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
Final Words
Game consoles have always been different, architecturally. The PlayStation 2 was very different from the original Xbox, and thus it is no surprise to see that the two platforms continue to be quite different this time around.
Given what we’ve discussed thus far, there are a number of conclusions we can draw:
The most important thing to keep in mind is that the revolution in physics engines and collision detection isn’t going to happen over night. The first games for both consoles will, for all intents and purposes, be single threaded titles. More adventurous developers may even split up execution into two concurrent threads, but for the most part don’t expect to see a dramatic change in the quality and reality of the physics simulation of the first titles, especially when compared to titles like Doom 3 and Half Life 2.
However, a change is coming and by the end of next year multi-threaded game engines should be commonplace on both consoles and PCs, which will hopefully lead to much more entertaining experiences. The approach to that change will be different according to the platform; without a doubt, developers will have their work cut out for them.
The transition to multi-threaded development alone will increase development time 2 or 3 fold. Not to mention that the approach to architecting game engines will differ whether you are porting to the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3. The Xbox 360 is clearly going to be the easier of the two to develop for once a game engine is multi-threaded, just because of the general purpose nature of its hardware. That being said, it won’t be impossible to get the same level of performance out of the PS3, it will just take more work. In fact, specialized hardware can be significantly faster than general purpose hardware at certain tasks, giving the PS3 the potential to outperform the Xbox 360 in CPU tasks. It has yet to be seen how much work is required to truly exploit that potential however, and it will definitely be a while before we can truly answer that question.
Cell’s on-die memory controller is a blessing for game performance; it most definitely will keep the PPE fed far better than the Xbox 360’s external memory controller. Even the cache size advantage of the 360 won’t be able to offset the reduction in memory latency thanks to an on-die memory controller.
The on-die memory controller is not all an advantage however, a big part of its inclusion is out of necessity. Remembering back to our discussion about the SPEs as being in-order with no cache, threads run on these processors only have access to 256KB of local memory, which is reasonable for a cache, but not much in the way of memory. So these SPEs will depend on having low latency access to memory in order to keep their pipeline filled and actually contribute any useful performance to the system.
At the end of day 1, when running mostly single threaded code, the performance difference from a CPU standpoint between the Xbox 360’s Xenon and the PS3’s Cell processor is basically a wash. The 360 has more cache, while the Cell has a lower latency path to main memory. In the end, the first generation or two of games will mainly be a GPU battle between the two consoles, and both will offer significant improvements over what we have with current consoles.
Graphics-wise the 360’s Xenos GPU and the PS3’s RSX are fairly different in implementation, but may end up being very similar in performance. Treating Xenos as a 24-pipe R420, it could be quite competitive with a 24-pipe RSX despite a lower clock speed. The unified shader architecture of the Xenos GPU will offer an advantage in the majority of games today where we aren’t very geometry limited. The free 4X AA support offered by Xenos is also extremely useful in a console, especially when hooked up to a large TV.
If the PS3’s RSX isn’t much more than a higher clocked G70 then at least we have a good idea of its performance. NVIDIA has mentioned that by the time the RSX launches we will have a faster GPU on the PC, which leads us to believe that the performance advantages of the RSX are mostly clock speed related. At 550MHz, the RSX GPU should have no problems handling both 720p and 1080p resolutions, although the latter won’t be possible in all games, mainly those that are more texture bandwidth bound. We do think it was a mistake for Microsoft not to support 1080p, even if only supported by a handful of games/developers. At the same time, by not imposing strict AA implementation regulations like Microsoft, Sony does open themselves up to having some PS3 games plagued by jaggies despite the power of the console. Given the amount of power in both of these consoles, we truly hope that their introduction will mark the end of aliasing in console games, but some how we have a feeling it won’t. Aliasing has plagued console games for too long for it to just disappear, that has to be too good to be true.
With at least 5 months before the official release of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and a number of still unanswered questions about the PlayStation 3, there is surely much more to discuss in the future. The true nature of NVIDIA’s RSX GPU, the real world programming model for Cell, even final hardware details for both consoles has yet to be fully confirmed. As we come across more information we will analyze and dissect it, but until then we hope you’ve gained more of an understanding of these consoles through this article.
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Doormat - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
@#22: Yes 1080P is an OFFICIAL ATSC spec. There are 18 different video formats in the ATSC specification. 1080/60P is one of them.FWIW, Even the first 1080P TVs coming out this year will *NOT* support 1080P in over HDMI. Why? I dunno. The TVs will upscale everything to 1080P (from 1080i, 720p, etc), but they cant accept input as 1080P. Some TVs will be able to do it over VGA (the Samsung HLR-xx68/78/88s will), but still thats not the highest quality input.
Pastuch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
RE: 1080P"We do think it was a mistake for Microsoft not to support 1080p, even if only supported by a handful of games/developers."
I couldnt disagree more. At the current rate of HDTV adoption we'll be lucky if half of the Xbox 360 users have 1280x720 displays by 2010. Think about how long it took for us to get passed 480i. Average Joe doesnt like to buy new TVs very often. Unless 1080P HDTVs drop to $400 or less no one will buy them for a console. We the eger geeks of Anandtech will obviously have 42 widescreen 1080P displays but we are far from the Average Joe.
RE: Adult Gamers
Anyone who thinks games are for kids needs a wakeup call. The largest player base of gamers is around 25 years old right now. By 2010 we will be daddys looking for our next source of interactive porn. I see mature sexually oriented gaming taking off around that time. I honestly believe that videogames will have the popularity of television in the next 20 years. I know a ton of people that dont have cable TV but they do have cable internet, a PC, xbox, PS2 and about a million games for each device.
Pannenkoek - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#19 fitten: That's the whole point, people pretend that even rotten fruit laying on the ground is "hard" to pick up. It's not simply about restructuring algorithms to accomodate massive parallelism, but also how it will take ages and how no current game could be patched to run multithreaded on a mere dual core system.Taking advantage of parallism is a hot topic in computer science as far as I can tell and there are undoubtedly many interesting challanges involved. But that's no excuse for not being able to simply multithread a simple application.
And before people cry that game engines are comparable to rocket science (pointing to John Carmack's endeavours) and are the bleeding edge technology in software, I'll say that's simply not the reality, and even less an excuse to not be able to take advantage of parallelism.
Indeed, game developers are not making that excuse and will come with multithreaded games once we have enough dual core processors and when their new games stop being videocard limited. Only Anandtech thinks that multithreading is a serious technical hurdle.
This and those bloody obnoxious "sponsored links" all through the text of articles are the only serious objections I have towards Anandtech.
jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#26 - yeah i know that happens all over but I was just commenting on the fact that the console's market is mainly teens and adults not mainly kids.expletive - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
"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. "This statement should be further qualified. There is only a tangible benefit to 1080p if the display device is native 1080p resolution. Otherwise, the display itself will scale the image down to its native resolution (i.e. 720p for most DLP televisions). If youre display is native 720p then youre better off outputting 720p becuase all that extra processing is being wasted.
There are only a handful of TVs that support native 1080p right now and they are all over $5k.
These points are really important when discussing the real-world applications of 1080p for a game console. The people using this type of device (a $300 game console) are very different then those that go out and buy 7800GTX cards the first week they are released. Based on my reading in the home theater space, less than 10% of the people that own a PS3 will be able to display 1080p natively during its lifecycle (5 years).
Also, can someone explain how the Xenos unified shaders was distelled from 48 down to 24 in this article? That didnt quite make sense to me...
John
nserra - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
I was on the supermarket, and there was a kid (12year old girl) buying the game that you mention with the daddy that know sh*t about games, and about looking for the 18 year old logo.Maybe if they put a pen*s on the box instead of the carton girl, some dads will then know the difference between a game for 8 year old and an 18.
#21 I don’t know about your country, but this is what happen in mine and not only with games.
knitecrow - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
would you be able to tell the difference at Standard resolution?instead of drawing more pixels on the screen, the revolution can use that processing power and/or die space for other functions... e.g. shaders
If the revolution opts to pick an out-of-order processor, something like PPC970FX, i don't see why i can't be competitive.
But seriously, all speculation aside, the small form factor limits the ammount of heat components can put out, and the processing power of the system.
perseus3d - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
--"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."--Does that mean, as it stands now, the PS3 will require an adapter to be played on an LCD Monitor, and the X360 won't be able to be used with an LCD Monitor with DVI?
Dukemaster - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
At least we know Nintendo's Revolution is the lozer when it comes to pure power.freebst - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
I just wanted to remind everyone that 1080P at 60 Frames isn't even an approved ATSC Signal. 1080P at 30 and 24 frames is, but not 60. 1280x720 can run at 60, 30, and 24 that is unless you are running at 50 or 25 frames/sec in Europe.