PS3: Playing at a Whole New Level - Getting Graphical
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The GPUs in both machines are custom built; Sony has partnered with NVIDIA to produce the 550Mhz "reality synthesizer" RSX, while Microsoft chose to go with ATI to develop the Xenos 500Mhz solution. The comparison of these two GPUs feels slightly less than straightforward; one benchmark of a GPU is its polygon performance, and in most of the spec sheets I've seen for each console, this is being measured in different units. The Xbox 360 boasts polygon processing at 500 Million triangles per second, while the PS3 is said to be capable of 1.1 billion vertices per second.
At a glance it may look as if the RSX exceeds Xenos extraordinarily, however, you need to understand that it takes at least three vertices to make a triangle. I'll be the first to admit that math isn't a skill I'm particularly endowed with, but if you want to convert the quoted number of vertices to triangles, you need to divide 1.1 billion by three, the result being 366 million triangles per second. All is not lost for the RSX however; as mentioned above it runs at a higher clock speed, albeit only slightly.
Another benchmark for a GPU is shader performance, and here Sony does excel with just under 75 billions shader operations per second. This is almost double the 48 billion that the Xbox 360 can handle. Add that to the fact that just the RSX GPU alone has a calculation rate of 1.8 TFLOPS compared to the overall rate of the whole Xbox 360 system of one TFLOPS. Overall system performance of the PS3 is two TFLOPS, double the Xbox 360 and around 100 times faster than the PS2.
The RSX will also handle the unconfirmed but possible 8 channel audio processing and provide native support for Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS (Digital Theatre System) and LPCM (Linear Pulse Code Modularization). DTS has been around for some time and is used to synchronize movie images with sound. LCPM is a digital audio format that converts analog sounds to digital without any compression, and is used primarily for concerts or musicals where the sound quality is of extreme importance.
The PlayStation Three was originally set for launch at the start of this year's second quarter, but Sony set it back to midway through the final quarter (and just in time for Christmas!) because the Blu-ray technology it will be using will not be released until June. Blu-ray, for those that don't know, uses a blue laser with a substantially shorter wavelength (405nm) than the DVD red laser (650nm) to read and write more information in the same amount of space. The technology is more expensive to produce than its main rival HD DVD, but also has more capacity per layer. This may be a contributing factor in the higher cost of the PS3.
Because the single Blu-ray optical pick-up can read data from all three formats (CD, DVD and BD), the PlayStation Three will be fully backwards compatible with game media from both the original PlayStation and PS2. There have been some concerns over whether the copy-protection scheme used in the Blu-ray format will interfere with viewing the games in pure high-definition mode, but fortunately it seems that gamers will be able to enjoy high-def' games over any HD-capable connection from the devices multi av-out or HDMI-out ports.
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