Truth Behind PS3 vs Xbox 360 in Folding@Home

Rob Zwetsloot, one of PSU's regular journalists, discusses the latest trash talk between the Microsoft and Sony camps

[ChefDejon]

read the story

[NoUseMerc]

The article points our truthful facts and I am afraid Xbots are going to jump all other it and disagree in their own ways.

But to say this article is false because its written by a Playstation site is stupid.

The facts are true and Xbox fans just cant let it go that the PS3 is more powerful both in CPU and GPU.

And yes, I said GPU. The PS3 does twice as many shader operations as the XBox 360 and with both the Cell and RSX its way more powerful. If you program the Cell to run graphics and then use the RSX as a buffer you get graphics that will clean the clock off any XBox 360 title.

[SlippyMadFrog]

Any source references to your statements? :/

[nix]

.. i posted the same thing last time and it was pulled off after it came out in the main page! i wonder what admin will do this time...? carry on! until then..

http://www.n4g.com/industry...

[techie]

Mercs to be honest there is sprinklings of truth in there...but it is also not quite accurate, and without providing sources its claims may well not be heard.

[gunnar2906]

Sorry my bad english

The author is or completely amateur either forgot very many facts considering ps3
He forgot that a ps3 has plus didicated 256 RAM BUS memory working at 3.2 Ghz, that 4.5 times more faster then the memory chip installed at XBox360. X60 's 512 DDR 3 is shared and works only at 700 Mhz. That means that PS3 intercore data flow and common purposes tasks are extremely fast.
Не forgot about pixel shaders pipelines at RSX that work twice faster then Xenos. He misunderstands the principles of antialiasing tying pixel output with vertex rendering and makes absolutely wrong decisions about antialiasing. Even more - he says that Xenos is R600 based that is not a fact but a complete rumor. Xenos is just a overclocked X1950XT (or even unsuccessful X1800) according to released data spec by Microsoft. Anyway if ATI had a prototype of R600 at the moment of X360 release (oct 2005) it would never let NVidia take the first place with its 8600 GTX chipset at the end of 2006.
I own both consoles and they connected to one HD TV set and comparing the same game ports on both consoles I may say that X360 graphics is not as good as on Ps3. It is much more "antialiased" I mean unsharp and has much less background details.

[gta_cb]

i thought this had already been put up in an old article?...

[23478ueyur_938223]

with some bias, but rounds off a lot more near the end.

[ErcsYou]

i could have swore this was old news. i think i read this on sunday.

[23478ueyur_938223]

You probably did actually -- May 13th article. Maybe it was a tip then?

[Lex Luthor]

man the ps3 is one ugly console

[weekapaugh]

yeah, the dingy white one with a power brick the size of Texas is just so aesthetically pleasing.

[Azurite]

Once again XDR has been overlooked...

[NoUseMerc]

What is the XDR?

[techie]

high speed memory used by the cell. 256mb XDR memory, and then the other 256mb memory. The RSX can also share the XDR memory.

There's a few inaccuracies in the article...and it doesn't half go off topic.

[BadMF]

He Misses xdr, thinks ps3 has only 256mb memory, wrong amounts of cache on both consoles etc.

[WilliamRLBaker]

The truth as the playstation universe see's it, one cannot really believe any thing psu says when it comes to truth about a console, just like one wouldn't believe any thing posted officially at xbox.com or teamxbox about ""truth""

[Birdman18]

this article turned into a 360 bashing about the hardware and this and that. haven't we heard enough of this??? GROW UP PEOPLE!! who cares how many cores are in this system compared to that one.. let me ask you something... do you have a console you like? are there games out there that you like?? do you have fun playing those games? THEN SHUT UR MOUTH!! ok, i'm done venting..

[BubblesDAVERAGE]

Y do u guys keep saying that get well informed because the Xbox has 512 memory but its not dedicated....again i state..the RSX can easily do 512

[carlman23]

And so what? I don't for a second doubt that the PS3's processor is more powerful (at $599 it darned well better be!). But F@H ain't selling consoles. This 'war' is about games, pure and simple (and maybe Blu-ray if it becomes the de facto next gen movie format; though I don't see DVD leaving for a few years yet).

[Cartesian3D]

anyway fans love to see their console win in every aspect ( Size,design,reflection,ergonom y,heat,noise.....and so on . )

[Hydrolex]

Sony > Microsux

[Maddens Raiders]

It's Deja vu all over again. :P

[wildcat]

only a matter of time now, not long before the Kevin kid comes in here with a 10-page report on how the cell pwns the "180"

[Jamaicangmr]

That was a very incomplete article. It puzzles me as to why he only mentioned the 256MB GDDR and not the 256MB XDR. Besides it kindda losts it's way because it started out to be about folding then got deeper into game developing than folding. Oh well movin on.

[Hydrolex]

PS3 > Xbox 360

[InMyOpinion]

Another Sony commercial. I urinate on folding@home. Try competing with games. You wanna fold or play?

@below - I have a brain tumor. Why else would I write silly comments like this? I hope you die alone...with AIDS.

[chrno6]

I hope u get cancer lol

[nix]

rule says: you can't alter the headline (title)....

now last time this post was pulled out from the front page for unknown reason..

http://www.n4g.com/industry...

now we have the same article running here.... please tell us how things work here because suddenly i am confused!

[marison]

If you have a negative story about a console (and even more if the same history is positive about the other) your story will be approved. This in the proportion of the number of the console fans, of course. Wii positive stories normally needs a year to be approved.

I post positive and negative stories about any console. The positive about the PS3 are approved in minutes. It's normal. There are too much happy PS2 users out there, otherwise I could not say the same about the PS3 yet.

[LoneGun]

Please take out this link admin before it confuses more readers as it has way too much false information. It's obvious that this guy did not do any research on this subject.

[Saint Sony]

Folding is GOOD, but please let PS3 do it. 360 is made for pure entertainment, not for solving medical mysteries.

[CompGeek]

Umm, a journalist for PlayStation Universe? Let's see if I can guess what this says before reading it. Sure doesn't say the 360 is better.

EDIT: I must somewhat revise my statement. The only thing I don't agree with is where he compares the CPU power simply by clockspeed and number of cores, which is not a viable performance comparison, whether the end result is correct in this case or not.

[EDF 2017]

Told you guys the 360 GPU can push twice as many poly's and vertices. The ED RAM being dedicated is a huge advantage. I guess that is why 360 games are prettier. Only thing that trumps the 360 is the Cell and barely. I mean the RSX could render games better than cell being it's max power is higher than Cell's.

[LoneGun]

Your numbers are totally mislead by microsoft's data. As you know, Xenos have unified shader, which means if it uses all 48 pipelines for vertices, it can set up a lot more triangles, but in the same time it can't do any pixels at all!! Which is pretty much useless. The power of doing pixels and triangles is shared, the number mentioned by Microsoft will never be achieved in real life. Silly X360 fanboy, you had fallen into one of Microsoft's marketing tricks!

[JasonPC360PS3Wii]

Sony trying to downplay being dissed by Peter Moore.

What did you say? the 360 could do this better, hurry up get to spinning Sony need to do somthing to get all this positive news off the 360.

Whats even more funny is the guys that created Folding@home are asking MS to jump in. Thats because with the 5 PS3s sold there just isn't enough for them to work with.

12 milliom+ 360s
4 million+ Blu-Ray players
I wonder which would do the work better hmmm.

[DirtyRat]

I found the whole folding at home thing hysterical, wtf!? Seriously I dont believe those figures there are literally millions of PCs connected to folding at home and I am in one such group, to suggest that the PS3 is dishing out most of this processing doesn't make any sense to me considering the amount of units sold.

I think the 360 and PS3 fanboys who blindly slag eachother off and compare ridiculous things like how many polygons the consoles can dish around are missing the whole point, which is exactly what this author summarised at the end.

It's the games that matter, I really dont give a flying fook whether PS3 or 360 win this next-gen battle as long as the battle is ferocious and means more good games for me to play!

Right now I prefer 360s lineup (hence why i just bought one) but that may not always be the case, and I see no sign that Sony are giving up on PS3.

[AIZEN SOZUKE]

you are the funniest the cell is a supercomputer which enables cg go smoke meth

[Pugovitz]

The article:

-So about folding@home
-Naturally leads into processing power
-Graphics? Where did folding@home go.
-Wait, so do you or don't you like the PS3 more?
-Software is more important.

Anyhoo, wasn't there another article saying that the 360 couldn't do it simply because of the way folding@home uses the CPU and the way the 360's CPU was built? We need someone who's not associated with Sony or Microsoft to tell us the truth.

[Boon Tarkas]

Sorry couldn't resist.

In terms of tera-flops and gig-ramatic equations, and the spouting of technical jargonese the PS3 wins hands down.

Here's the deal though, and this is where it breaks down into objective truth:
"Another night of Resistance anyone?! Anyone?"

vs.

"Halo 3 Beta! C&C 3! Booya!"

Or in more crass terms, "Yes, yours' might be bigger, but I'm the one that's gettin' off"

Who wins?

[reaperxciv]

why don't people just quit being fan boys and get ON with philanthropy.

[ReconHope]

does this journalist even know what he's talking about. He's leaving out key specs

[ReconHope]

i read this like a week ago y is it just coming up?

[Sly]

I don't know really which console can be better at folding@home I already read one article saying that the 360 would cream the PS3 in F@H and now i'm reading PS3 is better? and people keep saying in both articles that the information is inaccurate, i'm confused, lets just talk about games like were supposed to.

[deadeyes99]

I think that both consoles could contribute allot but M$ and SONY are too short sighted to ever think about such beneficial factors if it means less money for one or the other.