console vs pc

[ToxicBunny]

Kalvaer.. granted, given the techniques of coding for games right now, i do agree with you... but the money these guys are throwing at games nowdays, I wouldn't be surprised to find some enterprising developer coming up with a way to do it.

I do also think that whats inside the console is now less important than how the coding environment is developed and there Microsoft DEF have the upper hand.. but thats going to anger the sony fanbois lurking around...

 

[kingrob]

I do also think that whats inside the console is now less important than how the coding environment is developed and there Microsoft DEF have the upper hand.. but thats going to anger the sony fanbois lurking around...

TB, you said that on purpose to annoy the king!

I'm angry now.

 

[scotty777]

ha ha ha ha, i think that we will just have to see how these consoles perform in the long run, coz if say there is a problem, we will all here about it by the time sony releases the ps3 in South Africa.

 

[ToxicBunny]

Kingrob, of course I did.. sony fanboi...

You do have to admit that if it ends up in a software development environment battle, that MS will have the upper hand tho, they do have more experience.

Scotty777, yes we will have heard all about it by the time Ster Kinekor get their A in G and release it here, but given the supply constraints Sony currently have, I think we'll be lucky to see it before next Xmas...

 

[scotty777]

haha ya, but toxic bunny you must admit that fact that the ps3 can use a operating system is pretty cool

 

[ToxicBunny]

The xbox360 uses an OS as well.. how else does it play games...

if you're talking about it being able to run linux.... well woop dee doo... i honestly don't care... i have that on my laptop and it does it a million times better than the ps3 or the 360 could....

 

[ShockG]

This power debate is rather meaningless in terms of actual power that the end user can see. One thing if not the single most important thing about both consoles in this context are the graphics synthesizers used in both consoles.
In essence these are similar in terms of qualitative features, but not necessarily in speed. Where the one lacks inherent speed in the graphics unit, it makes up for with the host CPU (PS3) and where the other lacks in CPU power it makes up for in the graphics sub system. (XBOX360)

The XBOX does have SM3.0+ capability compared to that of the SM3.0 only of the RSX, but because consoles are closed box, you can take advantage of hardware specific features that would not be exposed in the equivalent API on the PC. Mostly though these are speed enhancing features not quality features.

Both the PS3 and XBOX360 are DX9.0 parts essentially (features wise) because they are both derived from the PC graphics counterparts (not so much for Xenos, but certainly for RSX) and that means games should and are most likely going to look the same. There may be differences in AI, but in game AI in our titles is not at a level where either Host CPU would not be able to cope. So the AI argument is rather theoretical.

It is important to take cues from the respective manufactures in what they are promoting over each other, note that neither MS nor Sony are touting technical advantages (at least in the graphics part) over each other because they are all cosmetic. These parts are so closely matched that, if one console cannot cope with a title, the same goes for the other.

E.g. Crysis is not feasible for the XBOX360 and the same goes for the PS3, but the PC can

 

[Ekhaatvensters]

E.g. Crysis is not feasible for the XBOX360 and the same goes for the PS3, but the PC can

Lol, you've been pimping that Crysis thing for a while now

but I must say, I have seen the screenshots and it looks amazing. Poor old console gamers really will be missing out. Not to mention a lot of other big DX10 game similar to Crysis that could be developed in the same way and exclude console.

Would game developers that take advantage of DX10 really want to be bothered to rewrite the whole thing for the DX9 architecture of these consoles?

Or is there some easy way out?

 

[ShockG]

Yeah I have been just that Crytek unlike any other developer don't whine, they just do and when they do, do; they do good
They came out of left field with FarCry and blew everything else away laying waste to iD's Doom3, HL-2 and all others that were held as digital-gods without much fanfare. They had HDR support in their engine in 2003 and that's something to remember.

Anyway, strangely enough it's not the DX10 that will make Crysis not work on the consoles since the game will work on 7800GT/X1800 onwards, but more about how the entire system is put together.
on PC's you can easily have a 1GB RAM requirement, this is not wise on consoles at all. Despite the large bandwidth between the individual components, the ram to hold all the game data just isn't there. On the XBOX360 you're sharing 512MB or ram for the entire system, yes the EDRAM is hella useful and is amongst the greatest things on the 360, but it's only 10MiB.
This 10MiB also holds full frame data, that is a full back and front buffer image sometimes, but other times is filled with a single frame and it's sampling data (480/576p with 4xAA 720p with 2xAA or 1080i with no AA) and you can't use this to store game textures.

On the PC however, yes texturing from ram is slow, but you can if you have too with at least 5GB/sec available, but more than anything the actual game content can reside in the ram without having to stream from HD which brings you right down to the 60MiB/sec mark

And every PC has a hard drive, that is not the same for the console. The 360 core having no storage media (not counting removable drives etc...) would mean streaming large volumes of data straight to the system ram from the optical drive which is even slower than the disk at 20MiB/sec at most in the case of sequential reads, should you have to do jumps that would get even worse.

Clearly not feasible for the Console :/ Not related to the API directly, but just an example of why somethings don't make sense on console esp next gen stuff.

 

[Ekhaatvensters]

Anyway, strangely enough it's not the DX10 that will make Crysis not work on the consoles since the game will work on 7800GT/X1800 onwards, but more about how the entire system is put together.
on PC's you can easily have a 1GB RAM requirement, this is not wise on consoles at all. Despite the large bandwidth between the individual components, the ram to hold all the game data just isn't there. On the XBOX360 you're sharing 512MB or ram for the entire system, yes the EDRAM is hella useful and is amongst the greatest things on the 360, but it's only 10MiB.
This 10MiB also holds full frame data, that is a full back and front buffer image sometimes, but other times is filled with a single frame and it's sampling data (480/576p with 4xAA 720p with 2xAA or 1080i with no AA) and you can't use this to store game textures.

On the PC however, yes texturing from ram is slow, but you can if you have too with at least 5GB/sec available, but more than anything the actual game content can reside in the ram without having to stream from HD which brings you right down to the 60MiB/sec mark

And every PC has a hard drive, that is not the same for the console. The 360 core having no storage media (not counting removable drives etc...) would mean streaming large volumes of data straight to the system ram from the optical drive which is even slower than the disk at 20MiB/sec at most in the case of sequential reads, should you have to do jumps that would get even worse.

Clearly not feasible for the Console :/ Not related to the API directly, but just an example of why somethings don't make sense on console esp next gen stuff.

Thanks a lot for the explanation. I thought the fact that it is DX10 shouldn't stop it from working on consoles, obviously DX10 games will work under DX9 or maybe even DX8 hardware like our current DX9 games do.

Interesting that consoles haven't moved on it terms of ram, because they have finally caught up with everything else. When PS1 and PS2 had been around for a while there specs were appalling and I wondered how some games run at all. But the CPU and GPU are now up to where PC's are, but only 512mb ram.. :/

Anyway, wouldn't this be a huge bottleneck for most new games? Will consoles be forced to use the equivalent of setting textures to "low" for PC games in the future? Maby Crysis is just a bit ahead of its time for now

 

[scotty777]

well yes i suppose the games would get bottle necked BUT this is the beauty of consoles, game developers can work around the small ram. and as for the cpu, they haven't quite caught up to the modern ones, i mean my humble amd 3200+ will run circuls around the ps3's and the xbox360's cpu's

 

[ShockG]

Maybe, maybe not. The CPU's are not directly comparable. Numbers wise, the Consoles blow any Desktop CPU out the water and then some. So there's no comparison there. On the other hand however, our desktop CPU's are finely tuned to our operating system (or the os to the CPU rather) so we get to do things that would prove problematic for the console parts, but that's at the software level. Number wise though, Q6700 and anything AMD can churn out is nowhere near what the consoles are offering.

As for the small ram, well it wasn't such an issue with PS2, because it used very low res textures and because the target frame size was small, the texture sizes themselves were small.
With the 64 texture formats supported by the XBOX360, they are byt and large what is available on the PC and as such they have the same compression ratios as the ones on the PC. Either way, a normal, displacement and diffuse map of a single 512x512 texture is going to have the same space requirements on the console or PC, so if you need 340MiB texture space for whatever on the PC that's exactly how much you need on the Console. Not much for PC, but death for the console.

What still makes things easier for the Consoles despite their HD capability is that they are by and large lower res than PC. With nobody using 1024x768 (past 720p vertical req.) PC users have been at the 1280x1024 setting for some time now employing AA at that. Where as for consoles you can't do higher than 1080 no matter what, so you can save alot of performance in that you don't need nearly as high a fill-rate...

Hence the PS3 RSX only have 8 raster output units even though it's PC equivalent 7800 has 16

But like I said, I'd rather have both PC and Console, makes life easier

 

[Kalvaer]

But like I said, I'd rather have both PC and Console, makes life easier

Now thats something I can not but agree with.. Have the best of both worlds Though right now.. I'd much rather have the XBOX 360 for my Console than the PS3.

The Price alone is one good reason, And I love being able to stream all my music and photo's and Videos from my PC wirelessly straight to my TV on the XBOX.. for me its more than a console, its my Home entertainment system as well

EDIT:

OH..

With nobody using 1024x768 (past 720p vertical req.) PC users have been at the 1280x1024 setting for some time now employing AA at that.

Quiet a few of the games now days for the 360 are 1080.. .I dont have a HD TV to play at that res, but its all there and those that do have the hardware to run it. are all very impressed

 

[Kritic]

go for ...............

XBOX 360, I was in the same boat. i decided to jump out into the ocean of xbox360. loving every moment of it.

 

[Fudzy]

What still makes things easier for the Consoles despite their HD capability is that they are by and large lower res than PC. With nobody using 1024x768 (past 720p vertical req.) PC users have been at the 1280x1024 setting for some time now employing AA at that. Where as for consoles you can't do higher than 1080 no matter what, so you can save alot of performance in that you don't need nearly as high a fill-rate...

Hey not all of us have 8800s yet 1024x768 is still the preferred res of most the CRT screen users I know.

Quiet a few of the games now days for the 360 are 1080.. .I dont have a HD TV to play at that res, but its all there and those that do have the hardware to run it. are all very impressed

Whats games are those? Last I heard 1080 was only for HD-DVD support?

 

[Kalvaer]

Whats games are those? Last I heard 1080 was only for HD-DVD support?

Well I noticed it last week when my new copy of World series of poker arrived.. I knew of one other that did and that was gears of war

From the Xbox Site.. the XBOX can run in these modes using the VGA cable (http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/xbox360/highdefdetails.htm):

640 x 480
848 x 480
1024 x 768
1280 x 720 (equivalent to 720p)
1280 x 768
1280 x 1024
1360 x 768

So I searched out the XBOX site (http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/catalog.aspx) and seems these all have 1080 support, Though even some of those that state 720i seem to have 1080 as well when you search on the game itself on the net, Now all I need is a HD TV:

Astropop™
Atari® Anthology™
Big Bumpin'
Blitz®: The League™
Call of Duty® 3
Cars
College Hoops® 2K6
DOOM®
EA SPORTS™ Fight Night Round 3
Eragon
Far Cry Instincts Predator™
Feeding Frenzy™
Frogger
Gauntlet®
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved
Hexic® HD
Hitman™: Blood Money
Import Tuner Challenge™
Joust™
Major League Baseball® 2K6
NBA 2K7
NHL 2K7
Outpost Kaloki X
Perfect Dark Zero™
Pimp My Ride™
Pocketbike Racer
Robotron: 2084
Sneak King
SUPERMAN RETURNS™: THE VIDEOGAME
Test Drive® Unlimited
The Lord of the Rings™, The Battle for Middle-earth™ II
TimeShift
Top Spin™ 2
UNO®
Viva Piñata™
Wik: Fable of Souls
World Championship Poker® Featuring Howard Lederer ALL IN (Different to the poker I mentioned above)
Zuma® Deluxe

 

[ShockG]

If yo have a 17" or bigger display, there's no reason why anyone should be using 1024x768 for anything. I mean if a 6600GT can play games at that res, then there's no reason to go lower. And besides 1024x768 is really dated now and looks kinda funny and robs a game of it's brilliance Can imagine Alan Wake at 1024x768, may as well play Fade To black

 

[Fudzy]

True, but bigger isn't always better. Alot of older cards support 1280x1024 but I'd like to see you play NFS: Carbon on a 6600GT at that resolution

To me, resolution doesn't play much of an important role as the engine that is being used. I would quite happily play all my games at 800x600 if it looked as if I it was a real movie.

 

[ShockG]

Yeah but you see that can't happen at 800x600. And b4 people say broadcast is of a lower res, understand that TV is a line based system, not pixel based like CRTs and LCD displays. BTW CGI movies have 32~64X SSAA applied to them, something that they could cut down on if every single display was at least 720 or even better 1080.

Imagine a sniping game where you use 800x600 to play that's goin' to suck. :/
Just like NFS:Carbon sucks at low res, AA at 800x600 just makes it look worse.

 

[Fudzy]

No maybe not, but they certainly haven't perfected photo realism properly at any level whether it be 800x600 or 1600 x 1200. Making the resolution higher just means more needs to be drawn on the screen at any one time which in turn increases the hardware requirements unncessarily. Would you agree that the graphics on the PS2 improved with time? How many times do you suppose a PS2 owner upgraded his/her graphics card?