The ultimate PS3 - XBOX 360 comparison thread!

Version 1.2.0.0;

After witnessing scattered PS3.vs.XBOX360 wars (and several incomplete and misguiding comparison like one's found in WinSuperSite) I finally decided to do a more complete comparison of these two machines.

Revision History :
1.0.1.1 : Corrected some mistakes now the CPU section is 100% correct.
1.0.1.2 : Restyling/making it more readable,Added the GPU section.
1.2.0.0 : Completion of the CPU part/Restyling.
1.3.0.0 : Added memory and software section.A little editing.

CPU (Central Processing Unit) :

1 - Comparing the Cores.

-The XBOX360 had it's CPU upgraded to Xenon from the Intel Mobile Celeron seen in the XBOX.
-The PS3 had it's CPU upgraded from Emotion Engine to the CELL Broadband Engine.

The almost similar PPE :
Both Xenon and the CELL have PPE (Xenon has 3,the CELL has 1),it's called Power Processing Element.
The PPE has the ability to do two way simultaneous multithreading (SMT) which means that each of the PPE's handles two instructions per cycle instead of one.

The PPE show clear signs of being designed for stream processing.

The PPE has also been stripped out of it's instruction window.And it has only one execution unit per-thread.Also PPE does not have the ability to do out of order execution so it should execute in order.

In a PPE two instructions get read,passed to the pipeline and go to thier respective execution units.

The PPE,like pentium 4 has a 21 step deep processing pipelines,meaning that when a single instruction gets executed,an instruction enters the pipeline.A jump instruction (like a GOTO instruction in BASIC), makes the CPU dump all the stored an processed commands and getting new instructions in,so a deep pipeline means a bad reputation with programs that have many GOTO's (like branch prediction).A deep pipeline was exactly the thing that almost killed Prescott (a 30 step deep pipeline).

The small cache (512KiB for CELL and 1MiB for Xenon,lack of out of order execution,deep pipeline all mean than PS3 is more likely to suffer a lot at AI,physics and GameLogic.
The simplified design of the PPE means that it can reach high clock levels,Both the PPE's at CELL and Xenon are clocked 3.2GHz and IBM has said that CELL can reach 4.8GHz too.


The Xenon :
The former XBOX had a mobile Celeron 733 with a pentium III architecture supporting SSE which was very good at it's time,the only 32-bit processor of the lot.

The Xenon has 3 PPE's.The difference between the PPE in the Xenon and the CELL is :
-Each of the 2-threads has VMX128,meaning 128x128-bit registers while the PPE inside CELL has a standard VMX with 32x128-bit registers.The VMX128 is similar to VMX in many aspects but it has more instructions,therefore incompatible with the standard VMX.

-The 1MiB cache shared between the 3 PPE's opposed to the 512MiB in the CELL.Also the Xenon cache has direct connection to the GPU.
-Added instructions to the original PowerPC CPU's.
The idea of having a CPU handling 6 threads comes from the fact that many games require 5-6 threads to run happy.The former XBOX was not a multi-core processor so much of the multi-threading had to be done by the developers themselves.

The CPU sports 1-MiB of L2 cache which is readable by the GPU,the GPU issues an L2 cache Lock request and then reads the memory directly.The cache is clocked by half the CPU clock and it has a 256-bit wide bus.Which makes the transition of data (e.g : texture image) to the GPU faster.
The Xenon also has an encryption capability to prevent hardware hacking.
(The Microsoft team which designed the XBOX360 pointed out that XBOX had two major issues : Slow FSB and slow memory.)

The Cell Processor :

The Emotion Engine was the CPU for PS2,the first 128-bit CPU of the industry(note:the main processor was a 64-bit MIPS processor).

.
The CPU is the well-known CELL Processor,consisting of a PPE and 8 SPE's(Synergistic Processing Elements) one of which is disabled which makes 7 Cores.
The PPE has a 512KiB cache.
Each of the SPE's is composed of an SPU (Synergistic Processing Unit) and a MFC (Memory Flow Controller) SPE's cannot execute threads but are loaded instead with small programs.Unlike shaders that are seen in GPU's the SPU's can be chained together to perform tasks(Most shaders are forced to act parallel and they cannot share any values).Each of the SPE's 32KiB of local memory instead of cache which can be accessed directly (this is impossible to do in the cache memory and unlike cache memory there are no structures to predict which data to load).They have 128x128-bit registers.(wikipedia Called it VMX128 which seems to be wrong although they are almost similar)
Setting the SPE's jobs is a task entrusted to the programmer.So the recent portions of the XBOX360 to PS3 has less performance on PS3 than in XBOX360.
It means that it's developer's job to make a game PS3 optimized.It's been stated that XBOX360 gives performance more easily than PS3 in programs with fewer threads.
From a long time ago IBM released a CELL processor emulator for linux to aid developers in optimizing programs for the CELL processor.Also the newer release of the IBM compiler has added some instructions to the C++ for the SPUs.
The CELL processor has given extremely high performance in Stream Processing (The Emotion Engine also exceeded the Mobile Celeron in this area) for example : Toshiba demonstrated a Home Cinema Encoding 48-1920×1080 MPEG-2 streams and displaying them as thumbnails for the user to choose.
Also reticently the PS3's have been given the choice of connecting to the FOLDING@home project.Numbers have shown that each PS3 performed x15+ better than the average PC's connected to the project.

The Front side bus

In Xenon the FSB increased from the rather slow 133MHZ FSB in the Celeron to a whopping 5.4GHz which is an extremely impressive improvement.
The CELL has a very fast Front Side Bus,called FlexIO licensed by RAMBUS (according to ps3dev.info) with 76.8GB/s total I/O bandwidth from the ~150MHz on the Emotion Engine.

The Interconnect bus

The Interconnect bus inside the CELL Processor is FAST called Element Interconnect Bus (EIB).It also check the cache coherency so it makes parallel processing by the SPE's much easier.

1 - Comparing the GPU's.

GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) :
For PS3 the GPU was upgraded from the Graphics Synthesizer to NVidia RSX Reality (a chip made by nVidia) Synthesizer.
For XBOX360 the GPU was upgraded from the NV2A (a chip made by both nVidia and Microsoft) to the Xenos Processor (Custom chip made by ATI)
(Edit : Not much details or specification instead some numbers have been released (or I didn't find any )
But I had the chance to find some very good articles on the Xenos so I'm putting some of the stuff here)
Microsoft had soe problems finding a suitable chip for the GPU,NVidia (since they were busy at the time) gave the a high price to do the job,Microsoft wandered off to find someone to make the GPU for them (they even considered - i think IBM - to make the GPU for them) but ATI managed to convince them to make the GPU.

CPU is not connected to almost anything in the XBOX360 excet the GPU,the southbridge is connected to the Xenos.Which makes Xenos part Northbridge - part GPU (ati is an expert at making both of them)
You might want to take a look at this diagram :
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/4/3

The Xenos is in fact the first GPU to have unified shaders (combined vertex shader and fragment shader)

The unified shaders is very new.The G80 is the very first to be available at PC market.The only API that takes full use of the unified shaders is DirectX 10 , there have been no changes in the OpenGL API to support it.
Note : The Xenos is not a DirectX 10 chip but it has a rich set of features because of it..

Xenos is combined from two dies.The main die and the daughter die.
The main die is at least four times bigger than the daughter die.
The daughter die is an eDRAM and has an extremely fast bus for communicating with the main die (32GB/s).

-source:wikipedia
The reason for this double die is that by the current 90-nm fabrication process (fabriaction using 90-nm transistors),the die would become huge and cooling it would become more of a problem.There are also no announcments about any 65-nm plans for this chip.
The framebuffer is inside the eDRAM and to be able to do all the operations properly there is a 256GB/s fast interconnect bus between the logic and the internal memory of the chip.
The eDRAM is designed to do the 4x FSAA without any problem.

The memory
PlayStation 3 comes with a 256MB XDR-Ram (made by rambus) and 256MB of GDDR3 memory for the RSX GPU.
XDR-RAM is a kind of memory that has twice the rate as a DDR2/GDDR3 memory just like DDR3.The one coming with PS3 is clocked at 800MHz therefore yielding the effective clock of 3200Mhz equal to the Core.

XBOX360 comes with 512MB of GDDR3 memory.The memory is shared through unified memory architecture.
Many come to associate this to the integrated memory but it's totally different.First the integrated GPU's are designed much weaker,Because they are optimized for minimal power consumption.And also XBOX360's GPU,Xenos,has a very wide memory interface.

The Software and toolchain
Sony was always too arrogant towards the game developers.But it seems that for PS3 Sony has revised it's strategy in the SDK area.They released the XLC compiler [made by IBM] some time before releasing the console,also they released a format called collada,an XML based format to ease the development process (XML is textbased so it can be used in all platforms,Macs[at least the IBM based one's] didn't support binary formats.),Collada is a format that holds both the graphical and physical software,suitable for hardcore game developing.Google also adopted this format for Google Earth 3D models.With the help of nVidia, PS3 supports a special edition of OpenGL called OpenES,highly similar to OpenGL.
All the PS3's come with Linux pre-installed and you can connect keyboard to it and work, some Linux fans even managed to bring up fedora on their PS3's.
Microsoft's attitude was better than Sony's from the beginning.They have released a toolkit called XNA framework, suitable for Homebrew game developers and even corporate delelopers so they wouldn't have to "re-invent the wheel everytime they wrote a game".The operating system installed on XBOX360 is Media Center.
There have been some statements that the Preinstalled Linux is more resource hungry than the Media Center.

To be continued...
upcoming additions :
-Memory
-Controller
-Connectivity
-...

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
-Mujtaba.

 

Very interesting!

 

Oooh, more hardware goodness... I'm in a hurry right now, but will definitely make a horribly long post later that no one will read and everyone will argue with...
For now I'll just mention that both the 360 and PS3 CPU's are single-issue. That is, each core can only execute one instruction at a time (with SMT, one instruction from each of two threads)
Most PC cpu's can issue three instructions per cycle. Core 2 does four.
So all in all, both consoles get their butts whooped when it comes to efficient execution of a single thread...

About SMT, IBM has demonstrated implementations of the technology that gave them 80% more performance, at 50% increase in transistor count. That's pretty impressive, and actually beats multicore (which gives you 100% performance, and 100% increase in transistor count)

I don't know exactly how efficient the consoles SMT implementation is, but you're right, SMT can be a lot more than Intel's hyperthreading.

 

At least this post wasnt so long I fell asleep reading it. I actually did that with one of your other posts on hardware, no offense. Doesnt help I lay in bed posting.

 

That's what it told (al least i think i do )
But I don't think it is more efficient in all areas.The biggest problem of the SMT is the resource access and the possible conflict which makes the design more complicated.
Even IBM went for dual core so there should be a good reason for that.

 

updated a bit.

 

Yeah, but if you think about it, being able to share resources can really improve efficiency. If the CPU is able to run two threads, and has 6 execution units (where most CPU cores have 3), for example, that would allow it to run two separate threads at full speed (just like a dualcore system) by assigning 3 units to each thread, or it could, if only one thread requires lots of CPU time, allow that to use more than 3 units. The end result is *at least* as good performance as a dualcore system. Plus whatever performance you gain from the added flexibility.
Of course you're right, it also adds some complexity so at least to begin with, multiple cores is certainly the simpler solution. I'm hoping that one day SMT will make a return though.

 

You might want to take a look at the SPARC CPU's the lastest I saw was an Eight Core one,each core capable of handling Eight threads...

(Note : Intel & AMD are still happy to have Quad-Core CPU's LOL)

 

Very nice post, very thorough research. Although I read through it and find myself actually not wanting to get either system now lol.

Heck, at this point I'm yearning for the days of the SNES.

 

"Consoles are a poor mans PC". Im sticking by that, these consoles are just a huge turn off now...I know how you feel. My favorite system is still the SNES.

 

Oh man, the memories: FFIII, Chrono Trigger, SF2 (old school), Super Mario World, ...

The hardware's progressed by leaps and bounds since then, but the games haven't kept up.

Still, hard to argue with the eye candy presented by either of these next-gen consoles though.

 

Ahh Chrono Trigger..arguably the best RPG of all time. And I loved figuring out every single secret in Super Mario World. Not to mention beating it in about 15 minutes lol.

 

Thanks to everybody for the Feedback ,I'm still doing research

 

Me too, followed closely by the PS1. I actually cried when I found out my Mum gave it to Vinnies. I have very find memories of playing Dr Mario against Mum up until 10pm at night.

And, to the OP, I am very impressed by the progress of this research. You seem to have presented the information in an unbiased way, good work!

 

The CPU part complete...

 

Wow... Thinking of a PC that use Xenos or RSX...

 

RSX is easy. Go buy a Geforce 7900 and you've got it. They're basically the same design. Xenos is trickier to classify.
In terms of raw power, it's outclassed by the Geforce 8800. It has one unique advantage though, the 10MB embedded ram used for frame buffer, which provides a big boost to the 360's graphical performance. Unfortunately, as brilliant as this is, it's just not big enough for use on PC's, where higher solutions have to be supported. The 360 renders at 720p internally, but something like 1600x1200 simply won't fit in a 10MB frame buffer, which make it useless in a PC.
So the bottom line is, on PC, a 8800 is a much better deal.

Btw, just another little correction:

There's no need for the API to support unified shaders. The API just has to expose access to the different types of shaders (vertex and pixel shader, traditionally, and geometry shaders on DX10 cards). It doesn't care how many there are of each, or how they're arranged. Unified shaders just means the card can put any shader unit to work on any type of shader. So as long as the API can say "Get a vertex shader unit to execute this shader program", it doesn't matter whether the card uses a scheduler to find a unified shader unit that's idle and gives it the task, or if it just sends the task to one of a small number of dedicated vertex shaders.

Unified shaders mostly means more efficient use of the shader execution units (because without it, some units may be idle because only units of a different type are needed at the moment), but it doesn't affect the API in any way. DX10 doesn't require unified shaders either, it just requires features that may be hard to implement efficiently without it (Dedicated geometry shader units would probably be a waste of effort, because the things aren't going to be needed for at least a year or two)

 

I really dont see the point in these comparisons, i know you put allot of work into it and well done but the fact is they can all have as much power as they want or little as they want.

PS3 vs 360 both are good technicly who wins? none of them because its us the consumer who decideds by its games and how it can handle media media just becoming the normal for them.

E.g. Wii less powerful than both of them yet its out selling them if you compare it by its launch month japan its outside 360 and ps3 already yet its not as powerfull but its innoative and something different 360 and PS3 arent their basicly updated graphics and media functions and improved online.

I have an xbox 360 is it the best console ive played so far yes it is do i think their were better games on PS1 which is technicly crap yes i do.

The average customer is going to walk into a shop look at price and games avalible and buy not go into its technical details.

So there will never be no winner in sales they will but not one that out rights beats all in every way possible.

 

The point? Some of us find it interesting.
No one's saying that the most powerful system is going to "win". We're just discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each.

 

Sorry if came accross harsh just my usual replies as ive seen hundreds of these threads turn into fanboy bashing etc.

I do like how the tech is made up myself i find it intresting how the graphics are done yet when you look at pc eqivalents its done totally different and not many games run as smooth but it depends on your pc consol its designed for it i suppose.

 

I promise you it won't turn into such a thing,
I think the first 3 lines of the article teel you what is this article for.

Interesting...

I think I was explaining this,too.
The special purpose of the consoles made Microsoft dump Intel.

 

http://dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=1

xb0x 360-superior

 

The writer himself doesn't say that.But for Sony&nVidia to be rather silent about RSX is a bit suspicious.Yes,I do know that Xenos is much more powerful than RSX but in the article the comparition between Xenon and the CELL is rather incomplete.

 

I think it's been fairly well documented that the ATi solution is the technically superior. The PS3 has the awesome processor tech, whilst the X360 has the awesome GPU.

What I would love is a PS3 with the ATi chip.

 

The PS3 has awesome processor tech, yes, but in games it's no better than the 360's CPU, even when we disregard the GPU.

But for people wanting to do scientific simulations and such, the PS3 is definitely the way to go (I know a few professors at my university are really hyped up about it)

 

The XBOX360 has 6 VMX128 units but using all of them is almost impossible,Utilizing the SPE's in float processing will be way easier.

 

What would be the C2D equivalent of PS3's and Xbox’s CPUs?
1.66 GHz C2D perhaps?

 

I'm not so sure. The 360's SIMD units are just that, regular SIMD units. True, they probably won't all be utilized at the same time, but they're easily available when needed.

The SPE's are different. They don't have access to main memory, they're more or less independent from the main core and have a very limited instruction set.

An SPE is great for long sequences of SIMD code, but regular SIMD units such as those in the 360 can be used for individual SIMD instructions interleaved with branches, integer code and everything else. I'd say that makes them a lot more accessible.

Depends on which benchmarks you use. For gaming, yes, something like that probably isn't far off.

For video encoding or scientific computations, the Cell is closer to something like a 30-50GHz C2D.

 

30-50GHZ C2D???? That would give it the status of a sever or super computer wouldn't it? How come it's that fast? I thought Core 2 was the fastest processor available to personal computing...

 

That's why they call CELL "supercomputer on a chip"
The architecture is fine-tuned to do float operation.

 

The Core 2 Extreme Quad core is technically the strongest mainstream CPU available right now. If you go a little outside, you can get like 3.6 GHz Xeon processors which are faster, but still kind of mainstream.

The Cell is designed to handle calculations and floating point processes extremely efficiently, which is why it's so much faster than the Core 2. The C2D is an excellent all-around processor that does pretty much anything at a decent pace. The Cell falls a little short in some areas, but in multimedia encoding and number-crunching, it's pretty much the fastest processor you can get right now (save for maybe SPARC chips). And IBM is starting to use it in several of its Blade Servers.

 

There is a 3rd next-gen console. Its the wii. It has the best system sold/since release ratio. It has a gpu wich i do not noe wat it is. It is ATI though.
The wii is arguably the best of the 3 systems. Needs more mature games though.

 

Wii is the cheapest, while playing games with it is fun (thanks to the motion sensor) , but it's graphics are noway near PS3 or XBOX360, I went and read a bit about the Wii GPU,it's interesting but just as I pointed out,it's much weaker than Xenos and RSX (it's chip die size is very small compared to many GPU's, see here
and a die size this small means reduced power for the GPU)

 

Maybe you should include the presence of a scaler into the XBox360 in the gpu chapter. It's called the "ANA" chip.
More infos here...
http://arstechnica.com/articles/headstart.ars/2

 

The main problem I have is : There is almost no data/spec. sheet /article about RSX (if you find one I'll be more than happy + rep.), so it'll just be like some advertisement for Xenos (no that it doesn't deserve that).

 

30-50 ghz

It's a 'super computer' by hype alone, just like the Ps2 was a 'super computer'.

It has one main core, and 7 highly limited cores.

Even if you were to put all of these cores to work, if you were to put all 4 cores of a quad core to work, it would be much faster.

 

The Wii is marginally faster than the original Xbox (except no built-in shaders, just in the TEV), so it doesn't really compete with the other two at all in terms of horsepower. But it is fun if you have friends to play games with. But as far as most of the games go... eh, my Wii is sitting at home right now and I'm just playing my Xbox 360.

 

I'll rather spend my $600 on the forthcoming R600 and drop a few more $ for a Core 2 Quad than a gaming console. I'm never going anywhere near Nvidia again after my friend dropped $600 on an 8800 and is unable to run Vista with it, but that's another thread. Any gaming console is optimized for calculations and floating point processes along with graphics obviously. If you were able to do those things with the aforementioned R600 and Core 2 Quad? It would make the PS3 look like a toaster. I guess I'm a pessimist when it comes to gaming consoles. If it was possible to upgrade the processor and graphics chip as time went by I might change my mind...oops wait a minute...we already have that...called a PC.

 

Actually the Wii has twice the amount of shaders that the gamecube had, which was pretty much the same amount the Xbox had.

It was just in the TEV.

The Wii DEFINATELY has shading potential, but it's so **** hard to do it, most people give up.

 

If you want mature on Wii, Manhunt 2 is coming to the PS2 and Wii as well XD LMAO.

On the 360 vs. PS3 arguement:

I'm impressed with what Cell can do, but the PS3 as a whole doesn't really impress me too much. The Xenos is more powerful and flexible than the RSX by a good width, and the RAM pool on the 360 is a more effective way for RAM set up on either game console. Having all 512 MB of RAM directly available to the GPU if need be is a big advantage for the 360, unlike on the PS3 where if the RSX needs more than the 256 MB of XDR VRAM, it has to then delve into the 256 MB of GDDR3 SRAM which is seperate and therefore takes more time to access. This issue has been of concern for Bethesda in porting The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion to PS3. At least the PS3, despite the higher price point has an HD media deliver system built in, so if you do want to have a high definition movie player, you're getting the cheapest one plus a gaming system. Also the HDD on the PS3 is easily upgradeable as it's your standard 2.5 in SATA like in laptop computers, and developers don't have to worry about whether they should add HDD cache file support when they know the system is going to have an HDD.

In my honest opinion: I'm more impressed with the Xbox 360 in the end as a standalone gaming machine which is what matters to me. The PS3 however is an amazing deal with what it has, but just needs more software. I'd get both if I could. However, I'm not a movie watcher really, I'm a gamer, so I'd get an Xbox 360. Better GPU, RAM set up, better overall system setup. I did not bring the CPUs into account as of now just to let you guys know, because of the mysteries surrounding the Xenon and Cell where they are so different, and hard to compare as of right now.

 

Yeah, but like you said, you're dropping $600 for a GPU and another what, $300-$400 for a CPU. And that's not including a mobo, RAM, case, optical drives, monitor, sound card, etc... PC gaming just becomes too expensive even in the long run just to run many of the same games with a little better looking graphics... and in 5 or 6 years (typical console lifespan) you'll just have to start all over with a new mobo, faster RAM, case, and all of that because the CPU's of the GPU's then will no longer work with the other stuff of now. I'd rather just pay $400 for a 360 now and not have to worry about crashing OS's, bad drivers, not enough RAM, and sluggish framerates all because I haven't shut down my computer in days. But hey, that's me...

And blaiming the fact that your friend's 8800 won't run Vista on nVidia isn't really fair as most of the problems come from Vista. Sure the drivers are more unstable than ATi's, but ATi drivers don't even support OpenGL right now, which means you can't play a lot of games out there, like Doom 3, Quake 4, etc... So yeah, all the crap can't be slung at nVidia.

 

How do you know how many shaders it has? Nintendo nor ATi have not released any specs besides clock speed on the GPU, so I'd like to see your source (not saying I don't believe you, I'd just like to see a source). And yeah, I did mention that the Wii's shaders were in the TEV and not built into the GPU...

The Wii's architecture just means that it'll get a lot of bad (graphically) ports, and it'll see a lot more potential in exclusives, especially 1st and 2nd party.

 

The NV20 GPU in the Xbox and the Flipper GPU in the GC both have 4 pixel shaders if I'm correct.

 

I believe the EDRAM just helps in running HDR with MSAA, isnt tht right?

 

I had a source long ago that said that the TEV was doubled.

The TEV of the gamecube could do pixel shaders in alot of ways better then the xbox, and in alot of ways, worse.

I'll try to look for it, but it would take me awhile. Look for it yourself too.

If this is true, the Wii does have pixel shading capabilites that are close to 7600gt realm......

 

Zellio, you really need a lesson or two about computer hardware.
The "Super Computer" title was given to CELL processor because of it's power in floating point processing.The GFLOP (giga flop = floating point per second) for CELL processor is more than QX6700 by and order of magnitude.Please go and read about these things (for example wikipedia's article on CELL processor is very good),or even roll back to page one and read the bit about the CELL processor that I posted.The CELL processor falls short on things like AI and branch prediction, when there are a lot of conditional goto instructions, to optimize a processor on AI and branching requires a lot of optimization both on Cache and on the CPU itself, CELL processor lacks these because it's not designed for these, yet it's the result of years of effort at STI R&D departments.
CELL processor is very good at floating point calculations, it's TDP is less than QX6700 (less than 80watts vs 120watts) and it has unique processing power that currently no processor can match.
Yet I agree it falls short at heavy branching and it's difficult to make multi-threaded games on it.Currently IBM is using CELL processors at blade-centers.
Also the SPE's on the cell processor are vertor processors meaning they are much capable on terms of scientific calculations.(goto page 1)
Core 2 Duo, no matter how much you love it, and no matter how good it performs for home users, compared to CELL looks as dumb as a troll in terms of these calculations.
Currently one of the main uses of Super computers is scientific calculations.So it does have the right to be called "Super computer on a chip"...

 

I've been pretty harsh in my criticism of the Cell, but mujtaba is right.
It's not entirely unjustified to call it a "supercomputer".

It is extremely powerful, for a certain narrow group of tasks. For those workloads, it can't just run circles around the fastest Core 2 CPU, it can run circles around a dozen of them.

For everything else? I'd compare it to a mid-range Pentium 4 performance-wise. (Of course, this is just a guess, not based on real-world benchmarks or anything). It's acceptable. Barely. But doesn't stand up to modern PC CPU's.

Hahah, sorry, had to quote that one. Best extreme overreaction of the year.
Your friend hasn't exactly wasted his money, has he? He's got the absolutely fastest card under XP. And in a week or two, he'll have the absolutely fastest card under Vista. Yes, the initial Vista drivers are delayed, but they'll get there. So in the long run, who cares? Would it be better if they hadn't sold the card at all until they had Vista drivers ready? Who would have benefited from that?

 

Updated a little.(I'm such a slacker )

 

The PS3 folding power:

http://www.techspot.com/news/24651-foldinghome-client-for-the-ps3-approaching.html
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/03/20/tech-ps3firmwarefoldingathome-20070320.html

http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-PS3.html

 

No, It's a framebuffer,and framebuffer is used for many many effects.Mirror,Blur [both motion and radial] and alpha blending.eDRAM is a very good idea for a gaming console.

-source:wikipedia