A discomforting rumor about the PS3...

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1

Whether the Inquirer speaks the truth is up in the air but this rumor is a little disappointing. Apparently the GPU housed in Sony’s upcoming console isn’t all it was expected to be. In fact it’s no better than what you can get today…or so they say.

“…the RSX was basically an off-the-shelf 7800 chipset, though the big news is in the “RSX is slightly less powerful” part of the statement. If one was to do some quick graphics card math, this would mean that the RSX chip powering the PlayStation 3 is less powerful than two GeForce 6800’s running in SLI mode – as the 7800 is – and according to Microsoft and ATi, the Xbox 360 GPU is more powerful than the same SLI combo.”

But if the RSX is based on the 7800 chipset wouldn’t it be at least equal in performance? Why would Sony backpedal and supply the “lite” version? Well see in 2006, or 7…8 I guess.

2

It may be true, maybe not – time will tell. But keep in mind that wherever MS is involved, there is misinformation.

3

I’m sorry Exfoliate but you’ve been mis-informed.

Although thats what the Inquirer first reported, it was still only a rumour.

[i]
ONE OF the rather interesting aspects of being an online journalist on British time is that when you go to bed, half the IT industry is still fluffing about in the States. This can sometimes lead to some rather interesting surprises the next morning.

Today is one of those days. Yesterday evening we posted a story on the PlayStation 3 RSX GPU, here, sourced from games website Evil Avatar, which themselves sourced print magazine PSM.

All was fine and dandy. The INQ’s heroic reporters went down the pub after work and by the time they stumbled home to their beds and went to sleep, the whole God forsaken internet had imploded.

Sifting through the rubble this morning it would seem that the report sourced from Evil Avatar was a misquote from PSM. What one would be led to believe from the Avatar piece would be that the RSX chip is less powerful than the GeForce 7800. In reality, it’s the other way around – the GeForce 7800 is slightly less powerful than the RSX chip.

Of course, by the time this emerged half the interslice had gone into meltdown. Nvidia’s PR spinners were running around shouting at everyone they could lay their hands on shouting about this simply earth shattering mistake. Nvidia’s fanboy klan meanwhile cranked up the FlameMachine, and I’m still trying to clean the doodoo off the walls of my inbox.

Still, always heartening when somebody has the meticulous character to put a forwarding address of [email protected]. I’m saving that one for posterity.

So to clear things up a little, the RSX chip is more powerful than the GeForce 7800, not the other way around. For all those who have blamed this debacle on us, we’d point casually towards the people we sourced. People in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones, so if the sub-editor could make that sound more diplomatic I’d be obliged. µ
[/i]

4

It makes more sense this way, thanks dude. But I’m still not very impressed, you could over clock a GTX and match it probably. It’s going to bottleneck with the Cell.

5

bottlenecked at the cell? doubt it, the thing seems meaty.

it’s still gonna be a kickass console, look at the xbox-it was a huge success and it ran a pIII 733mhz celeron.

6

You could overclock your card to out-do the Xbox360 as well. You can’t upgrade a console like you can a PC, thus PCs will always be superior, but you can’t beat the fun of consoles. :smiley:

7

I can see developers not using the Cells SPEs to its full potential, if they start to overload a specific core without evenly balancing the workload then it may not.

8

Sorry I mean that the Cell will be bottlenecked by the 7800, as the Cell is obviously the cream of the crop. It will be one amazing console. I shouldn’t be complaining, you could barely get a Dell that cheap to play WarCraft 3 at a good clip.

9

thats the good thing about consoles…awesome gaming power and a fraction of the price of a PC…

10

Actually the Cell processor is an in-order processor, which doesn’t handle out-of-order instructions well. Incidentally, games are full of out-of-order instructions. Why the next generation consoles will be built around the cell is beyond me. John Carmack (id software - Doom , Quake, etc) has some things to say about the issue:
[SIZE=3]
“Carmack was [displeased] with the PowerPC processors for the new consoles, questioning the choice of an in-order CPU architecture. He estimated the console CPUs’ performance at about 50% that of a modern x86 processor and expressed skepticism about the returns of multi-core designs and multithreaded software, especially in the short term. Graphics accelerators are a great example of parallelism working well, he noted, but game code is not similarly parallelizable. Carmack cited his Quake III Arena engine, whose renderer was multithreaded and achieved up to 40% performance increases on multiprocessor systems, as a good example of where games would have to go. (Q3A’s SMP mode was notoriously crash-prone and fragile, working only with certain graphics driver revisions and the like.) Initial returns on multithreading, he projected, will be disappointing.”[/SIZE]

You can catch the rest of his keynote speech at QuakeCon 2005 over here.

11

Only problem with the power of consoles is that 90% of the time, game makers don’t use the full potential the console has to offer. Look at early PS2 games, the graphics on them would make you laugh now compared to more modern PS2 games, it takes a while for developers to realise just how far they can push a console. Although push it too far and you get major slow-downs and unplayability.

12

[QUOTE=Exfoliate]
Sorry I mean that the Cell will be bottlenecked by the 7800, as the Cell is obviously the cream of the crop. It will be one amazing console. I shouldn’t be complaining, you could barely get a Dell that cheap to play WarCraft 3 at a good clip.
[/QUOTE]

I realise that. But the G70 is a very good card, and the RSX is going to surpass it in performance. I was talking about the Cell not being used as efficiently. Anandtech article said that they would have got much better performance from an A64 or P4 CPU.

13

Really? So for all practical purposes why isn’t the XBOX 360 more powerful? I can’t see how they can make it so cheap and still have some nice components in there. How much did they cut down the P4’s inside is the question I guess.

14

[QUOTE=Exfoliate]
Really? So for all practical purposes why isn’t the XBOX 360 more powerful? I can’t see how they can make it so cheap and still have some nice components in there. How much did they cut down the P4’s inside is the question I guess.
[/QUOTE]
It’s not a P4 Inside, it’s a network of PPC (think Mac) CPUs called a Cell processor.

15

Wow, I must be ill-informed, I thought there were three 3.2Ghz P4’s or some sort in the XBOX 360 and the PS3 had the custom Cell. I thought the PowerPC bit was rumor a while back. I see no advantage of using some Mac processor, they’re fine for many apps but everyone knows how poor the gaming performance is, especially considering the price.

16

Guess you’re right again AT. I just assumed that if it was 3.2Ghz it had to be P4 but it’s a custom PowerPC trio oddly enough.

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU

Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
1 MB L2 cache

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox360/factsheet.htm