CNET has released a
comparison of the PS3 vs XBOX 360. The so called Senior Editor John P. Falcone is completely clueless as a gamer and does not understand the architecture of the XBOX 360. In his specs for the consoles, he lists the Video Ram for the PS3 at 256MB and the XBOX 360 as 10MB. 10MB is the memory embedded in the GPU that is used for frame buffer (cutting edge stuff) and not the available graphics memory. The 10MB is used to offload stress on the GPU and Memory plus allow for AA to be used with out penalty. The GPU in the 360 can even read and write from the CPU cache which reduces overhead (better performance).
The PS3 has 256MB dedicated to graphics and 256MB dedicated to the system. The graphics memory on the PS3 is locked at 256MB, PERIOD. On the 360, the 512MB of memory is "Unified", meaning the developer can use the memory AS he or she sees fit, which in most cases means the dev will use more than 256MB to produce killer textures (see GEARS OF WAR). In fact, developers such as Starbreeze Studios (The Darkness) have stated that the 360 will have better textures because of more available memory. The GEARS team started that they could not get GEARS to run in it's current state on the PS3 because of the lack of graphics memory. The game would need to be modified. Do not confuse this with the ability of the PS3 to run the Unreal 3 engine (as it can, it just cannot run GEARS).
Today,
comparision screens of Ridge Racer for 360 and PS3 were released. The PS3 version is clearly lacking detail and objects in the environment. This is because of a lack of texture memory and the CELL "cannot" compensate for this. Even though the game is Ridge Racer, it gives you an idea of what the lack of available graphics memory means and also the difficulty of developing for a more complicated machine (as the team had plenty of time to make this game the same or better than 360). Also the comparison images on the site are 720p 360 vs 1080p PS3.
11-15-2006, 01:00 AM
Linear Mode
