is a beast compared to the RSX in vector and computations in general and more flexible as it can offload certain calculations that would normally be designated for the CPU. Many of these features are only available currently on the 8800 NVIDIA cards and upcomg R600 core from ATI.


Onto ALU's (arithmetic logic unit) of the GPU. Responsible for doing vector calculations, integer arithmetic, and bitwise logic operations. The RSX has 52 ALU's (24 pixel shading pixel pipes capable of two operations per cycle and 4 vertex pipes capable of 52) to the Xenos 48. However the Xenos is a unified architecture which means that any of the ALU's can be
used for either vertex orpixel shader operations where the RSX has twelve of thirteen ALU's devoted to pixel and rest to vertex. So if a scene requires mostly vertex shaders the pixel shaders of the RSX must remain idle where the Xenos can go full out. The best part of it is the developers do not have to designate what pipes do what as the Xenos does it for them, no special programming required. The Xenos can run at full steam no matter what scene you throw at it unlike it less competent counterpart RSX. Let us do some math shall we. Lets look at how much GLOPS each GPU can do. It is going to be more relevant here than it is on CPU front. PS3 would be 52 ALU ops * 4 floats per op *2 (madd) * 500 MHz = 208. GFLOPS which is less than the Xbox 360's 48 ALU ops * 5 floats per op * 2 (madd) * 500 MHz = 240 GFLOPS. MADD stands for multiply add so you know. But wait there is more of course. For shader operations per clock, Sony is most likely counting each pixel pipe as four ALU operations (co-issued vector+scalar) and a texture operation per pixel pipe and 4 scalar operations for each vector pipe, for a total of 24 * (4 + 1) +(4*4) = 136 operations per cycle or 136 * 500 = 68.0 GOps per second. Given the Xbox 360 GPU's multi-threading and balanced design, you really can't compare the two systems in terms of shading operations per clock. However, the Xbox 360's GPU can do 48 ALU operations (each can do a vector5 and scalar op per clock), 16 texture fetches, 32 control flow operations, and 16 programmable vertex fetch operations with tessellation per clock for a total of 48*2 +16 + 32 + 16 = 160 operations per cycle or 160 * 500 = 80 GOps per second. In both instances you get some serious benefits with the 360. Again, the Xenos is quite possibly the most efficient GPU in existence because of its unified shaders and it is realistic to expect it to run very close to 100% efficiency while the RSX will never be able to do such. So in real world performance the gap in above numbers should definitely widen. When you take into account that the GPU and CPU can communicate directly over RAM and even better yet cache, you are looking at an incredibly fast and efficient architecture.

Now we'll talk about eDRAM. This is something else that the Xenos has and will not be used on PC's for a while as reported that it is hard to do on a non-closed system and is best suited for consoles. The Xenos has 10mb of eDRAM connected to the GPU through a 256 GB/s frame buffer bus (Higher than the 8800's and 5x that of the RSX). Damn is right. For starters this allows 4xAA (Anti Aliasing which eliminates jagged lines and produces an overall sharper image), HDR (High Dynamic Range lighting, which creates more realistic lighting effects), and Z buffering (determines depth of objects) to all be done with almost zero impact on performance. With such a huge bus the eDRAM can take the image, enhance it and push it wherever it need to go with literally almost no negative side effects and in fact frees up RAM for the GPU and CPU further widening it's lead over the PS3 in this regard. All 360 games are required to take advantage of this. So obviously the 360 has more bandwidth than the PS3. It also uses it more efficiently. For example to get 720P with 4XFSAA on traditional architecture would require 28MB worth of memory. On the 360 only 16MB is required. There are also features in the 360's Direct3D API where developers are able to fit 2 128x128 textures into the same space required for one, for example. So even with all the memory and all the memory bandwidth, they are still very mindful of how it's used. ( dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=8 ). The Xenos has so many DX10 features that make it a much more advanced GPU. The RSX was out of date a while ago where there is still nothing like the Xenos in the pc market.



The 360 also has more memory for textures. The RSX directly has 256 MB of ram to work with and another 256 or XDRAM that can be accessed if need but at a performance penalty. The PS3 OS take up 64MB of XDRAM used by the CPU and 32MB of the GDRAM used for by the GPU, whereas the Xenos can use the full 512 MB of RAM with the exception of the 32 MB being used by the 360's OS. Besides the fact the 360 is more efficient with RAM as said above, it has more of it to work with and does not get that slow down if it need to access more than 256, which is the case in Gears of War. The 360 has much more texture memory to work with even if it wasn't more conservative with it.


Bluray is another feature that has been touted by PS3 fans. The 2x Bluray drive has a constant read speed of 9MB/s because it is CLV (Constant Linear Velocity) where as the 12x DVD drive average read speed wit be 12.1 MB/s at least. 16MB/s for outer DVD and 8.2MB/s ( (16 + 8.2)/2 = 12.1 . So the 360's drive is over 33% faster which will help drive load times down. Not to mention that the 360 has more cache to stream content greatly improving load times and making them less frequent and on to of that if you have a full 25GB bluray disk you have a shit ton of loading to do. No load times in gears of war and I loved it.



Final topic, Procedural Synthesis. This is the technology that if implemented properly will truly make the 360 leaps and bounds above the PS3. Instead of storing textures and reoccurring objects like trees and buildings, it can generate them on the fly and dynamically with special algorithms. So my version of the game will look different than yours due to the dynamic rendering of the objects. This cuts down or needed storage capacity tremendously. Just look at this game .kkrieger ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger ), it only take up 97KB of data. That is insane compared to what current methods would need. For another look at what it can do read about this game SPORE ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_%28video_game%29 ). The foliage in Oblivion is all rendered via PS and looks incredible. This technique holds so much promise to revolutionize graphics. MS has filed for several patents for techniques for using the method which apply to the 360 and their next gen system. This will make games take up less space, look better and more varied and create a more unique experience for gamers. The way the CPU works, the GPU runs, and the way they communicate with each other are aimed at taking advantage of PS. That's likely one reason why the Xenos can do so much calculating for a GPU. Current ATI x1000 series GPU's can and are used for folding at home ( Calculates what a protein will do under certain circumstances and was until recently only done with CPU's). Once developers can get at least decent with PS we are in for a treat and will see things much beyond what a PS3 can bring us as far as what I know tells me, but I don't know it all for sure.

@jaysins
Damn, i actually read all of that...quite interesting. Even if all of it was a bunch of b.s., it still makes me feel good about my beautiful white box.

Very very good article to both Jaysin and the earlier poster, thomas? Sorry, I've forgotten who.

I'm glad you've provided a nice technical basis for why the xbox 360 is better for games and helping demolish the 'mythic' 'hidden' potential that ps3 fanboys have been touting on about :)

I also like that you've cited it with several links, examples and technical references versus statistics without references.

My guess is another playstation 3 fan boy will respond just after I write this asking 'How can you prove it? huh? you can't! Its all bs! even the links at ign.com! Fabricated! Lies! All Lies!'

Honestly, I hope that xbox360fanboy will use the three good pro xbox 360 posts in this thread to generate an article for posting on joystiq.com, xbox360fanboy.com and I dunno maybe some other larger gaming websites like gamespot or ign to help bash out the misbelief of playstation 3 graphical superiority.

Lol, congrats on reading all of that, that's quite a feat. Well I cited everything and put a lot of time into researching the technology and developers opinions and seeing what made sense, so if any of it is wrong I certainly apologize, I did try to make it as factual as possible but I do neglect the PS3 advantages, which I honestly am not as well read up on.

I think both companies went a different route with storage. PS3 w/ bluray and MS with procedural synthesis and advance compression techniques. I prefer the route of procedural personally. Look at oblivion. 120+ hours of gameplay, incredible AI, the forests and plant life is rendered procedurally and this entire game take up about one layer of the DVD. Spore depends on procedural synthesis as well. It's a really cool way to make games and helps cut back on development costs as artists don't have to do as much. As coding becomes more elegant for procedural synthesis it should also help reduce loading times as well as give us more detailed textures and free up a ton of disk space like it did with Oblivion. Speedtree is the company that actually specializes in PS and developed the logarithms used for oblivion. And to my knowledge they weren't extensively tailored to the 360 or PS3's architecture so we could see some huge performance boosts from more time being put into making better and more efficient code, especially the load times on oblivion for the 360, ugh. Like how the havok physics engine got a huge performance boost recently on all three consoles with it's latest iteration, especially the PS3.

The havock engine...? Was that the name of oblivion's engine? or was that fear's engine? It sounds very familiar.

BTW, Would you mind if I repost your long-winded hehe pro xbox 360 technical basis as a reply to the ps3 fanboy topic 'Ubisoft says splinter cellconviction couldn't be done on a ps3?' if I cite you as the writer?

The only reason I ask is that people on the ps3 board are posting the fairly logical questions in regards to this news like, "You shouldn't just make negative statments without providing basis for the 360 being better than the ps3. There is no evidence, is there?"

To which your post seems like a fair answer.

Scrolling through jaysins's comment was like staring into THE MATRIX. Hehehe I can see it all so clearly now!

James :)...Well said mate..I read alot about the power of 360's and ps3's, I know my shit..I have never seen the 500,000 vs 275,000 polygons/sec statement either. (not from a respected site anyways , which i visit daily). So I agree wholeheartedly at everything you said, for it is true :)..The 'others' on here that are fanboys obviously would challenge..obviously that would be because we are on a site for fanboys I figure..lol...duh.but, having said that..ppl need to know the truth..and you have stated it.

I would just link them to this page as a detailed write up on how the 360 is superior is not exactly proper for a ps3 fanboy site. Like how it seems odd that we get overly biased ps3 fans posting on this site. If the issue comes up on joystiq or kotaku feel free.

Havoc is a physics engine, a very popular one at that and quite good, and just recently got a huge overhaul for consoles. It is used in a ton of games, Crackdown for example. For the PS3 they made it run over I think around 7x faster but I'm not sure if that number is totally correct. It now runs several times faster on the 360. You won't see it being used in any games though until the next year or so.