Xbox 360 vs. PlayStation 3
by Mike Smith
With E3 over, it's pretty clear Sony came out on top where public perception is concerned. The best hardware, the best selection of games, the most convincing press conference... even the most hardcore of Xbox fans had to admit the PlayStation 3 made a convincing debut. Sony also neatly reversed the hardware dominance the Xbox had over the PS2.
Microsoft isn't so sure. Waiting in our in-boxes once we returned from the Los Angeles show was a graph-heavy seven-page document entitled: "Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 Performance Comparison." No prizes for guessing the conclusion it reaches: "Xbox 360 has provably more performance than PS3".
"I am mightier than Microsoft," says the PlayStation 3
Microsoft says it's better than the competition. Who'd have thought it? But this document makes quite compelling reading. Xbox 360 has three times the general purpose processing power as PS3, a faster GPU, and over five times the memory bandwidth? This is not what we were hearing last week.
So who's telling the truth here? Microsoft is certainly being more detailed at this point. The document makes a strong case, putting the PS3 and Xbox specs into perspective. Of course, there's cherry-picking of statistics and a tendency to emphasize the weaknesses of Sony's design and the strengths of the 360.
The heart of the issue, as Microsoft puts it, is that the Cell processor is ill-equipped to perform well in a gaming environment. Gaming, says Microsoft, requires a mixture of different mathematical operations, lots of decision-making branches, and a great deal of memory access -- and the Cell processor doesn't have direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and isn't as well-equipped to handle certain types of mathematical calculation.
Perhaps the most impressive way the PS3 announcement appeared to trounce Microsoft's was on the floating point operations. These are often thought to be one good measure of a system's performance in real-world applications.
"Sony is soft," says the Xbox 360
Microsoft's release admits that the PS3 can significantly outperform the 360 in this respect, but essentially claims that this is an artifact of the multiple-core structure of the Cell processor and not reflective of its games performance. The PS3's design makes sense "for video playback or networked waveform analysis, but not for games," as Microsoft puts it.
Makes you wonder why Microsoft trotted out its figure in the first place, doesn't it? The document goes on. "Game programmers do not want to spread their code over eight processors," says Microsoft -- but the 360 has the same issues with its three processors, albeit to a lesser degree.
Microsoft also puts the PS3's graphics processing power under the microscope. Because substantially less is known about the capabilities of the PS3's new chip, this is where it gets more speculative. The conclusion -- and it seems like a reasonable one -- is that the PS3 and 360's graphic chips are similar in capacity, but the Xbox is better equipped to squeeze out the most performance, thanks to far higher memory bandwidth.
Next gen games are pretty...
...no matter what platform
In the end, this debate is meaningless. Hardware specs didn't decide this generation, although arguably they had a role to play in the previous one. What counts is the ability of game developers to turn the potential of platforms into compelling gaming experiences, and anyone who's ever played a Game Boy will tell you there's more to that than pretty pictures.
Besides, there's rarely an incentive for cross-platform games like Madden or Need for Speed to make complete use of a console's capabilities. It's easier -- and more importantly, cheaper -- to make your game for the least capable machine and port it across to the others, adding in new bells and whistles if deadlines and budget allow. They hardly ever do.
But maybe we were all a little quick to proclaim Sony the hardware front-runner so soon. After all, the race has only just begun -- there's six months until the 360 is likely to release and probably a year before we see anything from Sony. It's early days.
Read the full comparison doc
by Mike Smith
With E3 over, it's pretty clear Sony came out on top where public perception is concerned. The best hardware, the best selection of games, the most convincing press conference... even the most hardcore of Xbox fans had to admit the PlayStation 3 made a convincing debut. Sony also neatly reversed the hardware dominance the Xbox had over the PS2.
Microsoft isn't so sure. Waiting in our in-boxes once we returned from the Los Angeles show was a graph-heavy seven-page document entitled: "Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 Performance Comparison." No prizes for guessing the conclusion it reaches: "Xbox 360 has provably more performance than PS3".
"I am mightier than Microsoft," says the PlayStation 3
Microsoft says it's better than the competition. Who'd have thought it? But this document makes quite compelling reading. Xbox 360 has three times the general purpose processing power as PS3, a faster GPU, and over five times the memory bandwidth? This is not what we were hearing last week.
So who's telling the truth here? Microsoft is certainly being more detailed at this point. The document makes a strong case, putting the PS3 and Xbox specs into perspective. Of course, there's cherry-picking of statistics and a tendency to emphasize the weaknesses of Sony's design and the strengths of the 360.
The heart of the issue, as Microsoft puts it, is that the Cell processor is ill-equipped to perform well in a gaming environment. Gaming, says Microsoft, requires a mixture of different mathematical operations, lots of decision-making branches, and a great deal of memory access -- and the Cell processor doesn't have direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and isn't as well-equipped to handle certain types of mathematical calculation.
Perhaps the most impressive way the PS3 announcement appeared to trounce Microsoft's was on the floating point operations. These are often thought to be one good measure of a system's performance in real-world applications.
"Sony is soft," says the Xbox 360
Microsoft's release admits that the PS3 can significantly outperform the 360 in this respect, but essentially claims that this is an artifact of the multiple-core structure of the Cell processor and not reflective of its games performance. The PS3's design makes sense "for video playback or networked waveform analysis, but not for games," as Microsoft puts it.
Makes you wonder why Microsoft trotted out its figure in the first place, doesn't it? The document goes on. "Game programmers do not want to spread their code over eight processors," says Microsoft -- but the 360 has the same issues with its three processors, albeit to a lesser degree.
Microsoft also puts the PS3's graphics processing power under the microscope. Because substantially less is known about the capabilities of the PS3's new chip, this is where it gets more speculative. The conclusion -- and it seems like a reasonable one -- is that the PS3 and 360's graphic chips are similar in capacity, but the Xbox is better equipped to squeeze out the most performance, thanks to far higher memory bandwidth.
Next gen games are pretty...
...no matter what platform
In the end, this debate is meaningless. Hardware specs didn't decide this generation, although arguably they had a role to play in the previous one. What counts is the ability of game developers to turn the potential of platforms into compelling gaming experiences, and anyone who's ever played a Game Boy will tell you there's more to that than pretty pictures.
Besides, there's rarely an incentive for cross-platform games like Madden or Need for Speed to make complete use of a console's capabilities. It's easier -- and more importantly, cheaper -- to make your game for the least capable machine and port it across to the others, adding in new bells and whistles if deadlines and budget allow. They hardly ever do.
But maybe we were all a little quick to proclaim Sony the hardware front-runner so soon. After all, the race has only just begun -- there's six months until the 360 is likely to release and probably a year before we see anything from Sony. It's early days.
Read the full comparison doc
