dx10 system vs. next gen consoles

[skynyrd4212]

i was reading a interesting post on here debating the advantages of a gaming pc and next gen consoles. my question is, do you think once more dx10 cards come out, vista get some of the expected bugs worked out ect, and everythings all fine and dandy, a system configured something like this:
nvidia or ati mainstream dx10 card
lets say 2gb of ddr800 ram, perahps 4
a decent core 2 duo, e6600 maybe?
good hard drive ect ect
use your imagination
do you think a pretty nicely configure gaming pc with a dx10 card will display better graphics then the ps3 or xbox360?
also do you think the sony cell processor has any use in the pc market?

 

[apt403]

nvidia or ati mainstream dx10 card
lets say 2gb of ddr800 ram, perahps 4
a decent core 2 duo, e6600 maybe?
good hard drive ect ect
use your imagination
do you think a pretty nicely configure gaming pc with a dx10 card will display better graphics then the ps3 or xbox360?
also do you think the sony cell processor has any use in the pc market?

that system make a PS3 look like a calculator.

the cell has a market in the pc field, but not for everyday use, it would be great in super comuputers because of its high floating point performance.

 

[Crapola]

I agree with APT403, it's a no brainer, the PC is much more powerful w/much better graphics.

8O

 

[matador_de_sa]

What would a ps3 be equivalent to in computer hardware?

 

[skynyrd4212]

a ps3 has 256mb of xdr memory, if i remember right, which is really fast, but only 256mb of it sucks.oviously the cell processor would perform very well for graphics and game type applications but how do you think itd perform with other applications? the ps3 definetly has some niceties but the problem with consoles is you cant upgrade them. if they made a console you could upgrade, what would we call that, oh wait, itd be a pc lol.

 

[Scrapmaster09]

you're getting into fuzzy territory here, PCs will always be more powerful and more capable, but consoles will always be more efficient and more optimized.

What I think is that a PS3 or Xbox360 will blow away any equivalent PC (speed, memory, ect...), but an up to date PC will be able to blow any console away in the future. As for right now and gaming wise, the 360 and PS3 are at the top, for now that is.

 

[skynyrd4212]

do you think dx10 will help to put pc's graphics capabilities more over that of consoles?

 

[bullaRh]

a PC without dx10 still looks better than a ps3 or 360

 

[Natecannon]

look at what you can do with Oblivion with modding. It's absolutely unbelievable the amount of graphical enhancements for Oblivion (which is touted as gorgeous out of the box) to make it even more gorgeous, with higher res textures, better bump mapping, LOD fixes, better weather effects and so on. You look at my copy of Oblivion, and look at what it looks like on either 360 and PS3 (when it comes out) you would think it's a newer updated engine.

I wouldn't trade my PC for a console if my life depended on it. PC graphics will always be the leader, it may lose its stride for a few months during the fascination with the new consoles. But ultimately PCs are ALWAYS going to look better... unless of course you try to play a poorly ported game that is bottlenecked by the console version.

 

[danjal]

this all depends on how you like to play your games, if you like to sit back on the couch in your living room, and just play games, consoles are designed for that, thats what they do, so thats when i'd opt for a console,

however, if your looking to do more as well and don't mind upgrading for future games, then a pc steps in.

saying one is better than the other can get a bit fuzzy because there both two different machines, like trying to compare apple & oranges.

 

[stevenp]

look at the 360, ps3 suxs,
Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
• Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
• Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
• VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
• 128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
• 1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance
• 9 billion dot product operations per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor
• 500MHz processor
• 10 MB of embedded DRAM
• 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
• Unified shader architecture

Polygon Performance
• 500 million triangles per second

Pixel Fill Rate
• 16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA

Shader Performance
• 48 billion shader operations per second

Memory
• 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM
• 700 MHz of DDR
• Unified memory architecture

Memory Bandwidth • 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
• 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
• 21.6 GB/s front-side bus

Overall System Floating-Point Performance
• 1 teraflop

Storage
• Detachable and upgradeable 20GB hard drive
• 12x dual-layer DVD-ROM
• Memory Unit support starting at 64 MB

I/O
• Support for up to four wireless game controllers
• Three USB 2.0 ports
• Two memory unit slots

Optimized for Online
• Instant, out-of-the-box access to Xbox Live features with broadband service, including Xbox Live Marketplace for downloadable content, gamer profile for digital identity, and voice chat to talk to friends while playing games, watching movies or listening to music
• Built-in Ethernet port
• Wi-Fi ready: 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g
• Video camera ready

Digital Media Support
• Support for DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG Photo CD
• Ability to stream media from portable music devices, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PCs
• Ability to rip music to the Xbox 360 hard drive • Custom playlists in every game
• Built-in Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
• Interactive, full-screen 3-D visualizers

High-Definition Game Support
• All games supported at 16:9, 720p and 1080i, anti-aliasing
• Standard-definition and high-definition video output supported

Audio
• Multichannel surround sound output
• Supports 48KHz 16-bit audio
• 320 independent decompression channels
• 32-bit audio processing
• Over 256 audio channels
now for the ps3 a little single core with 256mb of ram. now who wins.

 

[Nova46]

What would a ps3 be equivalent to in computer hardware?

The graphics chip the PS3 has is a modified 7800 GTX, which was top of the line I don't know...a year ago? Building even a midrange computer later when you see DX10 titles will make the PS3 look like a calculator, like apt403 said.

 

[stevenp]

yeah look at the famous ps3 and see for yourself
Product Name: PlayStation 3

Logo: PLAYSTATION(R)3

CPU: Cell Processor

PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
1 VMX vector unit per core
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @3.2GHz
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy
Total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS

GPU: RSX @550MHz

1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

Sound:

Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell-based processing)

Memory:

256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz
256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz

System Bandwidth:

Main RAM -- 25.6GB/s
VRAM -- 22.4GB/s
RSX -- 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s (read)
SB -- 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read)

System Floating Point Performance:

2 TFLOPS

Storage:

Detachable 2.5" HDD slot x 1

I/O

USB Front x 4, Rear x 2 (USB2.0)
Memory Stick standard/Duo, PRO x 1
SD standard/mini x 1
CompactFlash (Type I, II) x 1

Communication:

Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x 3 (input x 1 + output x 2)
Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR)

Controller:

Bluetooth (up to 7)
USB 2.0 (wired)
Wi-Fi (PSP)
Network (over IP)

AV Output

Screen size: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
HDMI: HDMI out x 2
Analog: AV MULTI OUT x 1
Digital audio: DIGITAL OUT (OPTICAL) x 1

Disc Media:

CD PlayStation CD-ROM, PlayStation 2 CD-ROM, CD-DA, CD-DA (ROM), CD-R, CD-RW, SACD, SACD Hybrid (CD layer), SACD HD, DualDisc, DualDisc (audio side), DualDisc (DVD side)
DVD: PlayStation 2 DVD-ROM, PlayStation 3 DVD-ROM, DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW
Blu-ray Disc: PlayStation 3 BD-ROM, BD-Video, BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE

ok maybe it has a blueray, thats pretty cool but everything else, its not that great, even the 360 whipps it.

 

[MasterLee]

To me there is no comparison, the hype on consoles always has been total BS.
Check this out, I totally agree with this guy and an article like this is way overdue. It should be put on TV.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2073727,00.asp

 

[kamel5547]

Well if you consider that the maximum resolution you can get from a console is 1080p, there is far more detail that can be displayed by a good PC monitor. And thats without getting into the actual hardware specs.

Very simply consoles cannot match high-end PC's at the time they are launched, the budget they need to meet alone should give that away.

 

[bruce555]

I agree with nova46 that the ps3 has modded G70 chip, which is not bad, but in real life pc right now is dated.

The xbox 360 has a x1900 type chip but with unified shaders. I mean that atleast on ATI's side of things they gave microsoft good hardware that will last and can be optimised for graphics much farther than the ps3 can dream of.

All I'm getting at is that really, your graphics are only as good as your graphics chip. It was a long time ago that the ps3 got dated and the xbox has now had its. Getting past all this before I hear anything about the cell processor, I feel the xbox has a not bad one in itself either. The biggest problem is that it cannot have out of order instructions (bad floating point).

But once developers are able to run with more cores they will have they will have alot of headway with both systems. They're talking about physics one core, sound the other and so one. Taking one of the xbox's cores and utilising the hyperthreading for some of the simpler tasks (sound and such) and still leave it alot of headway for processing power. So even though the ps3 has great processing power, so does the xbox.

Unless ps3 turns to Ray tracing to use up some of that floating point advantage I feel xbox is much more advanced for their graphics and I feel that the pc IS so far advanced in terms of graphics (especially looking at g80 + r600) that both of these are left in the dust.

Also another cripple to the ps3 is that the amount of memory. Once more of the cores are starting to be used, you'll have to load the instructions somewhere for all of them, sure the memory is running a 3.2 ghz and is completly 1:1 with the processor, but there just is not enough room for all the information to so that the processor can fetch what it needs to so that it can run smoothly. There still will be lag if all the cores are trying to be used. Look at how much memory you put in a server, sure you get great floating point performance, but the information is there so that the processors can use what it wants.

 

[Mike995]

A little comparason of architectures between the two consoles easily shows that the 360 is graphically more powerful, and more flexible then the PS3. Sony faked many of their performance numbers blatantly....End of story. All in all, both consoles were easily out datted before their release dates, even more so the PS3 then the 360.

 

[bruce555]

Well in 1080p for the ps3 the case is yet again, you may not be able to directly compair the two systems. I bet you to run at 1080p there's lots of details switched off. Just look and see how the g70 chip runs on games at that resolution. Not good at all. No cell processor will help with that.

 

[Nocutius]

For me i doesn't matter what kind of graphics i get from the hardware, it's all about the playability of the games, specially 4x strategies.

 

[matador_de_sa]

IMO the only console that is worth the money is the Wii, after it drops down from the launch price. It's really not that much to pay for something to play with some friends on your TV. Not everyone has a computer, and most people don't want to lug one around, so if you're just messing around at someone's house it's nice to have a console to play.