SHALLOWTALBYwrote:
John said:
The PS1 didn't have a PC based graphics chip and neither did the
PS2. In fact when the PS2 was announced with its 66 million triangles
per second the best PC card (remember 3dfx apocalypse) could only
manage 8 million, even on the day of launch the best cards were at 20
million. It was so good (comparatively speaking) because of its
architecture- which made it such a *** to program. But compared the
very best PC of 2001 - no comparison.
Nobody could of predicted how quickly technology was to move though and
6 months later the PC caught up and passed the PS2. It was easy for
Mircosoft to better the PS2 performance because of this revolution even
though when it was launched it was on par with an average graphics card
of the day.
This time though the PS3 uses PC graphics technology and can only be as
good as that technology. This is less of a revolution which is bad, or
good thing -depending of if you are one trying to learn its new
language.
Shallow
Yawn! What you mean like the PS1 had a polygon performance of
100,000/sec Which anybody with a pocket calculator and a tiny bit of
knowledge about matrix math could have worked out was just marketing
hype? The maths engine wasn't powerful enough to support the
necessary geometry and sure enough, the real figure is more like
20,000polys/sec.
Mainly though, what exactly do you think a "polygon"
actually is? Or rahter, what do you think is consists of? For years
manufacturs have been able to take a pretty free-style attitude to
what defines a polygon, which in geometrical terms means nothing
more than a shape with straight edges, and simply give themselvse a
best-case scenario. e.g. a tiny, non-shaded, non-textured polygon, or
a tiny polygon with sading and texture that is a million miles from
perspective correct (e.g. PS1) and uses lots of approximation and
linear interpolation (corrcted in arbitrary stages) to ramp up the
polygon speed whilst overlooking real-world performance and
sacrificing rendering integrity. I mean, most computer hardware is
capable of rendering hundreds of thousands of crappy polygons. Nvidia
have struck at ATI in the same fashion: Nvidia hardware has,
historically, generated much more polygons/sec than ATI cards, but
benchmarks don't tell anything about the corners they cut to maximise
the polys/sec figures.
The fact that the new Playstation uses hardware from a PC manufacturer
is not relevant to it's power: There is no other manufacturer with as
much experience making low-cost high-performance 3D hardware, and the
PS3s poly performance is way better than anything they've done before:
Much, much better than the PS2 for example.
It has always been the case that, in the desktop world of commodity
hardware at least, the PC has benefitted from it's open architechture
which means that anybody is free to produce hardware that is as
powerful as home-owners can afford at any time.
Admitttedly, owing to various go-slow OSs performance has always been
hampered and I'd rather use a purpose built console, for example, a
SONY playstation, to play my games on than a PC. But with Vista and
Directx 10, even though some problems will remain, when the OS and
the graphics cards that take advantage of its new features are
settled in the marketplace, the PC will, as ever, have a more
powerful hardware base than the concoles. And whereas new consoles
are released every five years or so, for the PC, new rendering
hardware is available every few months.
Technologically, you get what you pay for, the fact an entire PS3
platform will cost about the same as a PC graphics card alone speaks
for itself: Yuo can't compare a £500 piece of games machine with a
£5,000 desktop machine.
I don't want to shout down consoles, in particular the PS3, because I
love 'em and I'd be surprised if their games don't outplay the PC
tenfold! But it terms of pizel performance, if that's what you're
arguing about, the PC, for the forseeable future, will steal a march
on the consoles soon after they're released, if not before: It's just
the way it is I'm afraid. Only a £2000 games machine could sort it out
for sure.
