PS2 vs. PS3 vs. XBOX360

[1ghzdude]

How many times is the PS3 more powerful than the PS2 and Xbox360. :twisted:

Planning to buy a PS3 when the price hits 250$.

 

[icbluscrn]

How many times is the PS3 more powerful than the PS2 and Xbox360. :twisted:

Planning to buy a PS3 when the price hits 250$.

well thats simple math the ps3 is 3.1456978*(486+16/.78)-32°+√Ae^(pi i) /0 more powerful then the 360,

I dont even want to start on the PS2

 

[Xpyrofuryx]

Hmmm, well lets see... they are practically the same, the 360 might be a little more powerful even with its software advantage

 

[Xpyrofuryx]

oh, and lol @ the $250 for a PS3. with blu ray it will never hit that cause blu ray is failing... sorry

 

[infornography42]

How many times is the PS3 more powerful than the PS2 and Xbox360. Twisted Evil

Planning to buy a PS3 when the price hits 250$. Smile

The PS3 and 360 are about equal and the 360 is much cheaper.
The PS3 is significantly more powerful than the PS2, but so is the 360.

As for waiting till it hits $250... Well, you are in for several years of anticipation I'm afraid. They sell at a loss to Sony at $600 currently.

 

[cafuddled]

When your talking about raw power the PS3 is theoretically twice as fast as the X360 with the PS3 being rated at a theoretical 2.36 Teraflops. The PS3 cell processor also has it much better in the fact that it has a total of 8 cores with one of them being the main core and the 7 others being sub cores. The X360 only has 3 cores but does boast that it can handle 6 threads simultaneously, although that is under ideal conditions.

You might be fooled in to thinking that this must mean that the PS3 must be twice as fast, but you are wrong. When you take the other parts of the system in to account, for instance the memory and the graphics units then the systems start to stabilize in power. For instance they both have 512MB of memory being split in the same fashion with 256MBs going to the graphics unit and the rest to the processor. The graphics cards are also more or less the same speed with the difference being comparable to a X1800XT and a 7800GTX.

So now that these factors are added to the system you start to see the fact that the processor is much more powerfull does not make as big a difference to overall performance of the system. This means that instead of the PS3 being twice as fast, in real terms you will only see roughly a 15% increase to the games if they are coded correctly.

This brings me in to my next point, it is indeed true that the PS3 is harder to code games for and this is mainly because of the 8 cores. What this does mean is that ports of X360 games that are simply pulled over to the PS3 platform will indeed run slower because it will only be utilizing 3 out of the 8 cores available. However this does mean that in certain tasks for the PS3 if coded correctly that the certain tasks would be dramatically faster on the PS3 than they would other wise be on the X360.

Basically what this all means that is until they start making games exclusively for the PS3 that the consol games will play a bit slower on the PS3 than on the 360 but once games are made available you will be able to do things on the PS3 that the 360 could not cope with doing.

 

[VBDude]

I think you missed a few key points. 2 Teraflops refers to the CPU and GPU together. For CPU alone, the 360 does 115.2 gigaflops and the PS3 does 204 gigaflops, theoretically. This makes sense as the Cell cores are float-heavy whereas the Xenon cores are general-purpose. (FLOPS = floating point operations per second, with floating point meaning non-whole numbers.)

Also here are a couple quotes regarding the Cell:

The PPE is not intended to perform all primary processing for the system, but rather to act as a controller for the other eight SPEs, which handle most of the computational workload.

The PS3's 3.2-GHz Cell processor...has a PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and six accessible 3.2-GHz Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). A seventh runs in a special mode and is dedicated to OS security, and an eighth is disabled to improve production yields.

All of this information was from wikipedia, which provides its sources. (Xbox 360, Xenon, PS3, Cell)

As I read it, that means that your primary processing power is coming from six float-optimized processors with one general-purpose control processor as opposed to three general-purpose processors that can run two threads simultaneously (effectively making it six processors to the software).

I'll back the Cell as excellent tech, and very forward looking, but not in a console. I don't feel its potential power really benefits games, and anything it can do that the Xenon can't isn't entirely relevant. Unless you can think of an example?

This brings me in to my next point, it is indeed true that the PS3 is harder to code games for and this is mainly because of the 8 cores.

While I agree the cores' unique nature makes them difficult to program for, the Xenon processor in the 360 is also unique. Developers may have had more time to work with it, but it will take some time to realize its potential as well.

Another key factor in making the PS3 more difficult to develop for is the software used to develop for it. Microsoft is a software king first and foremost and thus provides a much stronger set of development tools with high levels of support for developers.

John Carmack has stated, "the Xbox 360 is the first console that I've ever worked with that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we've got for the PC."

For another (anonymous) game developer perspective please read this article: Playstation 3 vs. XBOX 360 - A Game Developer's Perspective. Read the "Performance" and "Game Selection" sections to get the relevant details.

 

[lati]

you are right it is failing,but it wont stay like that for long. plus blue-ray is not that much better then a normal dvd.
every one knows that you get 50 gigs on a blue-ray, but thats alot of wasted space for the ps3 games sence they put about 3 to 4 copy's of the same stage of each stage. (did i say that right) to use most of the space in a blue-ray.
but never the less blue-ray will be the next big thing,i just hope you invested in to it like i did long time ago!

 

[Mousemonkey]