which console should i get?

[me_b_kevin]

i have just recently moved into my new house.

my living room is set up with a 42" plasma 1080p HDTV, the front of my couch is 6 foot from the wall the TV hangs on, and i have a surround sound system that will literally rattle pictures of the walls.

i say all this to show what i have to work with.

i'll not say which system i'm leaning toward to avoid swaying anyone's advice. i'm also not sure when i'll be buying the new console. i just found out this past weekend that the wife is apparently ok with me getting one.

i would love to have a Wii but right now i'm wanting an HD console and don't really have the room to play a Wii.....and deep down inside i'm afraid i'll be throwing the controller through my TV.

so whatcha think?

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Mon'Star the Red- Rated "R" : http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=3224
Aboard the Necrosis- Rated "E": http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=3313

[Dopamino]

I would go with the Xbox. It syncs with your computer, it's cheaper, there's more variety in games, you don't get suckered into BluRay, and, finally and most importantly to some people, Halo.

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I mostly lurk around Media Center these days.

[ghostcat]

Wii.

Nothing beats it for fun, and it's going to have Monster Hunter.

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........Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;..........But when the blast of war blows in our ears,.....
........Or close the wall up with our English dead...........................Then imitate the action of the tiger;.................
........In peace there's nothing so becomes a man........................Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,.........
........As modest stillness and humility:........................................Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage!....

Dasher

"Another popup faction. Great. What's wrong with my popup blocker?" - Denelo
"Oh come on, slow and steady doesn't win any races, fast and steady does."

Back, if I can get this thing working!

[uspatriotsf]

I was having the same dilemma. I bought my son a Wii for Christmas... that thing is great. But I still can't decide which console to get for myself. For me it pretty much comes down to BluRay or HD. Maybe I'll just get both... cheaper than buying a BluRay/HD combo DVD player.

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<span style="color:#FF0000"><strike>RETIRED</strike></span>
ON MY WAY OUT OF RETIREMENT

DO NOT CLICK HERE

[Qunitinius~Verginix]

Play Station 3. Overall the system is better and while you are paying 100$ more, its worth it. It has better online games (Free online) such as Warhawk.

Not to mention, the quality of the games that will be PS3 only that are coming out in the next year or so (Metal gear Solid 4, Gran Turisumo 5) is STUNNING. No X-box game has this kind of potential, and If the people at Sony know what they are doing (Which I know they do), over the course of the next year, the system will be utilizing itself for its full capacity.

Did you know that right now the average PS3 game is using only half of the systems power, because of limitations, but once people learn how to work with it for its full capabilities, the games will be amazing.

Not to mention the amount of user created content that is coming out, such as for people to make their own system themes which can be downloaded right from the internet (using your PS3) and installed on your system.

One last thing, don't get sucked into buying the 360 for Halo 3, because I have played it and their is NOTHING in the game that was not new or innovative.

Verg

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[Dopamino]

I was having the same dilemma. I bought my son a Wii for Christmas... that thing is great. But I still can't decide which console to get for myself. For me it pretty much comes down to BluRay or HD. Maybe I'll just get both... cheaper than buying a BluRay/HD combo DVD player.

My decision was made when I found out that some peoples' BluRay discs were rotting.

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I mostly lurk around Media Center these days.

[Monk]

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articl...01-22119792.htm

Warner just jumped with Blu-Ray as well as New Line...The rot issue, I think, has been resolved, just don't buy any discs that are "on sale". It would appear that the Blu-Ray format will prevail now that it has a sizable lead in publishers. However, one should keep in mind that yet another format is fast approaching...broadband On Demand HD...Tivo as well as Netflix are launching set-top boxes that will deliver HD movies when you want them....I know you kind of wrote it off but the Wii doesn't really need a lot of space, for most games other than WiiSports. I love the Wii....as far as playing HD games you should be able to connect your computer via HDMI, SVGA won't give true HD. If you don't have HDMI on your PC a video card update would be in order.

[ghostcat]

Dude, 42" Disco.

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........Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;..........But when the blast of war blows in our ears,.....
........Or close the wall up with our English dead...........................Then imitate the action of the tiger;.................
........In peace there's nothing so becomes a man........................Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,.........
........As modest stillness and humility:........................................Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage!....

Dasher

&quot;Another popup faction. Great. What's wrong with my popup blocker?&quot; - Denelo
&quot;Oh come on, slow and steady doesn't win any races, fast and steady does.&quot;

Back, if I can get this thing working!

[me_b_kevin]

i am totally lost on this really...

i read people saying that the 360 isn't as "future proof" as the PS3 and that the PS3 doesn't have any good games.

i just don't know...it's all so confusing.

right now most of the games i would buy are on both systems

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Mon'Star the Red- Rated "R" : http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=3224
Aboard the Necrosis- Rated "E": http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=3313

[me_b_kevin]

i found this on IGN from E3 2005...long read but very informative

of course it's biased toward the 360

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There are three critical performance aspects of a console:


Central Processing Unit (CPU) performance:

The Xbox 360 CPU architecture has three times the general purpose processing power of the Cell.

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) performance

The Xbox 360 GPU design is more flexible and it has more processing power than the PS3 GPU.


Memory System Bandwidth:

The memory system bandwidth in Xbox 360 exceeds the PS3's by five times.

The Xbox 360's CPU has more general purpose processing power because it has three general purpose cores, and Cell has just one.

Cell's claimed advantage is on streaming floating point work which is done on its seven DSP processors.

The Xbox 360 GPU has more processing power than the PS3's. In addition, its innovated features contribute to overall rendering performance.

Xbox 360 has 278.4 GB/s of memory system bandwidth. The PS3 has less than one-fifth of Xbox 360's (48 GB/s) of total memory system bandwidth.

CONCLUSION:
When you break down the numbers, Xbox 360 has provably more performance than PS3. Keep in mind that Sony has a track record of over promising and under delivering on technical performance. The truth is that both systems pack a lot of power for high definition games and entertainment.

However, hardware performance, while important, is only a third of the puzzle. Xbox 360 is a fusion of hardware, software and services. Without the software and services to power it, even the most powerful hardware becomes inconsequential. Xbox 360 gamesby leveraging cutting-edge hardware, software, and serviceswill outperform the PlayStation 3.

DETAILED ANALYSIS OF PERFORMANCE SPECIFICATIONS:

CPU
The Xbox 360 processor was designed to give game developers the power that they actually need, in an easy to use form. The Cell processor has impressive streaming floating-point power that is of limited use for games.

The majority of game code is a mixture of integer, floating-point, and vector math, with lots of branches and random memory accesses. This code is best handled by a general purpose CPU with a cache, branch predictor, and vector unit.

The Cell's seven DSPs (what Sony calls SPEs) have no cache, no direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and a different instruction set from the PS3's main CPU. They are not designed for or efficient at general purpose computing. DSPs are not appropriate for game programming.

Xbox 360 has three general purpose CPU cores. The Cell processor has only one.

Xbox 360's CPUs has vector processing power on each CPU core. Each Xbox 360 core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread, with a dot product instruction, and a shared 1-MB L2 cache. The Cell processor's vector processing power is mostly on the seven DSPs.

Dot products are critical to games because they are used in 3D math to calculate vector lengths, projections, transformations, and more. The Xbox 360 CPU has a dot product instruction, where other CPUs such as Cell must emulate dot product using multiple instructions.

Cell's streaming floating-point work is done on its seven DSP processors. Since geometry processing is moved to the GPU, the need for streaming floating-point work and other DSP style programming in games has dropped dramatically.

Just like with the PS2's Emotion Engine, with its missing L2 cache, the Cell is designed for a type of game programming that accounts for a minor percentage of processing time.

Sony's CPU is ideal for an environment where 12.5% of the work is general-purpose computing and 87.5% of the work is DSP calculations. That sort of mix makes sense for video playback or networked waveform analysis, but not for games. In fact, when analyzing real games one finds almost the opposite distribution of general purpose computing and DSP calculation requirements. A relatively small percentage of instructions are actually floating point. Of those instructions which are floating-point, very few involve processing continuous streams of numbers. Instead they are used in tasks like AI and path-finding, which require random access to memory and frequent branches, which the DSPs are ill-suited to.

Based on measurements of running next generation games, only ~10-30% of the instructions executed are floating point. The remainders of the instructions are load, store, integer, branch, etc. Even fewer of the instructions executed are streaming floating pointprobably ~5-10%. Cell is optimized for streaming floating-point, with 87.5% of its cores good for streaming floating-point and nothing else.

Game programmers do not want to spread their code over eight processors, especially when seven of the processors are poorly suited for general purpose programming. Evenly distributing game code across eight processors is extremely difficult.

GPU
Even ignoring the bandwidth limitations the PS3's GPU is not as powerful as the Xbox 360's GPU.

Below are the specs from Sony's press release regarding the PS3's GPU.

RSX GPU


550 MHz

Independent vertex/pixel shaders

51 billion dot products per second (total system performance)

300M transistors

136 "shader operations" per clock
The interesting ALU performance numbers are 51 billion dot products per second (total system performance), 300M transistors, and more than twice as powerful as the 6800 Ultra.

The 51 billions dot products per cycle were listed on a summary slide of total graphics system performance and are assumed to include the Cell processor. Sony's calculations seem to assume that the Cell can do a dot product per cycle per DSP, despite not having a dot product instruction.

However, using Sony's claim, 7 dot products per cycle * 3.2 GHz = 22.4 billion dot products per second for the CPU. That leaves 51 - 22.4 = 28.6 billion dot products per second that are left over for the GPU. That leaves 28.6 billion dot products per second / 550 MHz = 52 GPU ALU ops per clock.

It is important to note that if the RSX ALUs are similar to the GeForce 6800 ALUs then they work on vector4s, while the Xbox 360 GPU ALUs work on vector5s. The total programmable GPU floating point performance for the PS3 would be 52 ALU ops * 4 floats per op *2 (madd) * 550 MHz = 228.8 GFLOPS which is less than the Xbox 360's 48 ALU ops * 5 floats per op * 2 (madd) * 500 MHz= 240 GFLOPS.

With the number of transistors being slightly larger on the Xbox 360 GPU (330M) it's not surprising that the total programmable GFLOPs number is very close.

The PS3 does have the additional 7 DSPs on the Cell to add more floating point ops for graphics rendering, but the Xbox 360's three general purpose cores with custom D3D and dot product instructions are more customized for true graphics related calculations.

The 6800 Ultra has 16 pixel pipes, 6 vertex pipes, and runs at 400 MHz. Given the RSX's 2x better than a 6800 Ultra number and the higher frequency of the RSX, one can roughly estimate that it will have 24 pixel shading pipes and 4 vertex shading pipes (fewer vertex shading pipes since the Cell DSPs will do some vertex shading). If the PS3 GPU keeps the 6800 pixel shader pipe co-issue architecture which is hinted at in Sony's press release, this again gives it 24 pixel pipes* 2 issued per pipe + 4 vertex pipes = 52 dot products per clock in the GPU.

If the RSX follows the 6800 Ultra route, it will have 24 texture samplers, but when in use they take up an ALU slot, making the PS3 GPU in practice even less impressive. Even if it does manage to decouple texture fetching from ALU co-issue, it won't have enough bandwidth to fetch the textures anyways.

For shader operations per clock, Sony is most likely counting each pixel pipe as four ALU operations (co-issued vector+scalar) and a texture operation per pixel pipe and 4 scalar operations for each vector pipe, for a total of 24 * (4 + 1) + (4*4) = 136 operations per cycle or 136 * 550 = 74.8 GOps per second.

Given the Xbox 360 GPU's multithreading and balanced design, you really can't compare the two systems in terms of shading operations per clock. However, the Xbox 360's GPU can do 48 ALU operations (each can do a vector4 and scalar op per clock), 16 texture fetches, 32 control flow operations, and 16 programmable vertex fetch operations with tessellation per clock for a total of 48*2 + 16 + 32 + 16 = 160 operations per cycle or 160 * 500 = 80 GOps per second.

Overall, the automatic shader load balancing, memory export features, programmable vertex fetching, programmable triangle tesselator, full rate texture fetching in the vertex shader, and other "well beyond shader model 3.0" features of the Xbox 360 GPU should also contribute to overall rendering performance.

Bandwidth
The PS3 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and 25.6 GB/s of RDRAM bandwidth for a total system bandwidth of 48 GB/s.

The Xbox 360 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and a 256 GB/s of EDRAM bandwidth for a total of 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth.

Why does the Xbox 360 have such an extreme amount of bandwidth? Even the simplest calculations show that a large amount of bandwidth is consumed by the frame buffer. For example, with simple color rendering and Z testing at 550 MHz the frame buffer alone requires 52.8 GB/s at 8 pixels per clock. The PS3's memory bandwidth is insufficient to maintain its GPU's peak rendering speed, even without texture and vertex fetches.

The PS3 uses Z and color compression to try to compensate for the lack of memory bandwidth. The problem with Z and color compression is that the compression breaks down quickly when rendering complex next-generation 3D scenes.

HDR, alpha-blending, and anti-aliasing require even more memory bandwidth. This is why Xbox 360 has 256 GB/s bandwidth reserved just for the frame buffer. This allows the Xbox 360 GPU to do Z testing, HDR, and alpha blended color rendering with 4X MSAA at full rate and still have the entire main bus bandwidth of 22.4 GB/s left over for textures and vertices.

CONCLUSION
When you break down the numbers, Xbox 360 has provably more performance than PS3. Keep in mind that Sony has a track record of over promising and under delivering on technical performance. The truth is that both systems pack a lot of power for high definition games and entertainment.

However, hardware performance, while important, is only a third of the puzzle. Xbox 360 is a fusion of hardware, software and services. Without the software and services to power it, even the most powerful hardware becomes inconsequential. Xbox 360 gamesby leveraging cutting-edge hardware, software, and serviceswill outperform the PlayStation 3.

Lastly, we were sent updated spec numbers on the Xbox's numbers, and we spoke with Microsoft's Vice President of hardware, Todd Holmdahl, about the Xbox 360's final transistor count.

Another bit of information sent our way is the final transistor count for Xbox 360's graphics subset. The GPU totals 332 million transistors, which is split between the two separate dies that make up the part. The parent die is the "main" piece of the GPU, handling the large bulk of the graphics rendering, and is comprised of 232 million transistors. The daughter die contains the system's 10MB of embedded DRAM and its logic chip, which is capable of some additional 3D math. The daughter die totals an even 100 million transistors, bringing the total transistor count for the GPU to 232 million.

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Mon'Star the Red- Rated "R" : http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=3224
Aboard the Necrosis- Rated "E": http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=3313