The Battle Of The Consoles: From Atari's 2600 To Microsoft's Xbox

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Consoles Versus PCs

However, there has always been a debate between what plays best-consoles versus PCs. The difference is greater than you think, with PCs sporting big hard drives and non-standard controllers, consoles placed in living rooms and connected to TVs, computers in 2nd bedrooms with big monitors on desks. Which brings us back to the three consoles now vying for space in our living room, the first almost indistinguishable from the PC, the second straddling the two, and the third the only pure-play gaming console. These are, respectively, Microsoft's Xbox, Sony's Playstation 2, and Nintendo's ATI-powered GameCube.

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Header Cell - Column 0	XBOX	PlayStation	GameCube
CPU	733 MHz Intel	300 MHz Toshiba	486 MHz Power PC
Graphics Processor Unit	233 MHz custom chip, jointly developed by NVIDIA and Microsoft	150 MHz Proprietary	200 MHz "Flipper"
RAM	64 MB	32 MB	43 MB
Memory Bandwidth	6.4 GB/sec	3.2 GB/sec	3.2 GB/sec
Polygon Performance	125 M/sec	66 M/sec	6-12 M/s
Simultaneous Texture Fills	4	1	N/A
Compressed Textures	4 g/sec	2.4 g/sec	N/A
Storage	2-5x DVD, 8 GB hard drive, 8 Mb storage card	4x DVD player, 8 Mb memory card	1 Mb digicard
I/O	4 Game controllers, Ethernet 10/100	2 game Controlle, USB, Firewire, PCMCIA	4 Game controllers, high speed serial port x 2, high speed parallel port
Audio Channels	256	48	64
3D Audio Support in Hardware	Yes (64 3D channels)	No	N/A
Midi and DLS Support	Yes	Yes	N/A
Hardware Audio Filtering and EQ	Yes	No	N/A
DVD Movie Playback	$30 remote accessory required	Yes	No (Optional in Japan_
HDTV Movie Support	Yes	No	N/A
HDTV Game Support	Yes	No	N/A
Maximum Resolution	1920 x 1080	1280 x 1024	N/A
Maximum Resolution (2X 32 bpp Frame Buffers + z)	1920 x 1080	640 x 480	N/A
Operating System	W2K Kernel	Closed, Sony proprietory	Closed, Nintendo proprietory
US Launch Date	15-Nov-01	October 2000	18-Nov-01
Broadband Enabled	Yes	Future upgrade	Future Upgrade