Anonymous developer trashes PS3 and Xbox 360 processors

If you're ready to get down, dirty, nitty, and gritty on the latest (and apparently not so greatest) generation of processors used in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, peep Anand's analysis of some very insider information on the forthcoming systems by an unnamed game developer who's worked on both boxes. If you're comfortable making heads or tails of things like processor architecture, branch prediction, pipelining, etc., feel free to knock yourself out with the read, but straight up word on the street is that the Xbox CPU is only about twice as powerful as the 733MHz Pentium III used in the first Xbox in real world gaming situations, and supposedly Sony's Cell isn't all that much better. Of course, there are just so many factors in game system bottlenecks—and we're not the kind of site to get gory on it here—but the bottom line is if you were super enthused about these two new powerhouse systems, prepare to get some of that piss and vinegar knocked out right quick.

[Via slashdot]

Update: Harsh! For reasons unknown (we'll let you take a guess), Anand pulled the article in question. Well, we're keeping the meme alive—we don't want to eat cake, and we don't want to two bit (figuratively) gaming platforms! Post mirrors in the comments! Thanks, John.

[Inlogic @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

rofl... yea right. Like if I would trust in someone anonymous...

[The 13th Duke of Wybourne @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

For an informed opinion on this, rather than reactionist rubbish look here http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050629-5054.html

[Jason @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Is anyone suprized? I'm pretty used to completely ignoring company claims and relying on the good ol' interweb to give me the real facts. Isn't that why we come to Engadget? :P

[domer @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Considering these processors are designed for multithreaded games (and none exist), I'm not too surprised. But given that the processors are 3.2 ghz as opposed to 733 mhz, I would expect them to be closer to 4 times as powerful rather than 2. I'm thinking the developer is just disgruntled because he/she can't figure out how to efficiently write multithreaded games since it's never been done. I don't think people should expect significant leaps in game development until 2 years into the consoles life cycle when developers finally realize how to maximize the threading capabilities. This is the same problem with the new dual-core CPUs in the PC space. The nice thing though is that both the 360 and PS3 are designed for this inherent developer block. The 360's extra cores are designed (have special instructions) for handling decompression of textures and sound. The 360 is using a high compression factor to minimize texture space on their dual layer DVDs. The PS3 doesn't have this compression issue with it's blue-ray DVDs and will in turn use those SPEs for assisting the graphics engine with vector based processing so it can render at 1080p (not feasible on the 360) ... again with a special instruction set.

[domer @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Thanks for the link Duke, without even reading Hannibal's stuff I nailed it on the head, because it's common sense (if you know anything about this stuff). Given that Anand already dropped the article, Engadget probably should too (or at least make reference to that fact).

[rotten_fruit_fan @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Actually the PS2 hardware had a lot of similarities, so Sony's coices aren't surprising. The PS2 was harder to code for because of its parallel processing architecture, and had no compression issues because of the jump to DVD.

But microsoft should have known better.

I guess they're not that much stronger than revolution after all.

[Dan @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Well, reading through the comments it seems that they dropped (for now) the article due to some rendering issues in IE and someone was worried that the anonymous source would be traced. While Hannibal definitely disagrees (and he doesn't so much disagree as much as says "well, duh") I don't think the pull was content related.

[Robert @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

"I guess they're not that much stronger than revolution after all"

Most probabily, but we don't know yet how powerful the Revolution will be, Nintendo has not given out specs only that it will have 512MB RAM, backwards compatibility and its phisical shape

[Jeff @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

"Given that Anand already dropped the article,"

Yikes, that's pretty funny. I read this last night when it was first posted on Slashdot and I couldn't believe some of the crap I was reading. Most of it was basically one developer whining about how now they can't make games the same way they used to or they won't run well. I mean, DUH. Anand probably talked to some 20 year old programmer at a single developer with limited experience. Every single new console release requires developers to learn how to get the most from it, and the entire point of this article seemed to be that consoles should be just like PC's and not change their architecture every generation. That in itself may be a somewhat valid point, but both the developer Anand was quoting and the writer himself seemed totally shocked - SHOCKED! - that they couldn't just write single-threaded games anymore and expect to get fifty times the performances as the previous machines.

I used to work in the video game industry and I can bet this article got body-slammed by Sony, MS, and every *other* developer out there that didn't want anybody to think *they* were the ones acting so childish and stupid.

I'm sure some people will think there's something Orwellian about the fact that the article was taken down (freedom of the press and all that), but it really was a lame-brained article. It shouldn't have made it past the editors. You can't have such an incendiary article be based almost entirely on repeated and numerous anonymous claims.

[natiahs @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

#3 said: "Considering these processors are designed for multithreaded games (and none exist),"

Exactly, that's why PS3 will be a magnitde more powerful that 360. 360 is designed for the old-gen, FIFO style game programming while PS3 is designed for an emergent style of game design. Many current programmers will not be able to make the leap to multi-core game design, but those who do will be able to do amazing things with PS3. As far as bottlenecks, PS3 does away with a good many of them by offering a graphics bus 5x wider than on the current highest end PCs (even those with the latest NVidia cards) and RAM that's 6x faster than PC4200. XNA sounded like a good idea when M$ introduced it, but now its holding 360 back to current (read: outdated) methods of game design.

(OF course, the flipside to this is that 360 will be MUCH easier to program for established designers. Games for 360 will likely look very much like PS3 games for at least a couple years)

Kudos to Anand for pulling the article, though. The slamming of technology by those who don't understand it is annoying.

Natiahs

[domer @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

natiahs - How is the 360 NOT designed for multi-threaded games with its tri-core CPU supporting 6 threads? The Cell and Xenon are specifically designed for multi-threaded processing. Only Nintendo's Revolution will lack some of the features but even that is supposedly a dual core 1.8 ghz Power PC chip (supports 4 threads). The 1st gen games are going to be running on a single core for all 3 systems (of course the Cell only has 1 core).
Other than the fact that Nintendo doesn't support high-def, I don't expect to see much difference in the game's aesthetics until 2007. At which point, "I guess they're not that much stronger than revolution after all" will look like a moronic statement.

[natiahs is bsing @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

first off, where do u get the fact that PS3 will be a magnitde more powerfull then xbox 360, the xbox 360's got the graphic chip that utilize unified shader architecture, which means that it runs at 100% efficiency all the time compare to comventional graphic card where u have 2 separate vertex and pixel shaders, yes , i agree that the PS 3's processoer cell has more FLOPS, however the XBox 360 has more general processing power, and the performance is really depend on how the parts work with each other, not just on CPU, lets pout it this way, if the PS 3 hadnt have the cell processor do u think it is powerfull than XBOX 360? (this is assume that FLOPS is all that matters, and some people thinks that FLOPS is all game needs) no, its design sux, well compare to the xbox 360, not only does xbox 360 has the share memory design where ddevelopers can draw the line between CPU and GPU, and its GPU well, the 10 MB embedded RAM has 256 GB/sec bandwidth, can draw AA 4x without the loss of performance, i mean now u cant really campare the 2 consoles, so just shut it, SONY does make a lot of false statement and wrong impression, i remember the demo they showed for PS 2 looks soo good, on the E3 videos, but now, even at my 50 in DLP it sux, like the demo with a beautiful girl, i mean no game even comes close to that, im just saying that it is useless to debate now, most of the techy website didnt even see the hardware, and therefore cant make judgment on it.

[scp @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/18/news_6120449.html

here you can read something more about that ps3/xbox360 issues. and it's NOT about single vs multithreaded, but about "in-order" vs "out of order" execution of instructions. check Chris Hecker's comments about it. btw. hecker is surely not 20 years old unexperienced game developer (for example he wrote software based rasterizer in days of quake1). i'm in gamedev biz just 6-7 years so i dont want to make such statemens... i'm waiting till we get some devkits

[Jeremy @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

"Other than the fact that Nintendo doesn't support high-def, I don't expect to see much difference in the game's aesthetics until 2007. At which point, "I guess they're not that much stronger than revolution after all" will look like a moronic statement."

Have you ever thought of the HD framerate, what if there is a problem with XBOX360 & PS3, they have an awesome picture, but a crappy framerate?

Why are we even arguing??? It's about the games, not the graphics per se.
Who stares at their tv watching videogames and are only immersed by the graphics and don't care about the gameplay.

Games already look realistic, it's not going to be a big jump in graphics anyways. We're reaching a threshold where something new needs to be done, instead of just focusing on pretty pictures.

[natiahs @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

10 & 11: Yes, 360 has a tri-core processor supporting 6 threads. But one core (2 threads) is fully dedicated to X-Box Live. That leaves 2 cores and 4 threads. Quite a stretch from PS3's 8 cores and 14 threads (7 & 12, if you discount the one reserved for redundancy).

You have to look beyond sheet specs to fully understand the capabilities of the new systems. 360 is designed around XNA, which is designed for current-gen, single-core PC games. To break from that would break one of the strongest features of 360 - easy cross development with PC.

Natiahs

[domer @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Jeremy - I'm talking about the hardware here, so as not to rant (like I've done elsewhere) about it in other non-hardware related threads. This is at least a hardware related thread. I completely agree with you that it really is all about the games, although I think you would have a hard time convincing Nintendo boys of that.

scp - It IS mostly about single vs multi-threaded code.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2453
"in order" vs "out of order" has to do with branch prediction and low level CPU stuff. Most of that will be handled by the compiler and can be optimized further by the developer. However, no applications today (there are a few, but certainly no games) are multi-threaded. This is a completely new paradigm of coding that needs to be understood. Multi-threaded apps exist, but the concepts to do it efficiently across processors in a game have not been proven out yet. With the advent of dual-core CPUs for the PC and these new consoles, this breakthrough will occur.

[salient1 @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

domer, you are completely wrong about how there are almost no multi-threaded applications. I've been developing software for almost 20 years and I've been building multithreaded apps for 15 of those years. Almost any business application of any size employs threading. I can't imagine writing software without it.

Threading is only new to game coders. Games have unique issues that make things difficult when you start introducing threads. This is the reason why these game boxes have hard limits on their threads. On a standard issues Windows XP box you can have hundreds of threads running regardless of the fact that you have a single core CPU. However, in a game this doesn't work well for most things because they have to have deterministic performance to provide an effective illusion of a virtual world. By dedicating CPU cores to specific threads they can achieve this result.

Unfortunately this requires a radically different design. It will be interesting to see how many game shops have the gonads to try it out. My guess is that most will stick with the tried and true techniques they've used for so many years now.

[natiahs is a numbnut @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Hey natiahs, stop your bullshit. Where the hell did you get the idea that a whole core of the X360 is dedicated for Xbox live?? Care to point us to a source of that wisdom? Who told you XNA is geared towards single threaded game development?

Why don't you post this bullcrap directly on AnadTech or ArsTechnica forums, and see what ass-whooping you get to stop talking out your ass ??

[ElCapitanAmerica @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

domer;

> However, no applications today (there are a few, but certainly no games) are multi-threaded. This is a completely new paradigm of coding that needs to be understood. Multi-threaded apps exist,

Make up your mind.

And where have you been? Multi threaded apps are *NOTHING* new. Are you talking about hard real time multithreaded apps?

[youarestupid @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Natiahs you are obviously some stupid ignorant fanboy. PS3 has 8 cores? WHAT? No... it has 1 core. It has 7 SPEs which are basically DSPs fed by the 1 core.
PS3 has 14 threads? WHAT? Where did you even pull that number from? The SPEs aren't cores, they're not multithreaded unlike the Xbox 360's cores.
Since 80% of game instructions are integer instructions, the Xbox architecture makes more sense. Start using facts before you idiots post again.

[threEchelon @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

#19: Thanks for taking out the trash.

#12 hit an important spot when he mentioned in- and out-of-order. The Xbox 360 and the PS3 are in-order (so as to reduce the size of the die)
which basically means that non-optimized code will run a lot slower, about 1/3. Out-of-order cpu's like those made by AMD and Intel can run
really crappy code really fast; optimization isn't as important. As long as console game developers optimize the code, the performance impacts of the console cpu's being in-order doesn't matter much.

[Nate @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Hey, why don't we all wait a bit and play some the games?

Everyone is talking crazy here and no one has even played with any of them. To nearly all of us, all we know are what the specs are on paper and a few short video demos.

All sides will have their staunch supporters, but I'd wager a lot of us will get both eventually. Like the older and current systems, each has their respective strong points.

So all of you fanboys just breathe in and out real deep and use all that processor knowledge to do something great, like wrangle G5 into a Powerbook for me. Cause I'll be damned if I'm gonna buy some Intel powered Mac notebook.

Just kidding.

[brian @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Jeremy is right. It amuses me that Microsoft and Sony are constantly struggling to one-up each other in the processing power war. My GPU is bigger than yours. My CPU pumps out more instructions in parallel than yours. And then there's the consumers who just fuel this war by irrationally defending them online and with people focusing on nothing except how powerful the system is/pretty the graphics are.

Let's take a look at how important this is, shall we?

How many killer hit titles did Xbox have? The Halo series, definitely. Maybe Forza. Madden. Jade Empire and Prince of Persia? That's about all I can think of. Ask me how many great franchises Sony or Nintendo has running on their systems with less powerful systems, and the irrelevance of all this becomes quite apparent.

Sure, HD is nice, but what use is that if the games that are all in HD with eight bajillion polygons has the worst gameplay in the world? I might as well pay 50 bucks for a 3dmark test instead. Nintendo seems to be the only one that is vaguely on the right track by focusing on trying to "revolutionize" gameplay interactivity instead of processing power. Granted, I'm not sure if the rumored gyroscopes are the right way to go, but that's not the point.

I own a PS2, Xbox and a Gamecube. What gets the most gameplsy? Halo, Smash Brothers, Street Fighter 2 and GTA:SA. Not a single one of them are played because they necessarily look the best.

Game companies need to get their heads in the right places.

So do the consumers.

[Arthur Zielinski @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Sorry to burst your collective bubble, but the reason is that the article was just technically inaccurate, not pulled due to 'conspiracy'. Two things to do to educate yourself are read the arstechnica article, which explains a lot, and to better understand the structure of a processor, which is probably a bit much to ask.

There's always hype and exaggeration surrounding hardware release, and this is what we're hearing from Sony (of course their 1 terraflop figure is fake, I doubt even their marketers believe in it) and Microsoft. The anandtech article is a good example of the reaction side that says 'new hardware x sucks and you're better off buying a toaster oven to play games on.' Don't listen to either.

There are many points to be made about this.

First is that they're using multicore CPUs. For those of you who don't program this probably sounds good; but the truth is that multiple cores is like multiple processors, the performance boost is only as good as your code, and code designed for normal systems/consoles is VERY BAD in this regard. See benchmarks of Athlon64 X2 versus Athlon64 in typical games. Improvements are minimal until they scrap their engines and rewrite. Anandtech themselves seemed to understand this concept, see their article at http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2410&p=7

Next is the MHz myth. Doubling the clock frequency doesn't mean hardware is twice as fast, so stop thinking along these lines. A 3.2 GHz PowerPC chip isn't supposed to be 4+ times as fast as a late model Pentium III. There is a world of other things involved. As a comparison, take a car. A cheesy Corolla has about 130 horsepower and a top speed of about 115 mph. If you put a 260 horsepower engine in it, do you really think it'd go 230 mph (about as fast as a 640 horsepower race-designed McLaren F1)? The answer you're looking for is a very capitalised NO.

There's also image quality. The developer is probably not taking into account that there is a lot more data to shuffle around because of the much higher resolution images their engine is now contractually required to deal with. All next-gen consoles are required to produce HDTV level output, which older games did NOT.

Also on the image quality front are many small things. For example: antialiasing. On an XBox 360, due to clever memory design, antialiasing is pretty much free. No performance hit. Is the comparison making the older XBox being compared against do heavy antialiasing to produce equal quality images? You can bet it isn't.

Speaking of which, there is of course the matter that much of the performance is dependent on the GRAPHICAL processor (the video card) and not the CPU. If there's a complaint about the next-gen GPUs then maybe it should be about ATi not doing it's part. Though to be fair it's very likely that ATi is doing it's part, as the general concensus amongst developers with a brain has been that the parts are very nice. Again, lack of technical knowledge and responsibility.

There's also the issue that, at least in the case of XBox 360 and Revolution, the hardware is tested and not unproven technology. The processors in these machines have the basic relationship to Apple G5s that Athlon64 X2s have to Athlon64s. Perhaps slightly more distant, but not significantly. The main difference is the extra cores. Now I don't particularly like Apple, but the G5 processor is hardly a technological failure (and not at all a product of Apple, for that matter). It's very close to being on par with my beloved Opteron/Athlon64, which is saying a lot.

The case for the PS3 is a bit more complicated; but Cell is rooted enough in existing technology to allow most experts to say that is it an amazing processor. More than likely the developer in question simply has no idea how to deal with multiple vector processors. I'd also bet the compilers they're using aren't optimizing properly. Code optimization in a multicore or pipelined CPU can actually speed up intensely mathematical bits of code by an order of magnitude.

I only hope I can clear up some of the FUD being spread by anandtech's irresponsible article.

[domer @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

salient1, ElCaptianAmerica - I deal with multithreaded apps on a daily basis (sorry for the confusion). The problem that I didn't explain well, is that nobody is coding apps to span cores or processors currently. Even the business apps that are multithreaded, don't take advantage of the multiple cores, or if there are dual procs, then the multiple procs. That's why it was ambiguous and unclear when I said "However, no applications today (there are a few, but certainly no games) are multi-threaded. This is a completely new paradigm of coding that needs to be understood. Multi-threaded apps exist,". Should have said:
However, no applications today (there are a few, but certainly no games) are multi-threaded across CPUs or cores. This is a completely new paradigm of coding that needs to be understood. Multi-threaded apps (within a core) exist,

natiahs - Stop making stuff up. Learn what a core is, and what the Cell architecture is, and what Xenon is, and then come talk here. While you're at it, you might as well read up on the 7800 GTX and the Xenos, to get a good clear picture on how the systems will operate.

Frame rate studies have already been done, and the Xenos will easily support 70fps at 720p. The PS3 should have no problem either at 720p, but 1080p will be heavily dependent on the developers optimization efforts. Dual screen 1080p is definitely out of the question with a reasonable frame rate.

[Trevor @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

domer- I think Quake 3 for the Mac multi-threaded for two cores.

[IWANTMIRRIR!! @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Here is the link, damn you guys are so freaking slow.

[IWANTMIRRIR!! @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Here is the link, damn you guys are so freaking slow. http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.games.video.sony-playstation2/msg/62ff83d96ea78ea9?hl=en

[bob sanders @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Natiahs, are you really a dumbass, or are you just desperate to get rid of the fact that the Xbox 360 IS actually a bit faster than the PS3?

It would be a PRETTY DUMB IDEA TO USE ONE WHOLE CORE FOR XBOX LIVE! MICROSOFT'S MUCH SMARTER THAN YOU THINK.
Its Built-in Ethernet port that's running at 2.4 GHz does all the work for Xbox Live networking.
Oh yeah, and don't give me that excuse that the PS3 is faster due to its higher floating point performance (in TFLOPS).
Floating Point performance isn't really important [in gaming] compared to general processing, and system memory bandwidth, and that's where the Xbox360 is stronger at.

And those who are changing the subject to Macs...
Macs suck IMO, some dumbasses claim that PowerMac G5's are much better in gaming like for Doom 3 than on an Athlon 64 or Pentium 4.
But guess what? It's like 3X WORSE IN GAMING!
Well, I'm saying the framerates on the best G5 are 3x less than on the best Athlon64.

[PSP @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

"Its Built-in Ethernet port that's running at 2.4 GHz does all the work for Xbox Live networking."

It's ethernet port runs at 2.4ghz? WOW! I want one. And it's actually built in?

OH WOW!

[Nate @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Shh, don't tell Bob Sanders that the processor in the Xbox 360 is related to the G5. It might blow his mind, man.

[I think this sucks @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

I was a firm sony believer, now I hate Kutaragi. You are a fucking idiot!

They promised us 1000 times the performance, not 30 (= sqrt(1000)). They had all the research, money, and feasible designs going for them. Now this. The 2 teraflops is a lie, all coming from some off-the-rack nvidia pixel shaders.
What the most unbelievable fact of this whole tragedy is, the xbox looks like its going to be faster than the PS3! Sure Cell has some vector crunching SPEs, but transistor count seems to be about the same for both Cell and Xenon, which has 6 threads. So if you want to give Cell a slight advantage here, fine.

But the heart of the 360 is the ATI chip! It has something like 48 general purpose Vector shaders, which are comparable to sony's SPEs. Omg. The ATI chip is a monster too, being split into two sister chips. An extremely unique design.
All in all if you count up the usable parallelism in both architectures, it looks like microsoft has about twice as much as sony, and on top of that they will take christmas.

How can somebody fail so miserably. Sony you fuckers.

[Microsoft � @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

The comments made in this blog entry are basically made from many fans of the different companies pointing fingers at each other. We at Microsoft�, having built various software for computers, firmly believe that the PlayStation 3, as a final product, will not live up to the specifications SONY listed to the crowd at E3. Remember that SONY has a proven track record of, in basic terms, lying about their systems specifications. Please visit www.xbox.com to see the current list of specifications on the XBOX 360. It is important to note that the listed specifications are not final and are subject to change. As for the PlayStation 3, expect consumers of the product who spend every last penny they have on the system, to be dissapointed, especially when pouring virtual water into virtual cups becomes virtually boring.

[Q0525#1 @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

i always though tht the nxt generation consoles wer gona b SH!T an they prob not gona b wot the makers say they r, Ps3 a little stronger than Ps2 but wiv more stuf same wit the 360 poece of Junk!!! dear Sh!t 2

[Bizzaro K. Rool With a Twist On a Feature While Hanging 7 Toes up on The Malibu @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Why do you people want to have all of these 'mature' games personally i hate them with a vengance i would rather have fun than go killing innocent people if you want to be a gangster go and get a tan, act black, live in some ghetto pump some iron and then go around bashing people on the streets get out your gun and start shooting people oh and you still dont have to be black to do this you can still be white trash. why if you done this in real life you would have a feeling that hey i think im doing something wrong here this doesnt feel as fun as i thought it would be i thought that i could just start with another gameover this is how games will be. as the games are going to come to an age where NPCs have emotions, have their own story to tell, their own 'life' if you will. I dont think it will feel right to just kill someone for no reason in a game sure their not real but i feel for the people in a game because im immersed in the world offered by the game and take everything in while playing.
so while everyone else is playing their 'mature' games (chaos hell: the day of blood kill all who you see only for xbox sic!!) i will be having fun playing super mario bros REV on my revolution

[Gavo @ Dec 19th 2005 1:01AM]

Hes just frustrated cause the nintendo revolution looks crappy and he wants to play his mario games. Not to mention being Anonymous and retracting the article look suspisious.