Don't say money can't buy happiness.

[schild]

ATI: Xbox 360 will outperform PS3

"I think PS3 will almost certainly be slower and less powerful," says graphics guru Richard Huddy; backwards-compatibility explained.
In an interview with Web site bit-tech.net, ATI Developer Relations Manager Richard Huddy waxed technical about Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 360 and ATI's role in the machine. The 360 will be using ATI's Xenos graphics processor, and Huddy's job is to chat with potential developers and help them develop the tools that best use Xenos' capabilities.


With regards to the console's architecture, Huddy says, "It's way better than I would have expected at this point in the history of 3D graphics." He sees the unified pipeline, rather than segregated pixel and vertex engines, giving the 360 a huge a huge advantage in accessible processing power.

Huddy goes on to shed some light on backwards compatibility. Each Xbox game is written with specific Xbox hardware in mind, and the 360's move to PowerPCs and ATI graphics doesn't jibe with the Xbox's Intel chips and Nvidia graphics processors. To add to the difficulty, the 360 wasn't designed for backward-compatibility early on in development.

To solve this, Microsoft has implemented the use of emulator programs that will allow the Xbox 360 to play Xbox games. According to Huddy, "emulating the CPU isn't really a difficult task. ...the real bottlenecks in the emulation are GPU calls--calls made specifically by games to the Nvidia hardware in a certain way. General GPU instructions are easy to convert--an instruction to draw a triangle in a certain way will be pretty generic. However, it’s the odd cases, the proprietary routines, that will cause hassle.” Once complete, the Xbox emulators could come pre-loaded on the unit's hard drive or will be downloadable via Xbox Live.

Huddy also dispels the notion of the PlayStation 3's higher graphics clock speed (550MHz versus the 360's 500MHz) means that Sony's console will outperform the Xbox 360. He believes that its ATI's unified pipeline that will make the biggest difference between the Xbox 360 and PS3. ATI archrival Nvidia, who is providing the RSX graphics processor for the PS3, has chosen not to go the route of a unified pipeline.

"This time around, [Nvidia doesn’t] have the architecture and we do, so they have to knock it and say it isn’t worthwhile. But in the future, they’ll market themselves out of this corner, claiming that they’ve cracked how to do it best. But RSX isn’t unified, and this is why I think PS3 will almost certainly be slower and less powerful."

ATI does have better technology now. At the very least, Microsoft has the money to buy the nicest things.

Ok, I'll admit it. I posted this because of the comments on emulation. I'm buying both machines. I don't play favorites between Microsoft and Sony. It's a waste of time.

[Fabricated]

ATi representative says that an NVidia product is slower? Holy shit!

Pfft.

[schild]

He gives harder facts than the crazy CEO of Sony.

[Daydreamer]

Preachers usually give harder facts than Sony execs

[Trippy]

ATi representative says that an NVidia product is slower? Holy shit!

Well given we don't have any benchmarks or more detailed architecture specs its hard to judge whether this is true or not. Some are saying that while ATI's approach may be nicer from an utilization standpoint the unified ATI pipelines are less powerful than the dedicated pipelines in NVIDIA's chip. However, the 10 MB of embedded DRAM is an advantage for ATI since it allows that chip to do AA with minimal performance penalty. So for graphic intensive games on both platforms it's possible the Xbox 360 version will look better because of the AA while the PS3 vesion may still have the "jaggies".

[AOFanboi]

Graphics, schmapics. Future games will differentiate themselves on their physics engines, which are CPU intensive. ATI are doing Microsoft's job of moving the spotlight away from the better architecture of the PS3 (read: faster system RAM bus speed since system and video RAM are separate).

Of course, they will not say anyting bad about the Revolution since ATI are supplying Nintendo as well. Plus, noone knows very much about it anyway.

[Azazel]

Luckily  , the nature of most cross-platform titles will keep most games' features running along the line of the lowest common denominator, save for some minor platform-specific bells and whistles. yay.

[Alkiera]

Luckily  , the nature of most cross-platform titles will keep most games' features running along the line of the lowest common denominator, save for some minor platform-specific bells and whistles. yay.

Which I'd believe, if I wasn't so often reading here that every cross-platform title of the current era of consoles looks best on the XBox.

Alkiera

[Margalis]

The cross platform XBox games look about the same as the Gamecube versions, both of which look higher res than the PS2 versions, but those are the only real differences. As far as effects and that sort of thing usually the cross platform games for all the systems are the same. It's not like you see one version with awesome physics and one with no physics - it's just resolution and anti-aliasing.

As far as the backwards compatibility goes, they STILL aren't saying anything. They mention multiple emulators - does that mean there is one per game? It sounds to me like the emulation won't be ready at launch, and different games will require different emulators. The fact that they aren't working yet is pretty weak given the system is supposed to launch what this fall/winter?

There was nothing worthwhile in the article. Wow, the ATI guys thinks that unified architecture is better than dedicated pipelines! That's an argument that's only been had 1000 times in the past with no resolution.

[schild]

In a corporate EB thing, it says the Xbox is backwards compatible. This was sent out to stores last week in their advertising shit for the month. So either it is and it's simply not perfect yet, or quite simply, we've been told by MS that it WILL be.

[NiX]

In a corporate EB thing, it says the Xbox is backwards compatible. This was sent out to stores last week in their advertising shit for the month. So either it is and it's simply not perfect yet, or quite simply, we've been told by MS that it WILL be.

Or for the 1 millionth time in EB's life they've managed to say something so stupid it boggles the mind. This option is most likely.

[schild]

From what I've read, they generally get gaming information correct. Especially in mailboxes. That said, corporate policy can get assbackwards some time and whoever is designing the stores right now is colorblind.

Now, you want stupid? There's an book in America called ENTERTAINMENT. Comes out twice a year, full of coupons for whatever city you're in. We're talking 2500 coupons that are all pretty damn good. On each coupon there's facts about the stores that remain on a little slip after you pull the coupon out. According to them:

EBGames rents video games.

[Murgos]

There was nothing worthwhile in the article. Wow, the ATI guys thinks that unified architecture is better than dedicated pipelines! That's an argument that's only been had 1000 times in the past with no resolution.

Theoretically I think dedicated pipelines would be faster.  I mean thats some cycles your not wasting on some other process.  Would you happen to have a link to a technical dialogue on the difference?  Something that actually says what the improvements should be in register file and branch prediction terms?  I mean pipelining and parallel pipelining are some of the all-time BIG improvements in processor design.

[Murgos]

I read a little deaper into it and it seems that a 'unified architecture' isn't actually getting rid of parallelism and coherence it's just shifting things around a little bit to have less stalls waiting for memory reads for textures at a higher cost in transistors (read $$$).  It looks like any benefit is really going to be dependent on the bus system as this method should generate a significant traffic increase but I read a couple suggestions which might mitigate that.

So as usually with new technology it's going to come down to the implementation and the jury is still out on if it will actually provide any significant increase in performance for a guaranteed increase in cost.

[HaemishM]

So as usually with new technology it's going to come down to the implementation and the jury is still out on if it will actually provide any significant increase in performance for a guaranteed increase in cost.

Which means, hardware is a tool, and the use of said tool is only as good as the user (in this case being the developer).

But really, at this point, both systems should be focusing on something other than graphics as a differentiation. The real differences will be in interface (i.e. the controller), and games library.

[Trippy]

I read a little deaper into it and it seems that a 'unified architecture' isn't actually getting rid of parallelism and coherence it's just shifting things around a little bit to have less stalls waiting for memory reads for textures at a higher cost in transistors (read $$$).  It looks like any benefit is really going to be dependent on the bus system as this method should generate a significant traffic increase but I read a couple suggestions which might mitigate that.

Because of the way DirectX was designed, the high-end graphics chips of the DirectX 8-era till now have had separate pipelines to do Vertex and Pixel shading. What ATI has done with their 360 GPU is remove that distinction so that their shader pipelines can handle both vertex and pixel shaders. On paper this means that they should have overall better utilization of their pipelines since with the dedicated setup you sometimes have the pixel pipelines waiting on the vertex pipelines or the vertex being idle cause they've done their work and the DirectX pipeline has moved onto something else. However given that the ATI GPU has so many pipelines some people are speculating that each pipeline is less powerful than the dedicated versions (i.e. it'll take more clock cycles to do the same amount of work compared to the dedicated versions) so that's why it's hard to make a comparison between the two GPUs at the moment.

[HaemishM]

Isn't the 360 using something like XUA instead of DirectX?

[Aenovae]

You might be talking about XNA, which is a whole suite of APIs, tools, documentation, and support necessary to develop for the Xbox.  Xbox graphics programming is literally DirectX with a few modifications.

One of the great things about programming for the Xbox is that 90% of your code compiles on the PC without modification.  As a rule of thumb, this similarity to the PC Windows API is what Microsoft calls "XNA."

[Jain Zar]

If there is any justice in this world I can pass on both the PS3 and Xbox 360. 

[schild]

If there's any justice in the world they'll both launch with a mouse and keyboard and I can fill my computer up with C4 and blow it up in a CompUSA. Or a col-de-sac. But I want it blowed up gud.

[Morfiend]

I am fully planning on getting both. As I always do. But I went to preorder the Xbox 360 at Ebgames, and he told me it was going to be $499. Damn, thats pricey.

[Trippy]

I am fully planning on getting both. As I always do. But I went to preorder the Xbox 360 at Ebgames, and he told me it was going to be $499. Damn, thats pricey.

That's just their high-ball estimate. They did the same with the PSP before final pricing was announced.

[schild]

The Xbox will probably come in at $299.99. I'm pretty goddamn happy Microsoft really wants to get market share. That system looks awesome and they don't need to lowball THAT MUCH. But I'll play their game. Gladly.