PS3 video card/gpu

Hi guys,
Simple question, I think , but how good is the PS3 graphics engine. It could be helpful if someone could compare it to a notebook nvidia or ati video card i.e. is it as good as an 8600 GT, 8700 GT or better?

Thanks, jam.

 

i know its going to start a flame war, but:

the ps3 gpu is just barely less powerful than the xbox 360 gpu.

the xbox 360 gpu is basically a match for the 8600m gt.

the 8700m gt is slightly faster than the rest of what you mentioned.

restated: ps3 < xbox = 8600m gt < 8700m gt - in terms of gpu power.

the consoles are really good value- the entire console (includes cpu, gpu, hard drive, ram, case, cables, controller) costs about as much as JUST the 8600m (or 8700m) gt

besides, they are all really close. none of them are leagues ahead of each other or anything.

 

Blasphemy!! j/k. Don't care

 

The ps3 has a much better CPU .

 

So, the PS3 matches the 8600 GT? Goodness, I'll have to reconsider what laptop I'm getting now. As I want to get a new laptop and a PS3, would you recommend me getting a laptop with an 8600 GT, so I don't have to get the PS3?

 

Hmm...It's hard to say. It depends on what kind of games you place because PC and PS3 both have their and strengths and weaknesses when it comes to types of games.

 

/sigh

A Console runs a pared down GUI. It can't and won't do 95% of what your laptop is capable of. But what it does it does very well. If you get a laptop with the same comparable processor and GPU your laptop WILL NOT perform as good as the console. The Console runs a very streamlined GUI that helps the GPU and CPU work better to give you more performance.

Do not try and compare your desktop/laptop to a console JUST based on the hardware.

 

the cell cpu is really really weird.

weirder than you think.

alone, it is pretty much worthless. if you could stick a cell in a computer (with integrated graphics lets say) - you are looking at maybe a 2.5ghz p4 level of performance. ok.

the same is true of the xbox cpu. its actually probably a little better at general cpu stuff, though. maybe like a 3ghz p4, i dont know exactly.

but the cell (ps3 cpu) is really good at a few specific things that gpu's are normally responsible for. if a ps3 specific game engine was made that could take advantage of the cpu + gpu power, it could be really really strong. you could offload a lot of the gpu tasks onto the cpu, freeing up the gpu to do some serious work. its certainly possible that a few ps3 specific games, later in ps3 history, will excel a lot in terms of graphics, over the xbox 360.

but the general cross platform games won't get that benefit, obviously. the xbox 360 is always going to play cross platform titles better than the ps3. curses.

obviously there are a lot of factors here. the biggest factor is the amount of quality time developers give toward making a program run on specific hardware. ps3 exclusive games are going to run well on the ps3, pc exclusive games will run well on the pc, and xbox games designed for the xbox will perform the best there.

those are the titles you should be looking for.

crysis over ut3.

 

I heard it somewhere from nvidia that the ps3 gpu is equivalent to the 7900 GTX, lemme find the source somewhere...

 

Yeh, thats quite wise actually. Thanks.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2451&p=21

On the very bottom it says "Overall, we consider this a successful launch. Aside from the performance of the 7800 GTX, we can infer that the PS3's RSX will be even more powerful than the G70. As RSX will be a 90nm part and will still have some time to develop further, the design will likely be even easier to program, faster, and full of more new features. "

This was the only reputable site I could find. Others were 360 fanboy sites and ps3 fanboy sites and blogs and such.

 

It is based on the same architecture as the 7800 GTX (G71). How that translates into comparable power is debatable.

 

Keep in mind, PCSX2, The most up do date PS2 emulator available only just manages to make games playable on the PC, And thats with a 2.2ghz CPU and 8600GT, whereas the PS3 emulates the PS2 quite well (its software emulation, not hardware unlike the PS2 playing PS1 games)

 

thats just because they don't know how the processor works. if they had the documentation, they would have a much easier job.

as it stands, pretty much any gpu works fine.

the problem is cpu emulation, which is a heavy task.

with documentation the process of developing a quality emulator is much easier than by trial and error. sony has a slight advantage over the pcsx2 team

plus- sony's original intention was just to put the ps2 cpu into the ps3. the current crop of ps3's have a ps2 chip in there. that goes to show how tough it is to make a good emulator. its a software problem not a hardware problem, in short.

 

Both the RSX and the Xenos are more powerful that the 8600GT, I remind you, the RSX is more powerful that the desktop 7800GTX (according to nVidia), and don't compare the 3DMark05 score of the 7800GTX with the 8600GT. The 3DMark scores for the 8000 series do not match their real-life performance.
And an interesting thing about the PS3 is that (if you can program it properly) you can make the CELL processor help the GPU in rendering.

 

No they dont, They AU, Asia, and European models never had the PS2 chip in them, They have been purely software emulation, As will be the new 80gb USA model when the 60gb model is phased out.

 

right, but a bunch of ps3's do have the hardware chip. someone thought it might make more sense to use that instead of emulation.

trust me, the pcsx2 team isn't at a brick in the road because of cpu limitations. a core 2 duo cpu is going to do things like cpu emulation MUCH better than the cell cpu. its just the fact that sony knows the ins and outs of their own ps2 cpu, whereas the pcsx2 team gets to use trial and error.

 

Very early north American and Japanese models had the Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer built into it, all other models used software emulation

Cell may have 7 cores but only one of them is a "proper" core, the other 6 are mini cores designed to complement the main core, unlike our dual cores where each core is the equivalent of the other so don't get too exited by the 7 core Cell processor

 

nvidia disagrees with you.

i wish i could find the article but they say the 8700m gt is stronger than the xenos. the xenos is stronger than the rsx, so by a feat of logic the 8700m gt is stronger than the pair. desktop 8600 gt = 8700m gt. the 8600m gt isn't far behind. that was the basis of my statement.

the cell cpu mini cores are designed to do weird things that traditionally, cpu's should not be doing. gpu functions. however, if someone makes an engine designed to use a combination of the cell SPE's and the rsx, it could be pretty powerful. maybe. its sort of a toss up as to whether or not that will happen.

 

Firstly, you said that 8600GT was more powerful that the Xenos not the 8700GT.
Apart from that, that report (posted on Gizmodo) only compared the 8700GT and the shadows made by the Xenos - which 8700GT was better (because of the DirectX10, even 2400 HD will do shadows at a better speed, but at which frame rate ? )
There are reports like this one in which show that nVidia claims, RSX is more powerful than the 7800GTX : http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/9132/PlayStation-3-GPU-More-Powerful-than-GeForce-7800/
Even if it's not as powerful as 7800GTX, it's just slightly less powerful than the 7800GTX.

Well, PS2 did that, a part of the work was done on the CPU while the rest was done on the GPU. And the Wikipedia page for RSX has already included some info about the combined power of the CELL and the RSX.
(The idea of the CELL processor was not to make a normal CPU, but a power streaming CPU which excels at floating-point calculations including the matrix and vertex calculations)

You can also take a look at an article I posted here earlier : http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=92054
You can find some info there.

 

its hard to say. i agree i was speculating. either way, they are all right there, and i wouldn't put any very far from the others.

i understand the idea of the cell. its pretty intriguing. we will have to wait and see how it pans out.

if you want to, you can find articles that say the rsx is faster than the xenos, or vice versa.

you can also find people (probably not articles) who profess that the xenos is faster than an 8800gtx, or at least comparable.

there are people who say that the xbox 360 is faster than any modern pc because it has like 300 GB/s of memory bandwidth, but that is quite a stretch of the imagination. 250 GB/s or so of that is the frame buffer to its own 10 Megs of memory. ridiculous.

you can find people who say the 8600m gt is bad. some say its great. some say its worse than a console gpu, some say better.

they are all pretty much comparable (except the 8800gtx which leads ahead by far)

 

I think the PS3 video card is based on a 7800gtx.

 

hmmm, well seeing as I don't care about the power of a console's GPU as all the games released for it are guaranteed to run the only thing I have compared between a 360's GPU and a PS3's GPU is the image quality.

Initially I found that the PS3 had more of an HDR look and the lighting seemed to look better but made some games look washed out. So it was both a positive and a negative. The AF on the PS3 was just brilliant, much better than the 360 (i.e. long roads actually looked good the whole way and didn't seem to fade like the same road in the 360 version would).

360 does a much better job of AA though, the edges looked way smoother than the PS3 in all the games I saw, even when comparing both at low and high resolutions. I didn't know if it was me at first but when I saw the sort of jagged looking basketball players in NBA live 07 I knew the 360 had won in the AA department. That being said the lack of lighting in 360 games actually makes it look better than the PS3 equivalent, sometimes.

Overall though I think just because the initial PS3 games didn't look good in the future they will look much better; MGS4 for example looked like the best looking game i've ever seen. I think PS3 exclusive games will look much better than 360 exclusive games for example (MGS4 image quality > Halo 3 image quality)

In the end though a console's GPU doesn't determine anything, its a console's games that will indicate it's sales (i.e. wii with releasing zelda: twilight princess > PS3 releasing with resistance: fall of man [i think the winner was obvious])

 

Basically, once developers unlock the potential of the cell mini cores the PS3 would be an awesome console - but until then it looks as doomed as the 3DO AND the Atari Jaguar - It's much more expensive to develop a PS3 game in 1080p (like the Jaguar) AND its (until we unlock its potential as I said) needlessly futuristic (like the 3DO). At least it's not as expensive as the 3DO.

I'm going to play a working copy of Duck Hunt.

g'night.

 

It's an awesome console the second MGS4/Tekken6/FFXIII come out

 

Square enix said FF13 is only 12% completed at the moment and they wont be releasing any games until mid 08, I think it will be a good 12-18 months before we see ff13

 

but the cell processor is harder to code for than a multi-core processor like the xbox360's,

i don't hide the fact i don't like the ps3 but even i have to say its a damned fine piece of kit

 

it doesn't really have a better cpu. the cpu is just the single core.

the other mini cores are more like mini gpu extension things. however, the ut3 engine does have them doing audio, physics, ai, stuff like that. pretty interesting.

i am assuming that the total gpu power of the rsx and the cell combined outweighs the xbox's xenos.

if it didn't, they probably wouldn't have spent money making such a weird part. who knows, though.