Gadgetory

in the last round of the console wars we compared the CPUs and the PS read Cell processor came out on top after four round the score is two to one for the PlayStation 3 and this time around we'll be taking an in-depth look comparing the GPUs this is going to be the single most technical round in this series of videos so put on your thinking caps and get ready for some heavy weight game console action its LP from TechnoBuffalo and welcome to the next installment of the console wars the processor may be the power that drives both machines but when it comes down to graphics the GPU is equally as important the graphics processing unit is essentially the piece of hardware that converts all those ones and zeros into actual gameplay graphics and the more ones and zeros that can push the higher of the resolutions the effects and frame rates it can handle spec wise you can notice that the GPUs on the devices come from competing manufacturers ATI and NVIDIA the competition between ATI and NVIDIA has been going on since long before the current console war but that's another story the xenos GPU on the Xbox 360 is of custom ATI design the core is clocked at 500 megahertz and the chip has 48 shader pipelines with a unified shader architecture shader architecture is very important when it comes to GPUs to simply explain what shaders are well shaders are computer programs that determine the final look of what you see on the screen shaders take rendered 3d objects made out of polygons and make them look more realistic so shaders turn something looking like this into this shaders can be divided into pixel shaders and vertex shaders pixel shaders alter lighting color and surface of each pixel and vertex shaders basically connect those pixels together in 3d space now shader pipelines are essentially the highways on which the data travels and the more lanes on the highway the less of a chance there is of traffic bottlenecking so the Xbox 360 GPU has 48 pipelines that can be used for both pixel shader and vertex shader operations the xenos GPU on the Xbox 360 was among the first modern GPUs to use unified shader architecture the PlayStation 3s GPU the RSX is also clocked at 500 megahertz but it has dedicated pipelines for different shader operations 24 pixel shader pipelines and 8 vertex shader pipelines so basically the Xbox 360 GPU has a bigger shader processing highway with quite a lot more lanes to make an example the ps3 cannot get more than 24 pixel pipelines at any given time while the Xbox 360 GPU can access up to 48 pixel pipelines depending on what's needed so if there's a bottleneck on the ps3 system it can probably be located right around these parts there are some benefits to having dedicated pipelines but the fact that both graphics card manufacturers have now transitioned over to unified architecture tells a pretty clear story unified architecture is clearly the way to go let's possibility of bottlenecking and overall higher maximum bandwidth so the Xbox 360s xenos GPU is superior when it comes down how many shader operations is capable of handling which may be one of the reasons why multi-platform 360 games have better frame rates compared to their ps3 counterparts but if you guys watch the previous round where I covered CPUs you may remember that the Cell processor could handle vertex calculations and it can actually decrease the workload of the GPU which make this comparison even trickier and obviously because we don't have any benchmark applications for game consoles it's impossible to make scientific comparisons here the xenos chip is actually divided into two GPUs the main die and the daughter die which has ten megabytes of edie ram built in the embedded dram has a self processing memory controller which makes it possible for the xeno chip to use anti aliasing and alpha blending without taking a hit to the framerate Eliason is essentially jaggies that occur on diagonal and curved lines alaya singh is most prominent on lower resolutions so the lower the resolution you have the more anti-aliasing you will need while 720p is considered a high definition it's in my opinion not a high enough resolution to run without any anti-aliasing most of you PC guys can definitely relate if I look at a game on my 40 inch LCD screen running at 720p without proper anti-aliasing it's going to be quite rough around the edges and some of you guys may note that a large amount of games on both consoles are actually running in sub-8 dear resolutions and upscale to 720p which makes the need for good anti-icing even more necessary for example hallo ODST is running at 640 p and modern warfare 2 is actually running at a 600 p resolution in upscale to 720p may become next generation of consoles will see all games running at native HD resolutions but not this time around anyways if you want to see a good example of the lack of anti-aliasing take a look at any game on the Nintendo Wii and you'll know what I'm talking about ok back to business so thanks to the daughter die with embedded dram the Xbox 360 games generally have better anti-aliasing which I consider a significant advantage I am myself have a 40 inch screen which I look at from a fairly short distance and when comparing the same games on the competing consoles the graphics on the 360 stand out as cleaner and sharper because the diagonal and curved lines are cleaner and less jagged now if the ps3 were running games at 1080p as a once promised anti-aliasing would not be as necessary but on 90% of games on the market today the xbox360 counterparts have superior anti-aliasing which I hold in very high regard but the GPU on the ps3 has a very significant advantage which relates directly to the Cell processor the RSX GPU has a high bandwidth interface between the Cell processor and the GPU itself so it could hand over some of the graphics processing operations for example vertex calculations over to the Cell processor freeing up the RSX GPU to exclusively handle other essential graphics processing tasks Naughty Dog has done this with uncharted 2 and been able to crunch out amazing graphics out of the ps3 with decent anti-aliasing to match another thing that greatly affects graphics are textures the higher the resolution the more high detailed textures you will need so if you have a game running at 1080p you're going to need very high detailed textures to match but straight off the bat I'll go out to say that neither of the two consoles are capable of running games natively at 1080p with high detailed textures matched the only games you'll see running at 1080p with a constant framerate will be racing games and fighting games that use very simple reoccurring textures so in my opinion is better to run games at 720p and have high detailed textures than to run games at 1080p with fuzzy and low-res textures even though the trailer for the upcoming 1080p God of War three looks amazing I have to admit that the textures look a bit soft and I'd rather see it running at 720p with high detail textures like uncharted 2 to have a lot of high detail textures on the screen at once you need to have quite a lot of fast memory that's dedicated to the GPU and a fast access to that memory both consoles have an equal amount of memory but the xbox360 has a unified architecture and the PlayStation 3 has two separate sets of memory half of the ps3s memory is superfast xcr Ram which gives the ps3 some speed benefits in certain situations but in most situations it's going to be harder to take use of two separate memories for things like textures but when it comes down to memory it's pretty clear that both platforms have a slight bottleneck in their hands PC GPUs these days have one to two gigabytes of dedicated memory and I would imagine it being quite tough to squeeze out ultra high textures out of 512 megabytes when you have an operating system running in the background and this is where texture streaming comes to play as you know blu-ray discs have five times the capacity of DVDs which give the ps3 huge benefits there's more space for high res textures and very little need for the compression of those textures this equates to the amazing hide until world you see in uncharted 2 the ps3s GPU gets off easy as it does not need to devote power into texture decompression now the Xbox 360 GPU has its work cut out for it it has decompressed textures that are stored on limited space DVDs but if we look at games like Gears of War 2 we notice that the Xbox 360 GPU is excellent at texture streaming even though it has a bunch of V compression to do so the Xbox 360 GPU has a bigger workload and still manages to pull it off with style so even though it may be possible to run higher resolution textures on the ps3 than the Xbox 360 it's mostly thanks to blu-ray and the cel processor not the GPU but in any case all the evidence points in ps3's GPU being a bit weaker than magazine O's on the Xbox 360 the essentially free four times multisample anti-aliasing on magazine O's definitely tips the scales pretty fast for the Xbox 360 the cel processor may compensate for the weaker GP on the ps3 but is pretty clear that the Xbox 360 gets a point in this round to recap the ps3 has a better processor and faster memory but the Xbox 360 GPU is superior thanks to its advanced architecture but as you know graphics are usually more than just some of the parts of the different hardware and in the upcoming round we'll be taking an in-depth comparison of the best-looking game of exclusive and multi-platform on the Kathina consoles stay tuned for the next round of the console wars LP signing out