Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, mods feel free to move it.

Only.. I read such mixed things on the internet about which is more powerfull out of the XBOX 360 and the PS3.

So, which has the more powerfull

1/ CPU processing power
2/ Graphics power

Is the cell processor really the big flop I read about or a great bit of processing power that I read elsewhere!?

Interested to hear from you guys and gals in the know

Thx!

You can't compare them easily just from seeing the specs.
The big factor here is the software running on them...

well cell might be more powerful on paper, but in realty its not. they made it to complicated, a lot of developers simply refuse to even program for it, and simply just port over.

Thx for your reply, what does "port over" mean? Thx

Not completely true. The power of the cell in real life has proven by 3 things allready.
1 SACD decoding fully based on a software sollution that was running on the cell processor. From the comments made by sony folks blu ray was peanuts compared to getting SACD running !
2 Folding@home -The results since the PS3 joined Folding at home suggests also the power of the cell. Specially some comments some MS folks made about it and the 360 using for distributed computing.
3 The fact that some folks use a couple of ps3's as cheap super computer.

The point is we are comparing aples and oranges here. Cell is a number cruncher. Raw calculations are were it performs very good, but it's questionable how good this will be for games.

What has been proven is that the use of this power might be complicated and that the tools sony so far delivered are not as good as MS material.

So CPU power is a big question because how much power can you use of the cell for games ???

Now GPU power.
When both presented the specs. The first thought was Nvidea's chip was more powerfull. Because of the raw rates.
Then the 360 ATI GPU was more powerfull because of the fact of 10mb embedded memory and how it was used, the fact that it was close to a DX-10 card.
But then this was released.
http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.p...5/cell-vs-g80/
That is the cell alone outperforming the G80. (8800 series which is known to be more powerfull as the 360 card)
Which has raised the question ones again what can the PS3 do if the cell processor is used to assist the gfx processor of the PS3. Yes it will have consequences on the processing power but so does ussing a very large part of the memory for gfx of the shared 512mb of the 360.

So that brings us to the following is the PS3 or the xbox360 more powerfull can not be said at this time.

Take a game from one system and let it run on another system.
With a good port. The diverence between the systems will be taking into account. However incase of the PS3 and the 360 the huge difference in architecture and the bad understanding of the cell + lazy coders will mean in some cases that they will use allmost the complete 360 code and hardly optimise it for the PS3 speciall needs.

Thankyou dakhaas for your in depth reply, its much apprecited

well im not 100percent sure on this. but...

from what i hear the PS3 is technically more powerful than the XBox360 is... although the PS3 is hard to program for vs the xbox360 from what i heard... so the odds of anyone using all that power the ps3 has anytime soon is probably pretty slim.... overall though reguardless of which has more power i think this time around it's much harder to "notice" which ones more powerfull (or better as far as graphics/frame rate) vs the XBox vs PS2 days which you could clearly see the XBox won that as it was obvious from a visual standpoint/frame rate standpoint in general.

but i would take the XBox360 over the PS3 anyday cause it just has better games and you can mod it fairly easy ... although system reliability im fairly sure the PS3 is more reliable... cause i heard in some cases "up to" 33percent of XBox360's fail (alot RRoD, Red Rings Of Death) ... and as far as i can tell thats probably true from reading around etc.... the original XBox seemed alot more reliable vs the xbox360.

p.s. only reason i bought a XBox360 myself though is for Forza Motorsport 2 (MUCH better game than the Gran Turismo series is (playing ALL ASSISTS OFF as the games (Forza/Forza2) MUCH more fun/challenging that way) . cause if this game did not exsist i would not have a xbox360 to this day...... but in general i tend to play majority of my games (which are shooters) on the PC as i cant use a analog stick to aim at all vs a mouse which im MUCH MUCH better with.

It is tough to compare them directly. The most demanding game out for the PS3, Uncharted, only uses about 30% of the power and is absolutely stunning. The character animations, environment animations, etc go far beyond anything that has been developed for cross-platform or even 360 exclusive use. Ratchet & Clank is the first console game to really use texture streaming, and I've seen 2x as much stuff or more going on on-screen than any xbox game, and it runs at a solid 60fps -- no framerate drops or stutter at all.

The first game that was ported from the PS3 to the 360(most are the other way around), Burnout Paradise, has been said to have clearer textures and less pop-in than the 360 version.

There are unique aspects to the Cell architecture that show a lot of promise for the future. The SPEs for example, can input, process, and output all in the same clock cycle. It has higher internal bandwidth than the xbox if you consider the slowest pipe, though misrepresentations of the xbox internal bandwidth abound. For example, when people say that it has 256GB/s internal bandwidth, yes it does but that's only between the memory and the memory logic; this then has to go through the GPU @32GBps then there are two one-way 10GBps pipes (one in each direction) between the CPU and GPU. Some sources even add up the bandwidth of each individual pipe and quote that number as if it means anything.

On the PS3, the XDR memory is accessed by the Cell @25.6GBps; the memory controller is on the cell die, and the EIB(bus that connects the various processors together has a 153.6GBps data rate. The two one-way pipes between the CPU and GPU are 15GBps and 20GBps.

I would think that the 10GBps CPU<->GPU pipe on the 360 would be the bottleneck... Also, as has been mentioned, the Cell can take a significant part of the load off of the GPU.

You can find a nice diagram of the Cell/GPU/RAM interconnects in on page 5 of ps3_deferred_shading.pdf; you can find a link to that here.

There is a nice presentation here(and the next few slides) that demonstrates the stream processing I mentioned, where in/process/out can happen in the same clock cycle.

Finally, below is an xbox internal bandwidth representation that I found here.



Obviously these are both complex systems and as an amateur armchair analyst I can't call it with certainty. However, I think that the second-gen of PS3 games will begin to unlock the system's potential to a degree that will be surprising.

Don't forget, developers whined about how hard the PS2 was to program for, and within a couple of years some pretty impressive games were hitting the shelves.

It ain't over till the fat lady sings!

Why are you asking? If the reason is for something other than general conversation and knowledge, all this analysis it meaningless.

You pick the system for the games and maybe features like the Blu-ray player in the PS3, etc. X-Box has more games and the community is larger.

Power is not that relevant because they are both in pretty much the same class and you are not going to do things like…encoding video, multitasking, 3D rendering CAD software…etc. That’s where power is more relevant…like using a computer.