Posted on 11/18/2005 8:30:35 AM PST by Sofa King
Ask most gamers what makes the difference in the next generation of consoles and most will say it’s their CPUs with multiple cores (in X360s case) and with revolutionary design (in PS3s case). Initially it would seem that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 should hold some advantage over its rival as it features 3 general purpose cores as opposed to the Cell processor’s 1 such core. The latest news from developers however, suggests that they will be using one core for most of the calculations, a choice which will result in comparable performance by both systems. Many had also praised the Cell’s 7 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs) but as more details about them have been revealed it turns out that they will carry out very specific functions and will therefore not be available to developers for other functions. This also suggests that the advantage in accelerated physics calculations that many expected the Cell processor to have, will not be realized.
(Excerpt) Read more at megagames.com ...
Any way to copy/paste text of article..
(Work filters.. games..)
revolutionary design (in PS3s case). >>>>
I think the Nintendo outpaces all of them when it comes to revolutionary design.
The hardware that will soon be introduced by Microsoft and Sony is not a bad step in the evolution of consoles, especially when the manufacturers have to make sure they offer competitive prices in order to remain attractive to the consumer.
Another positive aspect of the new consoles is their graphics hardware which, for both manufacturers, should deliver a considerably enhanced gaming performance. The CPUs however, are likely to cause a bottleneck in both systems, meaning that developers will be left with the challenging task of finding innovative ways of improving overall system performance.
What is a problem however, is that both competitors claim that their machines will be future proof (for the next 4-5 years at least) and that during those years they will offer the best gaming experience available. This, it turns out, is not the case and while we would have accepted it if the manufacturers had come out and said that they had to sacrifice true next-generation performance for a better price, it is unlikely we would have been willing to pay USD 60 for games that offer few, if any, improvements to current PC titles.
Microsoft’s and Sony’s decisions on setting up their consoles had nothing to do with providing the best possible gaming experience for their owners but more to do with profits, owning the IP to the hardware and securing exclusives. This is not a bad thing until the manufacturers decide that they are not willing to pay the cost of their choices and try to substitute real world performance with theoretical limits and overwhelming marketing strategies.
What is worrying is that the increased control that both Sony and Microsoft will have over the gaming industry may result in developers focusing too much on console titles and missing the opportunity to create PC titles that could truly revolutionize gaming by offering improved physics, gameplay and A.I.
We will have to accept the new consoles since we are not given many options but we have to commend Nintendo on maintaining its prestige and staying away from the HD-Next-Gen battle of superlatives.
It seems that the next-generation of gaming has not yet arrived but when it does it will probably be on the PC.
Where both consoles seem to have gotten things right is with their Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Both the nVidia Reality Synthesizer (RSX), which will feature in the PS3 and the ATI Xenos chip which will power X360 seem to be well thought out parts.
It now appears that the RSX will not be able to utilize the Cell’s SPEs for any of its processing requirements but even so the GPU should perform very well. It appears that the PS3s RSX will be a G70 based board built on 90nm featuring Turbo Cache and running at 550MHz.
Even though the RSX is a G70 based design there is some speculation regarding the existence of some silent parallel pixel and shader pipelines which may be enabled in the PS3 chip. There is also a more recent buzz suggesting that the RSX may borrow from the G71 design which offers speeds of 650-700 MHz, improved vertex pipeline support and 512 MB of memory. Either way the nVidia chip is expected to provide quite an impressive array of visual effects for Sony’s console.
ATIs R500-based Xenos chip is also expected to offer a reliable and impressive solution for X360. The board will feature a 500 MHz parent GPU built on 90 nm with 232 million transistors. It will also feature a 500 MHz 10 MB daughter embedded DRAM built on 90 nm and featuring 105 million transistors.
Overall the GPUs of these new systems will be their main advantage over current generation PCs although it is not clear for how long that advantage can be maintained.
The hardware that will soon be introduced by Microsoft and Sony is not a bad step in the evolution of consoles, especially when the manufacturers have to make sure they offer competitive prices in order to remain attractive to the consumer.
Another positive aspect of the new consoles is their graphics hardware which, for both manufacturers, should deliver a considerably enhanced gaming performance. The CPUs however, are likely to cause a bottleneck in both systems, meaning that developers will be left with the challenging task of finding innovative ways of improving overall system performance.
What is a problem however, is that both competitors claim that their machines will be future proof (for the next 4-5 years at least) and that during those years they will offer the best gaming experience available. This, it turns out, is not the case and while we would have accepted it if the manufacturers had come out and said that they had to sacrifice true next-generation performance for a better price, it is unlikely we would have been willing to pay USD 60 for games that offer few, if any, improvements to current PC titles.
Microsoft’s and Sony’s decisions on setting up their consoles had nothing to do with providing the best possible gaming experience for their owners but more to do with profits, owning the IP to the hardware and securing exclusives. This is not a bad thing until the manufacturers decide that they are not willing to pay the cost of their choices and try to substitute real world performance with theoretical limits and overwhelming marketing strategies.
What is worrying is that the increased control that both Sony and Microsoft will have over the gaming industry may result in developers focusing too much on console titles and missing the opportunity to create PC titles that could truly revolutionize gaming by offering improved physics, gameplay and A.I.
We will have to accept the new consoles since we are not given many options but we have to commend Nintendo on maintaining its prestige and staying away from the HD-Next-Gen battle of superlatives.
It seems that the next-generation of gaming has not yet arrived but when it does it will probably be on the PC.
I think the Computer Scientists (myself included) need to step up and figure out a generic way to make all threads of execution parallellize across multiple CPUs without having to recode everything. Then new multi-core CPUs and large clusters would just naturally scale as if they were just one fast CPU. I can't imagine that there is no way to do this.
How so? In what way?
The size of three DVD cases, 20 years of downloadable content. Gyroscopic controller with multiple configurations. And we still dont know the hardware specs.
That's probably true. Developement costs are rising within the game industry because of how difficult the new consoles are becoming to work with (especially Sony's). Rasing the prices of games is just going to cause less of them to be sold. The industry is going to have to find cheaper ways of doing things, and new languages/compilers that are better suited to the new nature of the hardware would probably be a good place to start.
Let me sum it up for you: Too much PR, too little power.
Is this changing?
I think their new thing is going to be getting the whole family to play together.
Add this chip, and you will be rocking. :-)
http://www.ageia.com/products/physx.html
Add this one and you would have a really kick butt system:
Definately. I think one key to this generation is that instead of Nintendo filtering the content they will allow parents to set passwords for ratings. Not to mention that Gamecube has had a few M rated games.
Already done and used by the supercomputers
Just think,
Muliticore Central Processing Unit (CPU) - (I really like the Cell)
Dual Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)
Physics Processing Unit (PPU)
Artificial intelligence coprocessor (such as the AIS-1)
Audio processor (such as the new X-FI)
All running ona n extremely fast bus. WOW!
ping
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