What CPU and GPU to match PS3 gaming experience?

If i want to have a good gaming experience, what kind of videocard should I buy if I want to have an experience close to PS3 games.

Would Ati 3850 be good enough?

And what CPU minimal? AMD 4800 good enough?

 

get a ps3? i dunno, but i think that would be closest experiance. from what ive heard the ps3 has an average video card, but an INSANE cpu. if your looking for a computer, dont try to get a computer so it can look like it does on consoles, the beauty of a pc is how much BETTER you can make games look on pc than on consoles.

 

Ok good to know. But what minimum specs do I need to make PC games look as good or better than PS3?

 

i read somewhere the gpu in the ps3 is comparable to the 7800 gtx. so the 3850 should be good enough, though if you have the money you should get the nvidia gtx 280 . i dont think any processor compares to the ps3 processor, but luckily games are more gpu reliant than processor. any good dual core or quad core processor should be fine i think, im not extremely knowledgable on processors though.

 

your not going to get the same graphics on a pc as your going to get from a ps3

 

Anything from a 8600m GT ->>> and up destroys a PS3 and a Xbox 360 for that matter graphically. So no worries. That CPU in the PS3 is not as powerful as they say. You can´t compare an out of order CPU aka PC CPU´s to an in of order CPU aka PS3. A Core2Duo destroys the PS3 CPU when it comes to gaming. The PS3 CPU is basically a number crunching CPU.

Get a 8800GT desktop or a 9600m GT DDR3 for a laptop and you have beaten that PS3 by far. Remember PS3 runs at 720p except some easier games that run in 1080p, not many do that. A 8600m GT runs games beautifully in 1280x800.

 

No cpu out there matches CELL right now, but gpu is matching 8700M GT.

But worry not, alot of multiplatform games can have somewhat better visuals than on PS3 because of the possibilty of higher resolution and AA on PC.

 

akuma, did you mean no CPU in the first part, cause otherwise thats like saying, apples arent fruits, but apples are fruits, yo.

 

Yeah, cpu. Sorry for the small mixup.

 

PS3 CPU is only powerful for multi-threaded apps since it contains seven CPU's on a single chip. Actually eight, but one is disabled to improve yields. So it's not your conventional x86 CPU architecture.

Quad Cores are getting close as long as software is written to take advantage of all the cores.

 

any high-end card will run games @ 1920*1200 and above, an hd 4850 for example. ps3 run most games at 720p

 

I really don't think it's just up to the GPU and CPU for PS3 competing graphics. A nice screen is really going to go, and as soon as games start coming out on bluray, then that'll be the next step. But yeah, a core 2 duo and a 4850, plus a nice screen will own the ps3.

 

Going by specs alone, I'd say the PS3 and Xbox360 for that matter would compare to a PC with a 3GHz Core 2 duo + 7900GS

You've got to think about it, about 99% of the PS3 and Xbox360's games are in 720P (aka 1280x720) For most PC users/gamers that is a resolution most would consider unacceptable nowadays.

Take some cross platform games for example.

Grid on the Xbox360 & PS3 runs 30FPS capped, at 1280x720. a single 8800GT + 2.4GHz core 2 duo can run Grid in 1920x1080 with 4xAA with 60+fps.

 

ps3 cpu? meh. its really good at some types of tasks but mostly the ps3 cpu is good at being cheap. a quad core intel processor costs almost as much as a ps3, and there is a reason. any modern processor will be great. intel core 2 duo or core 2 quad.

ps3 gpu? 7800gtx. just get an 8800 though, or 4800 for even more performance.

 

What they said, you don´t need any expensive GPU or CPU for that matter to have a better graphical experience on the PC.

 

The PS3 CPU is quite capable but only in certain (somewhat limited) fashions given that programming is designed to take advantage of its strengths. It's not a matter of faster or slower than your desktop quad or dual core because in some ways those can be more versatile and they follow a very different design philosophy.

The GPU in the PS3 isn't anything particularly amazing, but the Cell processor I think can be tasked with some graphics processing. From what I've read the Xbox 360 may have a ever so slightly better GPU than the PS3, and it's CPU is different too (and hard to compare) since it has 3 general cores to the Cells 1 general core with a bunch of less versatile specialized cores.

You can beat the PS3 or the 360 in graphics quite easily though. They tend to run the games at much lower resolutions than PC gamers will try to use so that makes the comparison quite a bit less clear. Also, while they've stayed the same the CPUs and GPUs in desktop technology have continued to advance and games will continue to take advantage of that. The programmers do a great job though of wringing every bit of performance out of the consoles as time goes on, that's the only real way for them to compete (but they do have the advantage of minimal overhead to support the console OS vs a desktop operating system).

 

Hardware wise the PS3 has a modified 7800 GT card with a CPU similar to a low GHz Core Solo model. The PS3 can only run commands in order so unless you just doing math it really isn't very powerful, the reason they use it is that it is easy to program for, its cheap, and it gives them something a bit more unique then just having an intel CPU.

On the other hand you can't run things the same way on a PC. Gaming companies make games for 1-6 sets of hardware, so they know EXACTLY what they can do, computer games doesn't work that way so they are generally very inefficient. Then consider how much power you have to waste on security, intenerate management, your OS, etc. The PS3 shoves the entire OS onto one core, and has one disabled, leaving you 6 processing cores and one manager. You need hardware several times faster to get the same experience since you can’t shove Vista and everything else (most people can’t at least) into one core. Even so, pick up a 8800GT, 8800GTX, or the aTi version; and any CPU, a decently fast harddrive, 3GB or more of RAM. Of course if you don't need to play at 1080p resolution then you don't need nearly as much hardware to get the same FPS. If you play at 720 is around half the pixels and thus about half the hardware power is needed.

 

A lot of PS3 games don't run at 1080 anyway, same with the Xbox. On top of that, a lot of the gamers asking these questions do expect their games to run at a displays native resolution be that WSXGA, SXGA, UXGA, etc. They also want to turn the settings up all the way, which when added to higher display resolution results in much more demand on the GPU than the consoles can handle.

Also, it doesn't seem that the PS3's CPU is easy to program for when it comes to games. Hasn't that been one of the things that's slowed development for it?

 

Last I heard the RSX chip (PS3's video card) had a 128bit memory bandwidth. Therefor is greatly outclassed by a 7800GTX or any other suffix of the card. They were comparing it to a 7600GT with a few more shaders and modified memory.

 

Yes my mobile go 7800GTX outclasses that PS3 GPU. The whole laptop does that this proves since if I play at the same res 720p with my old XPS M170 it does in fact play games much smoother and better looking due to AA and AF. I bought that XPS M170 at the same time the 360 was released. I do have a 360 too.

Actually it is a little hilarious since it is a single core CPU too

 

It has been my knowledge, and the knowledge of inquiring minds for quite some time now about the PS3 and Cell BE,
A.) The Cell BE is NOT cheap, to manufacture or develop for.
B.) Is radically new, and extremely useful in floating point computations(which is the reason that the highest performing super-computer series in the world, blue Gene etc. utilize cell BE blade setups)
C.) Uses a radically different programming method, called paralell processing(streams instead of inline packets as with conventionally architectured processors)
D.) The video card works in tandem with the Cell BE, for all graphics intensive tasks, and computational margins (i.e. physics, AI, partical count and placement, etc.)
((On a side note, the PS3 Excells at OpenGL as it is CPU intensive(i.e. Motorstorm)))
And finally E.) Right now, with Cell programming and cross compiling being at an early stage like what it is....it's easy to get caught up in the lies, that the Cell is underpowered or infereior...But as for now, any laptop with Nvidia 7900+ or ATI 1900XT+/ with any mid range AMD or Intel dual-core, can run circles, visually around anything cross-platform on the PS3. Ahh but take a gander at in house exclusives, developers that have a leg up in the PS3 programming competition(i.e. Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Guerilla Games, etc), and you can get more of a feel for what the PS3 can do graphically.

In the next year, PS3 developement is going to hit a growth spurt, and games that are beautiful and fun like you wouldnt beleive are going to be popping up on the console.... I however am a PC gamer at heart, like I have been since the 386DX days, but I must give credit where credit is due...

 

I think you might be giving too much credit! Still, much potential exists in the PS3 which has yet to be tapped (the 360 too).

 

Depends on what you use it for. For general purpose stuff, my old Athlon 64 could run circles around a Cell.

For the scientific number-crunching I've spent the last 6 months on as a college project, a Cell processor performed ~10 times faster than a desktop PC.

It's not that simple. The PS3 has one regular core. It then has 8 very specialized smaller cores, which are unable to do a lot of what you normally expect from a CPU. For some specific purposes, the Cell has 8 specialized extremely cores. For others, it has one primitive, stripped-down core which is about as efficient as a Pentium 3.

And any modern PC can easily render graphics similar to what you see on a PS3. For games or 3d graphics, the PS3 is not exceptionally powerful.
And no, not even Sony's inhouse stuff looks that amazing.

Yeah... To Sony's marketing department. They've found some way to make people *believe* all the crap they spew out.

 

I have some friends at my university who have been working on similar projects with a PS3. Very useful tool to them although they all also think it is an odd choice of processor for gaming. I'll take their word for it though, they're the ones that know enough about programming to really know what a Cell is good for.

I think they'll find ways to make better use of it but I don't think it will ever be as good for gaming as some people believe or Sony promised.

 

Promises and PR aside, I have played with my own two hands, and seen with my own two eyes, Killzone pre-alpha code, and I can tell you, that unless they've ( Sony) somehow magically learned how to utilize pixie dust, in a console... the Cell BE and RSX are way better at gaming than one gives them credit for. See the simple perspective is, you base your comparisons on conventional architecture, and by extension the programming used there of, however such is not the case, with comparison to relatively new/underdeveloped hardware, as the conventional thought process effectively obscures, your mind from the possibilities that this hardware brings to the table. The engineers and technical consultants that made the PS3 were thinking outside the conventional box, the developers that bring the amazing games like Uncharted, Killzone 2, Resistance: Fall of Man 2 etc to this console, thought outside the conventional box. So why is it so hard for us, the consumer to do the same thing? We are just humans like the engineers/techs/developers. I could tell you, but if you were really interested in learning, you would have already figured it out a few sentences back.

 

Ok thanks for all the answer guys but I'm a bit confused. So many different answers.

I forgot to say one important thing though: i'm looking for a desktop GPU.

So what videocard should I get? I'm on limited budget. I'd like to spend less than $200 (if possible even less).

 

Visiontek Radeon HD 4850 has a thumb up in the price to performance ratio...However, if the most extreme performance be your flavor, then consider the Nvidia GTX280 might be the better (but more expensive) solution. The new ATI Radeon HD4870 X2 doesnt perfom badly at all, and is definitely worth consideration.
By the way, are you looking for a single, dual, or multi-gpu video card?

 

HD 4850.

End thread/

 

I'd say you'd clearly beat out the PS3's graphics with a E7200 and a 9600GSO.

 

I was thinking single with my budget.

 

No more than a year ago, I would have suggested the EVGA 8800GT, but as with the times, the tides have changed, and the Visiontek 4850 is the new 8800GT...

 

even with an 8600 GT you can pretty much tie.

a 9600, 8800, 9800, ati 4850 or 4870 (in that order - increasing power) all pretty much represent domination of the consoles, including the ps3.

 

Any decent dual core CPU, and an 8600GT is good enough to equal the same gaming experience, with the exception of a few games. The RSX GPU in the PS3 is a revision of Nvidia's G70 GPU better known for being used as the GeForce 7800. It's locked at 500 MHz though, and has half it's ROPs disabled probably to save on power usage, especially as the Xbox 360's Xenos GPU has 8 ROPs as well.

Now there is alot of confusion over the Cell Broadband Engine and speculation. Yes, it has a single PowerPC CPU core, and it's made with 8 Specialized Processing Elements (SPEs) one disabled for redundancy, and if I remember a firmware update has or is going to enable the 8th SPE since the Cell and production has proved perfectly reliable. The main strength of the Cell is high floating point capability in a processor that can also manage more normalized tasks, a good intermediary between a typical desktop CPU and a more parallelized processor like a GPU or even a physics processor. That's what makes the Cell BE unique, the problem is that it is hard to program for initially, but it's a monster of a media decoder. IBM, Sony, and Toshiba had other things in mind outside of game consoles here-namely supercomputing arrays paired with more traditional processors as well as HDTVs where you can stream in and render multiple channels at once.

The core experience of gaming on the PS3 is easily attainable as well as surpassed on what is considered a "medium-end" PC game system. The PS3 could pull out better physics and other things too, but the amount of time and money it takes to develop the software and release it kind of keeps it down, but the Cell has insane potential. Besides, the 360 and PS3 suffer from a huge dilemna that PCs absolutely dominate in-they got miniscule amounts of RAM for some gaming experiences while most computers now have 2, 3 GB of RAM on a mainstream basis. Battlefield 2 or 2142 it all it's large scale glory while using "next-gen" rendering techniques? Forget it. Battlefield Bad Company has tiny maps. Far Cry 2 is certainly vast, but the draw distance is extremely low. Call of Duty 4 is also a fun example of console limitations considering the rendering is done at 600p then upscaled to 720p or 1080p. Honestly that's kind of sad. I really like the PS3, and the Cell BE is a great processor, but the lack of available RAM and older generation GPU are a real limiting factor.

 

another ps3

 

I don't think that PC and console can be compared 1:1,cos games on consoles are made differently AFAIK still,I played xbox 360 yesterday and it was "WoW" good

 

KZ2 isn't technically that impressive however, it's just using a lot of cheap post-processing to mask some awful texture work and low poly models.

I've been waiting 2 years now for the PS3 to deliver on the amazing power Sony keep promising, by the time it realizes this stunning "potential" console tech will have moved on a generation.

 

But KZ2 was announced to be visually most stunning game of this generation. Meaning no other game even compares with that level of beauty. ;]

If you've been really waiting for two years now, then maybe it's time to come out from under that huge rock and going to store and buy some games. Like MotorStorm series (best offroad/agressive racing games to date) Metal Gear Solid 4 (a true AAA+ title), Resistance series (a good storyline with awesome gameplay fps), Ninja Gaiden Sigma, WipeOut HD (only game in this generation what runs 60fps 1080p), Uncharted Drake's Fortune (sequel is on the way), LittleBigPlanet (you wanted something innovative, here you go), Gran Turismo 5 Prologue (HD car simulator, with constant updates), Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm (for anime fans, best naruto-based game to date - just look at the visuals), Heavenly Sword (practically like GodOfWar with a female character) Valkyrie Chornicles (one of the best jRPG's in this generation) and WarHawk (one of the PS3 launch titles).

Not enough? Here are some 2009 titles : LA Noire, Cross Edge, White Knight Chornciles, Demon's Souls, Killzone 2, Heavy Rain, inFamous, Shin Megami Tensei, Uncharted 2, Under Siege, WarDevil, Yakuza 3.

ALL of them being exclusive to Playstation 3.
(And of course, there are around 40+ multiplatformers for X360/PS3 in 09)


Sick and tired of Xbots or PC-fanboys acting like immature morons from Gamespot forums shouting "where are the games" crap. You're a 360 fanboy and don't like PS3? Alright, who cares, go and finish Halo 3 for the eleventh time and wait for the next one. You're a PC fanboy and don't like consoles at all? All right, go and whine in WoW, perhaps some NPC will care.

 

haha. nice

 

Heh... a PS3 fanboy. A rarity indeed.

 

Fanboy? For stating some exclusive game names?
Kid, go troll somewhere else.

 

8800m will chew and throw ps3 rsx

 

Back from the dead....

 

has anyone seen actual gameplay from kz2? the framerate looks horrible.

 

Intel GMA 950 crushes the PS3´s GPU under it´s feet ha ha

The framerate is horrible in most of PS3´s games. Sony always wants to make it very difficult for developers to work with it´s hardware compared to what Microsoft does, develops the console with the developer in mind not just to brag about the console and overhype it like Sony has done. Anyone remembering this old statement about the PS2? "The PS2 is a supercomputer, you won´t have to own a PC anymore, this is the answer to the PC" Hilarious indeed.

But as far as GPU as the question is from this back from the dead topic. Who dug this topic up? Why not dig up more old topics??? Anyway 7800GTX like someone else said, other say 7900GTX.

 

Hey jsut posting here b/c i think it's great and i'm hoping we can squeaze 5 more pages out of this topic.


Just doing my part...

 

It's not my fault that this is getting THIS offtopic.

Troll.
Intel GMA 950 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#GMA_950
nVidia RSX - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX_'Reality_Synthesizer'

According to the facts, PS3 gpu is basically heavily customized (+boosted up) nVidia 7800GTX.
Unless you're sayng Intel GMA 950 == nVidia 7800GTX (powered up) you're just a fat liar.

Second lie. There are only three multiplatform games what have fps problems to date, and the number is the same on Xbox360.
Fact, Playstation 3 has over 120 exclusive games and around few hundred multiplatform games.

Third lie.
Sony doesn't "want" to make anything harder for the developers, in fact they are giving free professional help to some developer teams to help utilizing CELL's maximum performance.
Developers had problems when PS3 launched, because nobody had experience with a 8-core CPU before (except the ones who had previously worked on supercomputers) but after a year the problem was solved and nobody had problems.

Sony didn't brag about their console as much as Microsoft did when Xbox360 launched, so again, you're a liar.

And with that statement they have sold more than 145 million of these consoles. Not to mention, it is the best selling console to date with one of the largest game library.


So overall, you're a Xbot and a liar. You hate the PS3 so much (prolly because you're too poor to buy one) that you must lie about it to make your favorite console look good.

Pathetic indeed.

 

Just for argument's sake... magnus72 does have an XPS1730 and a descent gaming desktop so i don't think he is all that worried $400...

 

Yeah, if Magnus wasnt sporting an M1730 like me, I'd believe the poor comment... but hell, he could sell his M1730 (in which he has the Dual 88000's, so it's not the cheap end M1730, either) buy a PS3 and a Sager with the 9800GTX if he wanted to... and still have a few bucks for a new game left over.

His finances aside though- as they aren't my business - I was not aware of anything close to 120 exclusive PS3 games already... I mean, I'm not saying your wrong, and I love my PS3 more than my Xbox 3garbage, but I am not going to defend it blindly and say it has that many titles if it doesnt- and I don't count potential and unreleased games still in development as exclusives because if anything, I've been proven time and time again that developers love to delay and cancel games- *Please see Gran Turismo for PSP -- or (LOL) Duke Nukem Forever (which had a screenshot released recently, too...) and many other examples*

And as for Sony bragging- don't freakin' kid yourself man- Sony cooks their consoles up to the MAX before they are released. Then promise Firmware updates later to make up for the fact the hardware isn't "exactly" what they said it was- (8th core enabling on PS3 //////// PSP Processor clock speed increase /////// HDD on PS2 and Broadband online gaming on PS2 that you ended up having to buy seperatley later on anyone?)

That being said, long live my PS3, may many great games come out for it and may Sony win this generations console war- plus Blu-Rays awesome.

 

Oh alright, here's the list of them : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_3-only_games

Around 10-13 are still in developement, most of the games are avalible.

Here's the list of all PS3 games (including multiplatformers) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_3_games

And yeah .. GT4 for PSP sure is taking a long time, recently in interview they said it's still in the works and a 2009 release date is possible, so let's hope for the best.
Another note is, that Sony isn't denyng the rumour that all PS3's will get backward compability via FW update which would be awesome.

 

That would be excellent- except for the fact that it makes my 60GB not so valuable

Impressive list, though I wish they wouldn't use the download store games as exclusive titles even though they are... When I think of exclusive titles I think of actual PS3 titles around 40-60 bucks when released with disc etc. but the PSN games are still exclusive so I'm not arguing