Xbox 360 vs PS3

[Dark Legion]

As long as consoles have existed, discussions, debates, arguments, fights, and all out WARS have taken place over who makes the best video game units.

Things are slightly more complicated these days however. Console makers are taking different approaches to designing their products; some go for hardcore processing power, others focus more on online gaming.

Here we are comparing both consoles in different terms


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Hardware:

The Playstation 3 has the decided advantage when it comes to hardware. The CPU, memory, and graphical prowess is roughly a wash on both consoles as they are capable of roughly the same computational and graphical rendering abilities. Still, it's evident that there are some issues with the PS3 given the graphical slowdowns and framerate issues present only in the PS3 versions of multiplatform games. All PS3 models offer a bluray optical drive, HDMI, gigabit Ethernet, and USB 2.0. In most models it also includes built-in Wifi and Bluetooth capability as well. While the hard drives are roughly the same in size to many Xbox 360 models, the PS3 makes it much easier to expand as it doesn't require proprietary hard drive preloaded with software as the Xbox 360 does. The Xbox 360, while offering HDMI in its current models, only has a standard dual layer DVD optical drive, 10/100 Ethernet capability, and Wifi only though a $100 adapter.

This is where the Xbox 360 really falls apart. The Xbox 360 had a hardware defect where a heat source within the case causes some internal connections to become disrupted. This would cause a famous red ring to appear on the console indicating a specific hardware failure, hence the "Red Ring of Death" moniker. This hardware issue was so bad that Microsoft extended their warranty for just this issue for a full 3 years after purchase. When it happened to me a year and a half ago they paid in full for me to ship my Xbox 360 back to them. While it was a nice gesture since it didn't cost me any money except to get to the UPS Store, not having my Xbox 360 for 6 weeks was really disheartening and it caused me to appreciate my Nintendo DS a little more. Since my warranty for this issue runs out this coming December. . Aside from the Red Ring of Death issue, both consoles endured issues from drive failures to the console scratching game discs, however these issues were minor even for a typical console release.



Features:

When it comes to console features, the PS3 has a lot more flexibility than the Xbox 360. For instance, I can burn a DVD filled with AVIs or MOV files taken on a digital camera and my PS3 will play them just fine. It supports most major playback modes for video, audio, and images. The Xbox 360 is much more restrictive in that you cannot use your massive hard drive as a media server because it's very hard to place files on your drive. However as a consolation, you can configure your PC as a media server and stream music and videos from there through your Xbox 360 onto your TV. It's kind of a hassle but at least it's a workaround.

The PS3 has trophies which are awarded whenever you accomplish certain tasks in games. It doesn't work well for all games, but it's a nice thing to have. The Xbox 360 has achievements which is the same thing only there's a point value attached to each achievement which contributes to your overall gamerscore. The fact that this gamerscore is always displayed prominently on your gamercard makes this a much more public display of gaming prowess than I care for. I often am ashamed of my gamerscore and like to record my achievements or lack thereof in a second less public account. I'm not too fond of this as it seems like the gaming equivalent of every guy walking down the street with his pants down constantly comparing each other’s wangs.

Both systems have connectivity to commercial streaming media services. The Xbox 360 offers streaming movie service to Xbox Live Gold members and Netflix members via the Netflix service. It's convenient if you have accounts to both Netflix and Xbox Live Gold, but otherwise restrictive and expensive if you don't use one of those two services. The PS3 connects to a streaming music service called VidZone which offers streaming music, music videos, and ringtones.

The PS3 offers some additional features not on the Xbox 360 including a decent web browser, a cluster-based program called folding@home that lets your PS3 analyze medical data when you're not using your PS3, and connectivity to the PSP. Most of these features are nice, but they definitely shouldn’t factor into many people’s console-buying decisions. Frankly if you have $400-$500 to spend on entertainment and need a web browser, you're probably going to spend it on a PC.


Games:

It's my firm belief that the library on the Xbox 360 is superior to that of the PS3. There are only three exclusive titles that standout among their peers on the PS3: Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet, and MLB 09 The Show. This is compared to Gears of War 1 and 2, Halo 3, Saints Row 2, Mass Effect, and Fable II. In addition to the edge in exclusives, most multiplatform games simply perform better on the Xbox 360. It's almost as if most developers write their code for the Xbox 360 then port it to the PS3. The multiplatform sports games especially bad regarding slowdown or lower frame rates on the PS3. What's more is that downloadable content is much more plentiful on the Xbox 360 versions of multiplatform games and many Xbox 360 games receive patches where their PS3 counterparts do not.

The PS3 puts forth strong first person shooters like Resistance Fall of Man 1 and 2, and Killzone 2; the Gears of War games as well as Halo 3 are more critically acclaimed and sold more copies in the marketplace. Sports games are vastly superior on the Xbox 360 due to framerate issues on the PS3 as well as downloadable content. Peggle Deluxe trumps any puzzle game on the PS3, and the Xbox 360 just has many more quality racing games than the PS3. Even RPGs are stronger on the Xbox 360 with Mass Effect, Fable II, Lost Odyssey, and Blue Dragon. The only exclusive quality RPG on the PS3 is Valkyria Chronicles. This is surprising given the Playstation's stranglehold on this genre the last two console generations.

The downloadable games really are a wash. Both the Xbox Live Arcade and PSN games boast some great titles like Geometry Wars, Calling All Cars, Super Street Fighter II HD Remix, Flower, and Braid. There are some surprisingly quality games on both systems available for download. You really can’t go wrong in this area no matter which console you choose.

As for backwards compatible games, the PS3 clearly has an advantage given its vast library of PS2 and PS1 games. The Xbox 360 does have backwards compatibility for many of its Xbox titles, but not all and it’s much lower percentage-wise and even more so numerically than the PS3. However, all you need to play those Xbox games on your Xbox 360 is a hard drive, which is practically required for its owners anyway. While the older PS3 models features a 90% compatibility rate with PS1 and PS2 games, and later models an 85% compatibility rate, all the PS3 models currently in production are not backwards compatible with any PS2 games. Fortunately all PS3s even the ones in production does support backwards compatibility with PS1 games. While those games are a little tougher to find since Gamestop has been clearing out their inventory, there are plenty of quality titles, especially RPGs which can make a PS3 purchase more worthwhile. However the lack of PS2 backwards compatibility can be a problem for people looking to pick up a new PS3 if they have a large PS2 library. I feel lucky to have an old 20GB PS3 which can play most PS2 games, but not everyone might be able to find a model like that.

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Accessories:

The accessories for the most part are a wash between the two systems. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 have their own webcam, wireless headsets, DVD remotes, and texting keypads. The most worthwhile 1st party accessory that Xbox 360 has is a wireless racing wheel. Other accessories like memory cards, joysticks, rechargeable battery packs, and the HD DVD player are either too specialized or just serve to remind you that the PS3 has better standard features (built in rechargeable battery for the controller, and Bluray player, and hard drive).

I prefer the symmetrical feel of the PS3 controllers over the Xbox 360 one. The analog stick is a little lower on the PS3 version and I like the buttons on the PS3 a little better. It's not as sensitive as the Wii remote, but it's good for certain features.The original sixaxis controller didn't have a rumble feature. Instead you have to pick up a DualShock 3 controller, which is only compatible for just 3 dozen recent titles, most of which already have rumble support on their Xbox 360 counterparts.

Even though the Xbox 360 has a nicer set of accessories, the motion sensor in the sixaxis makes the PS3 controller much more versatile. It has all the buttons and analog sticks needed for a modern console game, but motion control to add a few interesting gameplay mechanics as well.



Continue.......

[Dark Legion]

XBOX 360 / PLAYSTATION 3 PERFORMANCE COMPARISON (with graph chart)

There are three critical performance aspects of a console:

� Central Processing Unit (CPU) performance.
o The Xbox 360 CPU architecture has three times the general purpose processing power of the Cell.
� Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) performance
o The Xbox 360 GPU design is more flexible and it has more processing power than the PS3 GPU.
� Memory System Bandwidth
o 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 games�by leveraging cutting-edge hardware, software, and services�will 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.

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.

Cell is optimized for streaming floating-point, with 87.5% of its cores good for streaming floating-point and nothing else.




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.




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.



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.

Performance 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 games�by leveraging cutting-edge hardware,

[Firefox]

To ap ki kia rai hai konsa Video Game Behtar hai?

[AAS 11]

Xbox 360 is better.

[*Tamraiz*]

hhhmmmm

[PrinceOfPersia]

pata nhi kya bakwas ki hy , kisi ka bhi article uta kar paste kar dety ho , apna article likho to bat hy ...

[Qandeel1]

hi, what is the price of xbox in pakistan? plus i would like to know can we play motion sensor games at xbox?

[Rahi]

Thanks for introducing.

[bilalquryshi]

thnx for information

[KHANZZzzz]

Xbox 360 Rocks Performance Wise......... But Games Collection Are Better For PS3 Exclusive Games Only