Everyone was expecting Sony to deliver a technological powerhouse with its PlayStation 3 debut here at E3 and Sony sure didn't disappoint. The PlayStation 3 combines the power of the Cell processor and the Nvidia-based RSX graphics processor to create what Sony Computer Entertainment's Ken Kutaragi calls a "supercomputer for computer entertainment."
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Much has been said on the difference between the two machines' noggins, some biased towards the Microsoft and others towards Sony. The CPU in the latter has more going for it in terms of "core" hardware but the former's cores - while fewer - are more powerful. According to game designer Nick Harper,
The cores really place the power in the hands of developers. The Xbox 360 has 3 running at 3.2GHz each, the PS3 has seven apparently. So theoretically the PS3 is faster, much faster, which means it can do a lot more complex things. These days complex things refer to physics calculations and graphics operations. But it's all about how to use them as the power can only be exploited by using the cores together. It's a bit like having several complex puzzles to solve with several clever people available. If you give each person one puzzle will they solve it quicker than if you give all the people one puzzle at a time? The better developers will make their code efficient, meaning theoretically better games.
The PS3 will be more complex to develop for, which might mean that the first wave of games will be better on the 360. Having said that, the PS3 line up looks a lot more impressive right now. We'll have to wait and see what Greg plays with on the floor at E3.
In terms of the active memory on access, the PS3 is two times as powerful as the PS2 and the Xbox 360 is twice that.
Nick says,
The reason memory speed is an issue is purely for framerate. If you have a massive polygonal monster (err literally) to display that's a lot of vertices to process, on top of texture mapping, normal mapping, light mapping, per pixel shading etc etc yawn. And you're trying to squeeze all that data down a pipe to be processed and spat out at the other end. The faster your memory the more you can squeeze down the pipe at once, meaning the more data you can process. So memory and processor speed are very connected.
Now for those teraflops. The more there are, the faster the machine can do sums. In more high-tech speak, gamesindustry.biz says:
Read More at Guardian
