Quote: "I thought it was using blue ray technology??"
Playstation 3 - BluRay (Sony did invent it though so no surprise)
Revolution - BluRay-P (Pansonic\'s version combining thier own DVD-RAM technology with Sony\'s BluRay. Result being the same 3\" Discs (yay) but just as much space as the X-Box games (approx. 23GB iirc))
X-Box - DVD-HD, I\'m actually to a loss to why Microsoft didn\'t try to make a deal with Sony over the technology. Still this is considered the \'Next-Generation\' DVD format. This is really the same as DVD-RAM vs DVD-ROM, and as we all know Panasonic lost despite having the better technology.
So we\'ll just have to wait and see who\'s made the wisest choice in which of the Next Generation Disc format\'s to use. Once again Nintendo however are sticking clear of the \'we\'ll give you multimedia center options with your console.\' route..
While this no doubt lost them business in the previous generation. DVD-Players are not cheaper than VCRs, so really I doubt people are going to migrate to these new formats as happily as they did with DVD. The take up of both CD and DVD formats has been very slow and methodical. We\'ll be looking at BluRay and DVD-HD making a difference probably in about 2-3years time really. When stuff becomes more publically available and companies start supplying for it regularly enough for the cost to come down.
It\'s why DVD in the PS2/XB were so popular. Rather than a stand-alone player that cost like £200, you could get your games console with the player for £250-300. When you thought about it, was a nice cheap solution. DVD\'s however were already on the market. This time it\'s a case of the technology comming long before the market is there. This happened with CD-Rom\'s and it took us more than 5-years to move on to the technology.
Quote: "But I wonder what the new xbox is going to have, maybe something like the Cell technology of the PS3?"
I\'ve been told a few times by Playstation fans, that the PS3 has a more powerful version of the Cell Processor that uses the same technology as the 360.
The reality is that the Revolution and X-Box 360 use the same Base-Processor. The Cell is still based on the Emotion Engine 2, which is very firmly a 128-bit Toshiba TX81 RISC Processor. It was\'t exactly surprising that after a year of hearing the X-Box 360 was going to have more than one processor, that the Cell (also developed mainly by IBM no doubt where the misconception comes from) also surprising appears to have been designed with more than 1 Processing Core.
It\'s interesting really. Rather than redeveloping the Core\'s of the PPC 9xx and TX81 to being CISC rather than RISC... what they\'ve done is created SuperScaler processing routines that rely on multiple Cores.
While it\'s claimed they can process A LOT more than your standard Desktop processor, there are some major design flaws that actually prevent this from being true.
The Share 128KB of Cache for example. Both Processors run from so little Cache it\'s just shocking!
Revolution however uses a Dual Processor (rather than Dual/Triple Core) Solution. It also runs at a much cooler speed, as well as requires much less power. While thier 2.0 GHz Dual PPC 64-Bit 950FX solution isn\'t likely to technically be able to process AS much as the other processors... it has a combined 1MB Cache on a PCI-E Bus of 2.2GHz. The end result is it is capable of pushing almost 4x more data through than the other machines.
Quite funny when companies get caught up in the raw power and forget that a systems overall speed is the ENTIRE design, not just one component. To that end the Revolution also uses a slightly slower R520 variation, that has an enhanced Shader Core.
From the rumours, the X-Box 360 has basically what\'ll be in desktop systems. R520 running at 575MHz 16MB Framebuffer via HyperMemory, 16x8 Pipelines... in essence it\'s a Radon 850 XT PE but with Shader 3.0a (::rolls eyes:
access. There are still some major omits that ATI have made though, like no Virutal Displacement Mapping (aka Hardware Parallax Mapping), no hardware stencil enhancements (so Doom3 will still run crappy on it).
They\'re small niggles and don\'t affect the overall performance but still they\'re quite major omits when you compare what the NV50 has in store.
See this is where the difference is... because Nintendo took the card and integrated it directly, much like they did with the Radeon 9700 for the GameCube. The end result, well just play Resident Evil 4 on a HDTV. For the Cube\'s technical power, that game is just freaking amazing!
They\'ve also gone and added an Asyncronous Pipeline. This is important, because what Matsh*ta has been able to do was cut the R520 to 12x4 Pipelines, which runs cooler requireing less power.. but then added an Async Core, that doubled the processing capabilities of the Shader Unit.
Effectively speaking your looking at 2x 12x4 SuperScaler Pipelines. While this does mean that you can\'t link Shaders running in the two pipelines much like a Non-SuperScaler design, so you\'d need to take a second pass.. the result is that you can do two distinctly different shaders pipelines at once.
They also changed the design from 128KB Cache From Frame Buffer, to 256KB Cache From RAM.
This means rather than waiting for something to be processed, sent to the VRAM, everything is streamed. Something Microsoft have yet to realise how to do yet.
Your signature has been erased by a mod. Please resize it to under 600x120. Thanks!
