On Jul 31, 1:30*pm, Tim O wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:48:19 -0700 (PDT), Air Raid

wrote:
The Xbox 360 and PC versions of id's Rage sport higher framerates than
thePlayStation 3version, the latest issue of Edge magazine reveals.

I realize this post is intended to start a flame war, and as a fan of
PC gaming, I often try to wind up the console players, but lets take a
serious look at the issue.

Rage was programmed by id, traditionally a PC game company.
The XBox360 shares so much architecture with the PC, that it's not
surprising an id game would run well on it.



Actually that is not really true. Although the Xbox 360 shares much
in common with PC architecture on the software side, as far as
Microsoft's tools, development environment, DirectX API, etc, but if
you take a close look at the actual hardware architecture of the 360,
it's not a PC at all. The Xenon CPU is a custom triple-core PowerPC.
No PC uses PowerPC CPU that I'm aware of. The Xenos GPU, is also a
custom piece of silicon, that has no direct PC counterpart. Although
PC GPUs that shipped after the 360, starting with the R600 (Radeon HD
2900), took after the 360's GPU, it would not be correct to say the
360's graphics architecture is based on any PC design. The embedded
graphics memory is one of many features that make the 360's Xenos GPU
a very "anti PC" architecture. It's not unlike the GameCube & Wii,
which, like 360, use a PowerPC CPU and a highly custom, console-
specific GPU created from the ground up specifically for the console.
Unlike the original Xbox which used a GPU (NV2A) very similar to the
GeForce 4. Overall, Xbox was just a slightly modified PC in almost
every way, from it's Celeron/Pentium III CPU, to its bus architecture,
to its GPU.

The PS3 actually has more PC-based architecture in it than the 360
does. While the CELL CPU is totally alien to PC architecture, the RSX
GPU is very much a PC-based design, it's basicly a stripped down
GeForce 7800.



The few technical articles I've read about the PS3 seem to infer that
its an extremely powerful console, but that power is difficult to
exploit. Sony built something great, but also very proprietary. If you
look at their technology through the years, that is very typical Sony.
For programmers that aren't completely immersed in PS3 architecture,
making a port must be very difficult.

The PS3 is really not much more powerful than the Xbox 360. The
biggest advantage PS3 has, is the amount of floating point performance
it gets from the CELL CPU (over 200 GFLOPs) It's roughly twice that
of the Xbox 360 CPU (over 100 GFLOPs) . It's very hard to get all the
performance from the CELL because the performance is divided up
between the 7 SPE units. While the 360 CPU is easier to use because
it's got 3 identical PowerPC cores.
The 360's Xenos GPU is very much superior to the RSX GPU in PS3.
For the most part, the extra power that CELL has, has to go into
making up for the shortcomings of RSX, just to get roughly upto the
360's level in graphics. Sure there are some PS3 games specifically
written to take full advantage of the architecture which outperform
any 360 game, yet there are so many more 360 games that outperform the
same game on PS3, and some 360-only games that outshine anything on
PS3.
Overall the 360 and PS3 are very close in capability, much closer
than PS2 and original Xbox. Both consoles are well behind even
modern low-end PCs that have decent gaming performance.
example: the AMD RV770 GPU used in Radeon 4850 has 1 TFLOP (1000
GFLOPs) of raw shader/compute performance for graphics, while Xenos
and RSX have 200 ~ 250 GFLOPs of shader performance, that's 1/5 or at
best, 1/4 that of a current low-end PC graphics card. On the highest-
end of PC gaming, with 4 AMD GPUs on two cards, (CrossFire 4870X2s)
you get 4800 GFLOPs (4.8 TFLOPs) of raw performance, and that was as
of fall 2008, almost a year ago. That is 20 times the performance of
the 360's Xenos GPU (240 GFLOPs). The gulf in performance between
the highest-end PC configuration and 360 / PS3 is about the same as
the gulf between 360 / PS3 and the Wii's Hollywood GPU
(12 GFLOPs).

I must say, as a console gamer, I am already looking forward to the
next-gen Xbox3 and PS4, as well as the rumored 'Wii HD'

As a tech enthusiast, as far as the PC side, I am looking forward to
the upcoming DX11 GPU from AMD & Nvidia, the R8xx/Evergreen and GT300,
as well as Intel's 'manycore' Larrabee architecture.