Where'd you get your information on the XBox? It is wrong. The XBox does not use the nForce chipset, and it does contain the nv25 which was just released as the geForce4 Ti.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well if it isn't an nForce chipset, what is it? ...Or is it some distinction you are making between having an nForce motherboard vs. having an nForce chipset?
Additionally, you can't quite say the Xbox GPU is exactly a GeForce4 Ti, either. Isn't the clockrate significantly dialed back at that point (as it is was even dialed back a notch when compared to the then current GeForce3 product). So this will have a major impact on the ultimate textured pixel bandwidth when compared to a present day GeForce4 Ti, correct?
I'm remember someone comparing the GPU in Gamecube, although they have no hard evidence on its specs, to a Geforce mx card, while the Xbox GPU, has a lower clock rate than a Geforce 3 card, but is comparable to a Ti4600?? What, because it has a nFinite FX engine II? or even not that??
Does anyone know for sure the specifications of the GPU made by ArtX that is in the Gamecube?
The comparison of the Xbox GPU to the GeForce4 Ti series is mostly because of the 1 extra texture unit. That is basically what a GeForce4 is (hardware-wise) a GeForce3 with an extra texture pipeline.
The ArtX GPU on the other hand...yet another piece of GC hardware with very little description on the internet.
The XBox's GPU has dual vertex pipelines like the geForce4, which is the big step up from the geForce3. The geForce4 also comes with more and faster memory, and the GPU has a higher clock rate, but it is essentially the same chip. The XBox memory controller is a custom chip, not the nForce PC chipset although the two no doubt contain much of the same technology. The XBox also does not have to support PCI or AGP, and the GPU has direct access to the main memory, rather than having its own memory system.
I compared the GameCube's GPU (Flipper) to the geForce4MX because it is a fixed function unit, not programmable. The Flipper has a claimed pixel rate that is substantially lower than what nVidia claims for the 4MX, but it has the advantage of only needing to support lower resolutions (i.e. TV). The comparison isn't completely fair because the Flipper does have a few capabilities lacking in the 4MX, but the point was that the Flipper isn't programmable and its vertex processing rate is in the same ballpark.
...the Gekko MPU was not built from the ground up. It's a derivative of the PowerPC 750 RISC processor and includes some 50 new instructions. Based on 0.18-micron copper wire process technology, the device runs at 405 MHz and has an external bus to the Flipper device with a peak of 1.6 Gbytes/s. The chip has a performance rating of 925 DMips (Dhrystone 2.1).
...
One of the modifications it made was to cut the 64-bit floating point unit in half, allowing it to do two 32-bit floating point operations every cycle. "Conventional wisdom is that four-way is actually better, but this is not necessarily true," West said. "Two-way is actually pretty much as powerful as four-way, plus it takes up less silicon and it's easier to make it go fast. We're going to try to complete two instructions every cycle."
To improve the internal data flow, IBM tried to eliminate "cache trashing," or wasting cache space on transient data. The 256-Kbit Level-2 cache can be locked down so that it retains only the data that needs to be reused. There's also an internal direct memory access that moves data from the cache while allowing the device to process a different set of data. This mechanism helps mitigate the incremental latency associated with compressing and decompressing the data.
The 405 MHz number might be out of date, but it really doesn't matter since 7450 based G4s will always clock higher than G3s on the same process.
...the Gekko MPU was not built from the ground up. It's a derivative of the PowerPC 750 RISC processor and includes some 50 new instructions. Based on 0.18-micron copper wire process technology, the device runs at 405 MHz and has an external bus to the Flipper device with a peak of 1.6 Gbytes/s. The chip has a performance rating of 925 DMips (Dhrystone 2.1).
...
One of the modifications it made was to cut the 64-bit floating point unit in half, allowing it to do two 32-bit floating point operations every cycle. "Conventional wisdom is that four-way is actually better, but this is not necessarily true," West said. "Two-way is actually pretty much as powerful as four-way, plus it takes up less silicon and it's easier to make it go fast. We're going to try to complete two instructions every cycle."
To improve the internal data flow, IBM tried to eliminate "cache trashing," or wasting cache space on transient data. The 256-Kbit Level-2 cache can be locked down so that it retains only the data that needs to be reused. There's also an internal direct memory access that moves data from the cache while allowing the device to process a different set of data. This mechanism helps mitigate the incremental latency associated with compressing and decompressing the data.
The 405 MHz number might be out of date, but it really doesn't matter since 7450 based G4s will always clock higher than G3s on the same process.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The "more than one FPU instruction per clock" also never came to pass -- at least we never saw any evidence of that in the docs or in practice. They did manage to get the clock rate to almost 500, however, which is great.
The later (post-7400) G4 processors also support a cache locking capability, at least on the off-chip caches.
<strong>Problem is, the Quake engine was designed from the ground up to run in an x86 processor environment (of 3 years ago?). That means a PIII. That means no vector processing or SIMD type of activity. The engine is clearly focused around a Single-Instruction-Single-Data (vs. SIMD) scenario with regard to how it operates. It's a resource hog because doing a long sequence of essentially the same operation "one-by-one" is extremely exhaustive (vs. utilizing parallelism) so the general CPU naturally has to overcome this via brute force x87 activity and brute force clockspeeds. As mentioned before, it's nontrivial to just revise the engine to take advantage of SIMD w/o having to rewrite major areas of the code (you rewrite one part to handle 4-pieces of data at a time and you find that some place else becomes the bottleneck and needs to be rewritten to handle 4 at a time). You might as well just rewrite the engine from the ground up, and that is exactly what must happen to really take advantage of newer processors such as the P4, G4, and any console that relies extensively on vector processing strategies. Essentially, the Quake engine running on today's processors is like running it on yesteryear's processors but ignoring the videocard as a source of graphics acceleration (albeit, a GPU takes parallelism and dedicated functionality to even more of an extreme than vector units).
From what I understand, (mostly because I haven't got the time available to take my knowledge any further at the moment), the RAM used in the Gamecube, 1T - SRAM, which has a latency of 10ns, and 5ns for the texture memory.
Also, I've heard that the Xbox RAM is all shared, and that when each individual task has been set for the RAM to perform, animation, AI, textures, etc, that the bandwidth plummets from 6.4Gbps, to around 1Gbps for each task, compared to the Gamecubes dedicated 3.2Gbps bandwidth of its RAM.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I have heard is that the Gamecube is no pushover technologically.
EA of Canada also ran its own tests of the Gamecubes polygon rate, 22m@60fps, and 44m@30fps, so it ain't that far behind.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I have heard is that the Gamecube is no pushover technologically.
EA of Canada also ran its own tests of the Gamecubes polygon rate, 22m@60fps, and 44m@30fps, so it ain't that far behind. </strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes the memory in the GC is extremely fast, and that counts for a heck of a lot. I never said the GameCube was a pushover, but its also not the XBox-killer that was being stated earlier in this thread. Its poly rates are quite good, but XBox's are up to about twice as good, and the XBox wins on flexibility. The numbers you give aren't correct... they imply a rate of 1320m/sec, which is most definitely wrong. The numbers might be 220,000 @ 60 Hz, which is about correct with a limited number of lights. It also happens to be very roughly comparable to a geForce 4MX.
You can't mean that the Xbox can render 120m fully textured polygons with lighting at 60fps, what can it actually do??
And also bearing in mind that the qoute of in-game poly count is taken from Rogue Leader (Gamecube), and as it is a first gen game, couldn't ninties console push a lot more???
Just out of interest, how many polygons does Halo push??
<strong>You can't mean that the Xbox can render 120m fully textured polygons with lighting at 60fps, what can it actually do??
And also bearing in mind that the qoute of in-game poly count is taken from Rogue Leader (Gamecube), and as it is a first gen game, couldn't ninties console push a lot more???
Just out of interest, how many polygons does Halo push??</strong><hr></blockquote>
Where'd you get that number? I said the XBox was about double the poly rate (there are way too many variables to generalize it that much though), and I said that your GameCube numbers were wrong. 12m polys/sec is about right for the Cube, and I'd guess that Rogue Leader is pretty close to that. I think most game companies nowadays know how to get hardware to run well... I wouldn't expect to see higher poly rates in "2nd gen" titles. Instead there are going to be some cool hardware features that get used, but this may actually reduce the poly throughput while improving the overall visual quality.
So what do i buy ? We're getting the xbox down here in Oz on Thursday it's being hyped to the moon. The PS2 is established. I haven't seen much info around on the GC. Anyone want to give me their biased or un-biased views on what's better ?
<strong>So what do i buy ? We're getting the xbox down here in Oz on Thursday it's being hyped to the moon. The PS2 is established. I haven't seen much info around on the GC. Anyone want to give me their biased or un-biased views on what's better ?</strong><hr></blockquote>
You should buy the console that has the most games that you're interested in playing. While it's certainly a valid and worthy exercise to compare the hardware of these gaming platforms, it isn't really relevant to determining which to buy.
My take: PS2 currently has the broadest lineup of games, and of the three, has the largest number of great games that aren't available on another platform. Since it has a huge lead in total number of consoles sold, I don't think this will be changing anytime soon. It's really a personal decision, though?figure out what games you're most interested in and buy the console for which those games are available. There are excellent games available for GCN, Xbox, and PS2.
Personally, I've always liked the PS2 hardware. The XBox was just ugly (inside and out), a glorified PC. The GameCube is interesting, but I haven't been able to read much about what's actually going on inside so I can't really formulate an opinion of the insides. The PS2 was innovative when it was announced and I think still is to some degree. It's two years older and still holds it's own. Not to mention that it's backwards compatible with the PSOne and supposedly forwards compatible with the PS3 (which has been announced as 100 times faster than the PS2).
But I agree with the previous poster. The available games are most important and the PS2 seems to win here as well.
Absolutely -- buy the unit based on the available games, not on its internal technology. All of these machines can deliver a very cool experience, but the experience depends on the software. In terms of available titles PS2 is way out ahead, XBox is second place (albiet with more complaints about inferior titles), and GameCube has the fewest but some of the best. A PS2 is cheaper than the XBox, a reasonable size physically, has a decent controller, and already has a large installed base so you know they will continue to make lots of titles for it.
<strong>Absolutely -- buy the unit based on the available games, not on its internal technology. All of these machines can deliver a very cool experience, but the experience depends on the software. In terms of available titles PS2 is way out ahead, XBox is second place (albiet with more complaints about inferior titles), and GameCube has the fewest but some of the best. A PS2 is cheaper than the XBox, a reasonable size physically, has a decent controller, and already has a large installed base so you know they will continue to make lots of titles for it.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Just like to add that the NGC is the cheapest of them all. Games are definately the most important factor though. I'm a huge mario/zelda fan so the Cube is a shoe in for me. They don't have as many FPS/blood & gore games (although they do have 007, resident evil & others) as the PS2 or Xbox (will have). It really depends on what type of games you want.
BTW: I just read on nintendoweb.com that the Final Fantasy series will be coming back to Nintendo (although not leaving Sony).
I heard that the big cheese of square and the big cheese of nintendo have some pretty bitter animosities towards one another. but square DOES want to port all the old final fantasy games(1-6) to the Game boy advance, mainly becuase the GBA is totally ****ing awesome, and japanese people love small gadgets that do alot
as for gamecube, I heard its possible FFXI will come to gamecube, as its Massively multiplayer online madness, and those work best when supported by various systems. but a major set back to having any final fantasy games come to GC is the gamecube minidvds, that storel ike half the capacity of a normal dvd, and final fantasy games usually take up multiple discs but I heard that square hates using multiple discs and would much prefer as few discs as possible, so therefore that leaves PS2 and xbox as more viable consoles to get the final fantasy series, and seeing as how most final fantasy games are ported to PC anyways, it doesn't seem to unreasonalbe that they could make it to xbox, but as much as I would enjoy having Final fantasy games on my Gamecube, I don't think its a reality.
Well, all I can say is that all thee consoles are very good, this is because it is still a very competitive market, and I hope it'll still stay that way with the entrance of M$ (Thats is one of the reasons I like Nintendo, they aren't into world domination). As the Gamecube will come out later it will seem as though it has a lot of catching up to do, but it will have some astounding must have games. Games like Perfect Dark zero with online play will be a hit, as well as other fps games like Die Hard, Turok Evolution, etc.
I love the Ps2, it has some really strong games, and it still has quite a bit of life in it. My only criticism about it though is the fact that MGS2 is very lacking in the texture department, and thats a shame as it is showing the PS2s age.
The Xbox, though, from what I've seen, doesn't have a very strong line up, at the moment although it has to be said that it does have a lot of potential for some truely beautiful games.
Comments
"some crappy GPUs"
TNT
TNT2
GeForce 256
GeForce 2
GeForce 2 Pro
GeForce 2 Ultra
GeForce 2MX
GeForce 2 MX 200
GeForce 2 MX 400
GeForce 3
GeForce 3 Ti 200
GeForce 3 Ti 500
GeForce 4MX (420-460)
and GeForce 4 Ti (4200-4600)
That's the PC stuff, with the Quadro lines excluded, as well as the Xbox GPU, which was already mentioned above.
G-News
<strong>
Where'd you get your information on the XBox? It is wrong. The XBox does not use the nForce chipset, and it does contain the nv25 which was just released as the geForce4 Ti.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well if it isn't an nForce chipset, what is it? ...Or is it some distinction you are making between having an nForce motherboard vs. having an nForce chipset?
Additionally, you can't quite say the Xbox GPU is exactly a GeForce4 Ti, either. Isn't the clockrate significantly dialed back at that point (as it is was even dialed back a notch when compared to the then current GeForce3 product). So this will have a major impact on the ultimate textured pixel bandwidth when compared to a present day GeForce4 Ti, correct?
[ 03-10-2002: Message edited by: Randycat99 ]</p>
Does anyone know for sure the specifications of the GPU made by ArtX that is in the Gamecube?
The ArtX GPU on the other hand...yet another piece of GC hardware with very little description on the internet.
I compared the GameCube's GPU (Flipper) to the geForce4MX because it is a fixed function unit, not programmable. The Flipper has a claimed pixel rate that is substantially lower than what nVidia claims for the 4MX, but it has the advantage of only needing to support lower resolutions (i.e. TV). The comparison isn't completely fair because the Flipper does have a few capabilities lacking in the 4MX, but the point was that the Flipper isn't programmable and its vertex processing rate is in the same ballpark.
<a href="http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010516S0056"; target="_blank">GameCube clears path for game developers</a>
By Anthony Cataldo, EE Times
May 17, 2001 (12:36 p.m. EST)
...the Gekko MPU was not built from the ground up. It's a derivative of the PowerPC 750 RISC processor and includes some 50 new instructions. Based on 0.18-micron copper wire process technology, the device runs at 405 MHz and has an external bus to the Flipper device with a peak of 1.6 Gbytes/s. The chip has a performance rating of 925 DMips (Dhrystone 2.1).
...
One of the modifications it made was to cut the 64-bit floating point unit in half, allowing it to do two 32-bit floating point operations every cycle. "Conventional wisdom is that four-way is actually better, but this is not necessarily true," West said. "Two-way is actually pretty much as powerful as four-way, plus it takes up less silicon and it's easier to make it go fast. We're going to try to complete two instructions every cycle."
To improve the internal data flow, IBM tried to eliminate "cache trashing," or wasting cache space on transient data. The 256-Kbit Level-2 cache can be locked down so that it retains only the data that needs to be reused. There's also an internal direct memory access that moves data from the cache while allowing the device to process a different set of data. This mechanism helps mitigate the incremental latency associated with compressing and decompressing the data.
The 405 MHz number might be out of date, but it really doesn't matter since 7450 based G4s will always clock higher than G3s on the same process.
<strong>Here is some info on the Gamecube:
<a href="http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010516S0056"; target="_blank">GameCube clears path for game developers</a>
By Anthony Cataldo, EE Times
May 17, 2001 (12:36 p.m. EST)
...the Gekko MPU was not built from the ground up. It's a derivative of the PowerPC 750 RISC processor and includes some 50 new instructions. Based on 0.18-micron copper wire process technology, the device runs at 405 MHz and has an external bus to the Flipper device with a peak of 1.6 Gbytes/s. The chip has a performance rating of 925 DMips (Dhrystone 2.1).
...
One of the modifications it made was to cut the 64-bit floating point unit in half, allowing it to do two 32-bit floating point operations every cycle. "Conventional wisdom is that four-way is actually better, but this is not necessarily true," West said. "Two-way is actually pretty much as powerful as four-way, plus it takes up less silicon and it's easier to make it go fast. We're going to try to complete two instructions every cycle."
To improve the internal data flow, IBM tried to eliminate "cache trashing," or wasting cache space on transient data. The 256-Kbit Level-2 cache can be locked down so that it retains only the data that needs to be reused. There's also an internal direct memory access that moves data from the cache while allowing the device to process a different set of data. This mechanism helps mitigate the incremental latency associated with compressing and decompressing the data.
The 405 MHz number might be out of date, but it really doesn't matter since 7450 based G4s will always clock higher than G3s on the same process.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The "more than one FPU instruction per clock" also never came to pass -- at least we never saw any evidence of that in the docs or in practice. They did manage to get the clock rate to almost 500, however, which is great.
The later (post-7400) G4 processors also support a cache locking capability, at least on the off-chip caches.
<strong>Problem is, the Quake engine was designed from the ground up to run in an x86 processor environment (of 3 years ago?). That means a PIII. That means no vector processing or SIMD type of activity. The engine is clearly focused around a Single-Instruction-Single-Data (vs. SIMD) scenario with regard to how it operates. It's a resource hog because doing a long sequence of essentially the same operation "one-by-one" is extremely exhaustive (vs. utilizing parallelism) so the general CPU naturally has to overcome this via brute force x87 activity and brute force clockspeeds. As mentioned before, it's nontrivial to just revise the engine to take advantage of SIMD w/o having to rewrite major areas of the code (you rewrite one part to handle 4-pieces of data at a time and you find that some place else becomes the bottleneck and needs to be rewritten to handle 4 at a time). You might as well just rewrite the engine from the ground up, and that is exactly what must happen to really take advantage of newer processors such as the P4, G4, and any console that relies extensively on vector processing strategies. Essentially, the Quake engine running on today's processors is like running it on yesteryear's processors but ignoring the videocard as a source of graphics acceleration (albeit, a GPU takes parallelism and dedicated functionality to even more of an extreme than vector units).
[ 03-09-2002: Message edited by: Randycat99 ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
According to John Carmack, Altivec does virtually nothing for Quake:
<a href="http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?q=Y&a=tpc&s=50009562&f=48409524&m=8420990301"; target="_blank">http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?q=Y&a=tpc&s=50009562&f=48409524&m=8420990301</a>;
<a href="http://bbs.xlr8yourmac.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000647.html"; target="_blank">http://bbs.xlr8yourmac.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000647.html</a>;
<strong>According to John Carmack, Altivec does virtually nothing for Quake[.]</strong><hr></blockquote>
That's what RandyCat said.
Also, I've heard that the Xbox RAM is all shared, and that when each individual task has been set for the RAM to perform, animation, AI, textures, etc, that the bandwidth plummets from 6.4Gbps, to around 1Gbps for each task, compared to the Gamecubes dedicated 3.2Gbps bandwidth of its RAM.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I have heard is that the Gamecube is no pushover technologically.
EA of Canada also ran its own tests of the Gamecubes polygon rate, 22m@60fps, and 44m@30fps, so it ain't that far behind.
<strong>
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I have heard is that the Gamecube is no pushover technologically.
EA of Canada also ran its own tests of the Gamecubes polygon rate, 22m@60fps, and 44m@30fps, so it ain't that far behind.
Yes the memory in the GC is extremely fast, and that counts for a heck of a lot. I never said the GameCube was a pushover, but its also not the XBox-killer that was being stated earlier in this thread. Its poly rates are quite good, but XBox's are up to about twice as good, and the XBox wins on flexibility. The numbers you give aren't correct... they imply a rate of 1320m/sec, which is most definitely wrong. The numbers might be 220,000 @ 60 Hz, which is about correct with a limited number of lights. It also happens to be very roughly comparable to a geForce 4MX.
And also bearing in mind that the qoute of in-game poly count is taken from Rogue Leader (Gamecube), and as it is a first gen game, couldn't ninties console push a lot more???
Just out of interest, how many polygons does Halo push??
<strong>You can't mean that the Xbox can render 120m fully textured polygons with lighting at 60fps, what can it actually do??
And also bearing in mind that the qoute of in-game poly count is taken from Rogue Leader (Gamecube), and as it is a first gen game, couldn't ninties console push a lot more???
Just out of interest, how many polygons does Halo push??</strong><hr></blockquote>
Where'd you get that number? I said the XBox was about double the poly rate (there are way too many variables to generalize it that much though), and I said that your GameCube numbers were wrong. 12m polys/sec is about right for the Cube, and I'd guess that Rogue Leader is pretty close to that. I think most game companies nowadays know how to get hardware to run well... I wouldn't expect to see higher poly rates in "2nd gen" titles. Instead there are going to be some cool hardware features that get used, but this may actually reduce the poly throughput while improving the overall visual quality.
<strong>So what do i buy ?
You should buy the console that has the most games that you're interested in playing. While it's certainly a valid and worthy exercise to compare the hardware of these gaming platforms, it isn't really relevant to determining which to buy.
My take: PS2 currently has the broadest lineup of games, and of the three, has the largest number of great games that aren't available on another platform. Since it has a huge lead in total number of consoles sold, I don't think this will be changing anytime soon. It's really a personal decision, though?figure out what games you're most interested in and buy the console for which those games are available. There are excellent games available for GCN, Xbox, and PS2.
[ 03-12-2002: Message edited by: Parvulesco ]</p>
But I agree with the previous poster. The available games are most important and the PS2 seems to win here as well.
<strong>Absolutely -- buy the unit based on the available games, not on its internal technology. All of these machines can deliver a very cool experience, but the experience depends on the software. In terms of available titles PS2 is way out ahead, XBox is second place (albiet with more complaints about inferior titles), and GameCube has the fewest but some of the best. A PS2 is cheaper than the XBox, a reasonable size physically, has a decent controller, and already has a large installed base so you know they will continue to make lots of titles for it.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Just like to add that the NGC is the cheapest of them all. Games are definately the most important factor though. I'm a huge mario/zelda fan so the Cube is a shoe in for me. They don't have as many FPS/blood & gore games (although they do have 007, resident evil & others) as the PS2 or Xbox (will have). It really depends on what type of games you want.
BTW: I just read on nintendoweb.com that the Final Fantasy series will be coming back to Nintendo (although not leaving Sony).
as for gamecube, I heard its possible FFXI will come to gamecube, as its Massively multiplayer online madness, and those work best when supported by various systems. but a major set back to having any final fantasy games come to GC is the gamecube minidvds, that storel ike half the capacity of a normal dvd, and final fantasy games usually take up multiple discs but I heard that square hates using multiple discs and would much prefer as few discs as possible, so therefore that leaves PS2 and xbox as more viable consoles to get the final fantasy series, and seeing as how most final fantasy games are ported to PC anyways, it doesn't seem to unreasonalbe that they could make it to xbox, but as much as I would enjoy having Final fantasy games on my Gamecube, I don't think its a reality.
I love the Ps2, it has some really strong games, and it still has quite a bit of life in it. My only criticism about it though is the fact that MGS2 is very lacking in the texture department, and thats a shame as it is showing the PS2s age.
The Xbox, though, from what I've seen, doesn't have a very strong line up, at the moment although it has to be said that it does have a lot of potential for some truely beautiful games.