Console = PC question

[j0ker_san]

What would be a PS2 equivalent PC....

PS2 games look pretty good, I haven't seen many pcs running that smooth.....just curious too see what you think a PCs hardware should be to be able to equal or beat a PS2....

[SickBoy]

You'd need a lot of horsepower to run, say, Madden 2001, like a PS2 runs it. I'd say a GF3 with an Athlon at about 1.6 GHz or so and DDR ram.... definitely NOT running WinXP....

Basically, if you're looking for truly problem free gaming performance you'll need to go console. It's the major advantage over PC gaming. A PS2 is a lot easier to keep running trouble-free than a computer.

SickBoy

[j0ker_san]

Ya, I totally agree, thats the one thing I hate about PCs, they are so unstable for gaming....ya if you upgrade them and tweak them you can get good performance but it seems you never run games the way they were intended to play.....but, you can easily get any game you want for a pc for free by burning it...

I would say a system like this would be able to do it

1.4 Ghz Athlon or higher
256 megs ram
and a really really expensive video card.....
but then you will still be faced with longer load times and stuff....

[Coolio]

i dunno i kinda like fixing and upgrading pc's.;)
also pc's aren't just for gaming you can do many more things with them.

[KeyboardCowboy]

i heard that the new microsoft xbox uses a 1.7ghz processor or something like that

[Maddman]

Originally posted by KeyboardCowboy
i heard that the new microsoft xbox uses a 1.7ghz processor or something like that

It uses a 733mhz processor based on pentiumIII technology.

[j0ker_san]

How come consoles can outpreform pcs by sooo much...
The PS2 has two 432mhz cpus and its like faster than a top of the line athlon.....
the xbox has a 733mhz cpu which can blow away the 2ghz pentium 4...(i think)

i know they don't have an OS that slows down computations and
there GPUs are really powerfull but still, i dont get it...the xbox will have a harddrive and OS, and it will still wipe the floor with a 1.4ghz t-bird...

[Maddman]

Originally posted by j0ker_san
How come consoles can outpreform pcs by sooo much...
The PS2 has two 432mhz cpus and its like faster than a top of the line athlon.....
the xbox has a 733mhz cpu which can blow away the 2ghz pentium 4...(i think)

i know they don't have an OS that slows down computations and
there GPUs are really powerfull but still, i dont get it...the xbox will have a harddrive and OS, and it will still wipe the floor with a 1.4ghz t-bird...

Consoles use processors designed specificly to meet the companies needs, and the game designers do not have to worry about compatibility with a wide range of hardware like you find in computers. Consoles are highly optimized to do what they do and also do not have to hit high resolutions as most use a tv as a monitor witch equates to about 720x480 regardless of tv size.

[Valid]

You won't FIND a PC that equals a PS2. At least not in how you're thinking of it. The PS2's architecture is fundamentally different from that of a modern day computer. Check out the GeForce3 vs. X-Box thread in the Graphics and Sound section. There's a lot of informative information over at arstechnica.com . Basically the PS2's SYSTEM-WIDE bandwidth is pretty mindboggling. If you looked at the cache and memory total of the system, you'd probably laugh. But who cares how much you've got if you can move it system-wide that much faster? A lot of designers complain because they can't even fit a whole 3DModel or texture in the cache. They're having problems programming for it because you can't program it like a computer. Who knows why SONY, Toshiba, etc did that. My guess is that it's just a ploy to get more original titles. Their reason would probably be "to give the people what they want - truly NEXT generation gaming." Bah, I say. Though I do have my PS2, and I love it. On a side note, the PS2s myriad of processors are custom-designed simply for gaming. So it makes sense that you'd need less clock-speed. Look at PIV or PIII versus Athlons of equivalent clockspeeds. But who knows about the X-Box. It just has a 733 mhz PIII I believe. The thing that really saves that is the next-gen graphics processing from nVidia and some smart memory management.

[j0ker_san]

I'm gonna check out that link you said.

Also, if you take a look at a ps1 youll see how powerfull consoles are.
Its only got a 33mhz cpu, and a bit of ram plus a tiny video card yet you need a AMD 300Mhz, with like 64megs and a 16meg card to play some of the games on it....

[Valid]

You are right though. I'm guessing operating systems (Specifically everyone's favorite bloated series - not that I don't use them) suck a lot of resources and impose an impressive overhead on the hardware.

[Maddman]

Unfortunatly you cant play any of the consoles at like 1600x1280 or even at 1028x768 or any faster then 30 half-frames per second.

[j0ker_san]

just hook up an xbox to a good big monitor and youll get a Maximum Resolution of (2x32bpp frame buffers +Z): 1920x1080!!

so there ya go, plus most of the time the games run so well you won't notice a difference in frame rates....pc games running on a good pc can have good frame rates but then they still get chunky at times and are unstable and suffer from bugs.....and ***** like that....consoles are more stable and meant for gaming now matter how much sweat and guts you put into a pc....

[Maddman]

X-box is just a stadardized pc in a console box intel proc. nvidia video card harddrive a version of windows ect. The difference is a pc was not made specifically for games, consoles were designed to play games and only games. I do remeber a time when computers were beter then game consoles. I owned the first nintendo console and had a 486 pc had the same game on each the nicest thing about the computer version unlimited save points with the nintendo you could only save in certain places. One of my roomates has a ps and after abandoning consoles till I saw that it was like night and day it is much better.

[RedDeathDrinker]

Consoles are optimised for gaming - like the posts before, no OS, or any other cycle-sapping stuff.

X-box seems to be just a stripped down PC.........

[Random Nonsense]

I think it's mainly the OS issue, as on consoles it is optimised for games, and just that, no need to be able to recognise different hardware etc at all! i remember back in the good old days, we had this thing called DOS, it was wonderful, if anyone remembers games always ran this thing called "DOS4GW" i think that was the name anyway, it was actually the game developers OWN operating system specifically for that game! i used to run mechwarrior 2 in 640X480 at about 30 FPS on my DX4-100! with mechwarrior mercenaries, this dropped, so i had to use 320X240 but in windos 95 it crawled really badly......

[Super]

Consoles are made for games and thats what they're best at (as was said before), but can they fold proteins or crunch WUs?

The reason I went with a PC is because it can do a lot of other things such as internet and internet gaming, but still I have respect for consoles.

[j0ker_san]

well said super, i'm a pc fan and console fan.

[Maddman]

Originally posted by Random Nonsense
I think it's mainly the OS issue, as on consoles it is optimised for games, and just that, no need to be able to recognise different hardware etc at all! i remember back in the good old days, we had this thing called DOS, it was wonderful, if anyone remembers games always ran this thing called "DOS4GW" i think that was the name anyway, it was actually the game developers OWN operating system specifically for that game! i used to run mechwarrior 2 in 640X480 at about 30 FPS on my DX4-100! with mechwarrior mercenaries, this dropped, so i had to use 320X240 but in windos 95 it crawled really badly......

DOS4GW is a protected mode driver for dos to allow dos games to access extended memory.

[maha_x]

Yes, the good ole DOS. DOS games had all the code for accessing hardware in them selves. Only OS was the DOS, which was only responsible for disc accessing (Disk Operating System). Games running with DOS4GW had their own code to access graphics and sound and controllers. Even keyboard was read direct from the hardware.

Today Windoze has has all those layers for different functions. U have DirectX for most gaming stuff. No more reading straight from the hardware. And all the hardware has got different, only the driver is in middle to sort out what goes where. PC could be more stable if the hardware interface was standard, not the driver.

I did alot of diggin at arstechnica and found out that alltought AMD's step with the FPU was a step in right direction, we need to still incorporate a true vector prosessing unit into our chips if we want to even begin to compare them with consoles. Our chips do SIMD, but the implementation is so poor, that a SSE unit in PIII is mayby 1/4 of a single vectorunit in EE (PS2's emotion engine, the CPU). And EE has two of these. Tbirds with 3Dnow! dont even support 128bit operations of a true vector engine. The upcoming Athlon4 with its SSE (in both FPU units I presume) could in ideal situation come to 1/2 of a vector unit in EE. So Athlon4 at 4x Mhz of PS2 could equal. Except that we didnt count the 3 FPUs EE would still have unused...

But what really messes this comparison is the GPU. I havent found any docs on what these contain, but they certainly bring up the PC in the comparison. The reported polygon troughput of PS2 equals (@ 25Mpolys/sec) a GF2. So a hesitated tought could be that the GF2 T&L unit maches the EE. This leads us to the balance of tasks between the CPU and the GPU.

I think that a fast CPU and GF2 could equal PS2. Im sure many of U want to disagree, and I excpect U to come up with a good explanation.

[MiteyJoe]

well most of the reason that consoles outperform PC's when it comes to games, is that console processors are proprietary RISC (reduced instruction set computer) processors, and the software is written ONLY for that particular processor running at that particular speed. the processor does all of the redundancy work itself through its own hardware coding.. and cosequently, only a small amount of software decoding is needed.

same principle that a rendering machine works on..

lets say for arguments sake an SI rendering computer can render an entire clip at 1600x1200 running at 100mhz in about 10 minutes using its own OS and its own software..

whereas an Athlon 1.6 running windrawers and 1gig of ram might take 10 HOURS to do the same operation because it is not specialized.

-Joe-