Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PS3 - A Hardware Discussion
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 24, 2005 4:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Will Sony Deliver on 1080p?
Sony appears to have the most forward-looking set of outputs on the PlayStation 3, featuring two HDMI video outputs. There is no explicit support for DVI, but creating a HDMI-to-DVI adapter isn’t too hard to do. Microsoft has unfortunately only committed to offering component or VGA outputs for HD resolutions.
Support for 1080p will most likely be over HDMI, which will be an issue down the road. If you’re wondering whether or not there is a tangible image quality difference between 1080p and 720p, think about it this way - 1920 x 1080 looks better on a monitor than 1280 x 720, now imagine that blown up to a 36 - 60” HDTV - the difference will be noticeable.
At 720p, the G70 is entirely CPU bound in just about every game we’ve tested, so the RSX should have no problems running at 720p with 4X AA enabled, just like the 360’s Xenos GPU. At 1080p, the G70 is still CPU bound in a number of situations, so it is quite possible for RSX to actually run just fine at 1080p which should provide for some excellent image quality.
You must keep one thing in mind however; in order for the RSX to be CPU limited and not texture bandwidth limited at 1080p, the games it is running must be pixel shader bound.
For example, Doom 3 is able to run at 2048 x 1536 at almost 70fps on the 7800 GTX, however Battlefield 2 runs at less than 50 fps. Other games run at higher and lower frame rates; the fact of the matter is that the RSX won’t be able to guarantee 1080p at 60 fps in all games, but there should be some where it is possible. The question then becomes, as a developer, do you make things look great at 720p or do you make some sacrifices in order to offer 1080p support.
One thing is for sure, support for two 1080p outputs in spanning mode (3840 x 1080) on the PS3 is highly unrealistic. At that resolution, the RSX would be required to render over 4 megapixels per frame, without a seriously computation bound game it’s just not going to happen at 60 fps.
Microsoft’s targets for the Xbox 360 are far more down to earth, with 720p and 4X AA being the requirements for all 360 titles. With a 720p target for all games, you can expect all Xbox 360 titles to render (internally) at 1280 x 720. We’ve already discussed that the 360’s GPU architecture will effectively give free 4X AA at this resolution, so there’s no reason not to have 4X AA enabled as well.
Most HDTVs will support either 1080i or 720p; those that natively support 720p will simply get a 720p output from the 360 with no additional signal processing. We’d be willing to bet that the game will still render internally at 720p and rely on either the Xbox 360’s TV encoder to scale the output to 1080i, or you can rely on your TV to handle the scaling for you. But for all discussion here, you can expect the Xbox 360 GPU to render games at 1280 x 720 with 4X AA enabled.
The support for 4X AA across the board is important, because on a large TV, even 720p is going to exhibit quite a bit of aliasing. But the lack of 1080p support is disturbing, especially considering it is a feature that Sony has been touting quite a bit. The first 1080p displays just hit the market this year, and the vast majority of the installed HDTV user base will only support 720p or 1080i, not 1080p. In the latter half of the Xbox 360 and PS3 life cycle, 1080p displays will be far more common place but it may be one more console generation before we get hardware that is capable of running all games at 1080p at a constant 60 fps.
In the end, Sony’s support for 1080p is realistic, but not for all games. For the first half of the console’s life, whether or not game developers enable AA will matter more than whether 1080p is supported. By the second half, it’s going to be tough to say.
Microsoft’s free 4X AA is wonderful and desperately needed, especially on larger TVs, but the lack of 1080p support is disappointing. It is a nice feature to have, even if only a handful of games can take advantage of it, simply because 1080p HDTV owners will always appreciate anything that can take full advantage of their displays. It’s not a make or break issue, simply because the majority of games for both platforms will still probably be rendered internally at 720p.
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tipoo - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
That was such bullshit. RSX was worth under 200Gflops, Cell about the same and much harder to extract that much from, Xenos was over 200, Xenon was around 100. Nothing was near the terraflop range except in marketing bullspeak.LanceVance - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
#59"Does every xbox game needs to be playable? No."
"How many of you still play your old games? Market research shows not a lot."
Backwards compatibility is a feature. It's just like any other feature on a mass market consumer product. Some people value it and others don't.
You clearly don't value that and won't consider it when making consumer decisions.
Other people clearly DO value that and you are trying to persuade them not to. That's none of your business. If people value a specific feature they have every right to consider it in their buying behaviors.
Sorry, I know this post has now gone way off topic from the original article of technical analysis. Beautiful article; but any open forum on such a political topic is doomed to degenerate into this.
knitecrow - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
software emulation is difficult and takes a lot of man power to get right.The main advantage for microsoft was that they didn't have to stuck with poor business and engineering design choices of the past.
Does every xbox game needs to be playable? No. I don't care for games like "big rigs"
I abviously want halo to work, but also the lesser known good titles on xbox ... like Panzer Dargoon Orta, Kingdom Under Fire, Otogi 1 & 2 and so on.
How many of you still play your old games? Market research shows not a lot.I have an 80+ games library for the xbox. I don't mind.
BenSkywalker - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
milomnderbnder21-They are flipping consumers off. Sony and Nintendo at this point are both adding costs to their consoles to incorporate hardware to make certain that their systems have full compatability with the prior generation. MS has decided that you and I are not good enough to offer that same assurance. They have decided to save themselves a couple of dollars and render useless all of their games they can't get running on their new platform so they can save a few dollars. They will take a shot at software hacks- if they don't work we are out of luck. They are also stopping production of current gen XBox hardware. I have about thirty games for my XB currently, what do I do with them if my XB dies and they aren't supported by XB360(which there is no assurance they will)? I keep my legacy hardware around, back to my 2600, and my games.
Olaf van der Spek - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
> Compared to the built in 5X CAV DVD drive in the Xbox, the hard drive offered much faster performance. With the Xbox 360, the performance demands on the hard drive are lessened, the console now ships with a 12X CAV DVD-DL drive.Aren't all read-only DVD drives dual-layer?
Starglider - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
I'm a game programmer and I take issue with the statement on page 4 that BSP collision detection benefits from branch prediction. It doesn't; it's one of the rare types of code where the branches are effectively impossible to predict. The algorithm /does/ benefit heavily from speculative execution, but as I understand it neither the XBox360 or the PS3 are capable of this. As such this is one area where PC style processors have an advantage; neither console is going to beat a modern PC at SuperPi.devilzblood - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
altho this is my first post at anandtech, i have been reading ur articles from the geforce 3 launch.newayz.....im posting here coz im wondering if neone knos this.....what degrees do Anand and Derek hold?? they seem to be such a bank of information, i never thought it was humanly possible to know so much about computers..needless to say im impressed by u people..and all i would like to say about the article is that it was an informative and enjoying read
milomnderbnder21 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#46MS is by no means "flipping off it's supporters" with regards to backwards compatibility. They have flat out stated that it is there goal that EVERY Xbox game be compatible on the 360, but they simply cannot guarentee it. In any case, look for a majority of them to be so. And if they can't get everything working, I'm not going to miss outlaw golf on my 360...
MDme - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#50Sony WILL support 1080p. They are supporting it so that they can BRAG about it. It's all about the hype, even if they only have 1 game supporting it, they will BRAG about it. heck, if you really think about it, if sony played a video (H.264) at 1080p then ran the game at 720p they will still claim, WE HAVE SUPPORT FOR 1080p. It's all marketing. Even X360 can claim this.
finbarqs - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
bla bla bla, which one is better?