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[Des-ROW]

s'more Sony news....

Originally posted by Tagrineth@Nov 9, 2003 @ 10:20 AM

Actually, the Emotion Engine is quite a lot more powerful and flexible than Gekko and XCPU.

But only the EE as a whole; the CPU (r5900i) can't compare at all.

Having two Vector Units bolted on doesn't hurt, you know. =)

Thank you for backing up my statement ^^

I think this is the favorite BS marketing tactic of 3D console makers (except Nintendo; they've actually given real-world performance estimates on their spec sheets) - give your vertex processing capablility and don't say anything about fill rate, giving a big impressive number that means nothing by itself.

Let's not even mention Microsoft stating that the XGPU alone has a performance over 80GFLOPs...

I agree.. I was just arguing with someone about Sony's 75mil figure recently, never mind the fact that it's nearly impossible to actually display that many polygons on almost any of today's display hardware (not counting obscured polygons). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe their claim was actually polygons, not vertices.

And regarding the 75Million polygons per second figure, you are just ignoring certain points of Sony's Graphic Synthesizer press release.

"When rendering small polygons, the peak drawing capacity is 75 Million polygons per second and the system can render 150 Million particles per second. With this large drawing capability, it is possible to render a movie-quality image. With Z-buffering, textures, lighting and alpha blending (transparency), a sustained rate of 20 Million polygons per second can be drawn continuously."

There you have, read more.

And, why argue if it is possible or not, when you can argue over the 125Million polygons per second figure that Microsoft stated? You have something just against Sony, maybe?

 

[it290]

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And, why argue if it is possible or not, when you can argue over the 125Million polygons per second figure that Microsoft stated? You have something just against Sony, maybe?

No, I pretty much dislike Sony and Microsoft equally, but as stated above, Microsoft's figure was regarding vertices, not to mention the fact that Sony generally hypes things to an even more ridiculous extent than MS (not counting MS's Windows division). I still don't understand how 75 million flat shaded, small polygons can be drawn on any screen the PS2 can render to in one second. I don't see why you feel the need to defend them so aggressively, especially considering your self-professed 'dislike of fanboys'- seems a bit hypocritical. I have no qualms about stating the fact that I dislike Sony on the whole, and being a consumer in a free marketplace it is my right to do so.

 

[Des-ROW]

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Theorical performance and practical performance are not the same thing, Sony clearly stated that in theory, the system's peak polygon drawing rate is 75 Million per second (small polygon, no textures, no lights, etc.), still, that for real-world applications, the system has a peak performance of 20Million polygons per second. Hype? What hype? The press release clearly states that.

 

[it290]

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Right, but I still don't believe it's theoretically possible to draw 75 million polys in one second, ya dig? No one has even come close to acheiving the 'real-world' figure of 20 million, so it's still hype - that is, words that have yet to be backed up by anything.

 

[ratfish]

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blah blah blah

As long as there's good games being developed out there, I don't give a rat's ass about polygons and verticies. Why should people dwell on technical specifications to try to prove one console is better than another? There IS no reason!

I say cut the crap, and start talking about something meaningful. If you care about hardware, good for you, but I'm betting if you took a great developer like Sega, and made them focus as much development on a game for an older console as they do for games on any of today's sytems, they would make a quality game.

Polygons, pfft, who needs more polygons?

If people keep pushing the systems, and only focus on hardware then I don't want to be a part of this commercial video game culture.

 

[gameboy900]

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I still love how Sega UNDER-hyped the Dreamcast's polygon performance at something like 2.5 million polys per second. Then a few months after the consoles release games were pushing 3 million and eventually a couple hit 3.25 million. PS2 (at least the game for the first year and a half) could only push about 3 million polys to the screen. I think by now they may have gotten as far as 4.5-5 million. I can't say anything about Xbox or GC since I haven't kept up with their info (or any other for that matter.)

 

[Des-ROW]

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Originally posted by it290@Nov 9, 2003 @ 05:51 PM

Right, but I still don't believe it's theoretically possible to draw 75 million polys in one second, ya dig? No one has even come close to acheiving the 'real-world' figure of 20 million, so it's still hype - that is, words that have yet to be backed up by anything.

So, Sony says the PlayStation2 can draw up to 20Million polygons per second, Microsoft says their Xbox can move 125Million polygons per second, and Sony is "hyping-up" their system? Especially considering that you state that no game has come close to the 20Million pps figure.

AM2 has been able to go over 10Million pps with Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution, on PlayStation2, which is an extremely complex hardware to develop for, I believe that Dead or Alive 3 dislpays the same quantity of polygons per second (probably even more), and on a standard DirectX8.1 platform.

I agree with you ratfish, I don't really care about that, gameplay is what really counts (My favourite system is the still alive, Neo-Geo/MVS), but people like getting against certain companies for X or Y reasons, and I personally hate that.

 

[Des-ROW]

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Originally posted by gameboy900@Nov 9, 2003 @ 06:22 PM

I think by now they may have gotten as far as 4.5-5 million. I can't say anything about Xbox or GC since I haven't kept up with their info (or any other for that matter.)

Seems that neither have you with the PlayStation2...

 

[Gallstaff]

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Originally posted by ratfish@Nov 9, 2003 @ 06:02 PM

blah blah blah

As long as there's good games being developed out there, I don't give a rat's ass about polygons and verticies. Why should people dwell on technical specifications to try to prove one console is better than another? There IS no reason!

I say cut the crap, and start talking about something meaningful. If you care about hardware, good for you, but I'm betting if you took a great developer like Sega, and made them focus as much development on a game for an older console as they do for games on any of today's sytems, they would make a quality game.

Polygons, pfft, who needs more polygons?

If people keep pushing the systems, and only focus on hardware then I don't want to be a part of this commercial video game culture.

So true dude, so true

 

[Tagrineth]

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Originally posted by it290@Nov 9, 2003 @ 05:51 PM

Right, but I still don't believe it's theoretically possible to draw 75 million polys in one second, ya dig? No one has even come close to acheiving the 'real-world' figure of 20 million, so it's still hype - that is, words that have yet to be backed up by anything.

Nobody says it's possible to draw that many.

The 75 million per second figure is for raw computation only. Hell, that figure doesn't even include a single static light, which would make the theoretical output impossible to see anyway. 🙂

I think this is the favorite BS marketing tactic of 3D console makers (except Nintendo; they've actually given real-world performance estimates on their spec sheets) - give your vertex processing capablility and don't say anything about fill rate, giving a big impressive number that means nothing by itself.

Actually, vertex processing numbers are more accurate than triangle numbers, since the number of triangles can vary even with the same number of vertices.

I still love how Sega UNDER-hyped the Dreamcast's polygon performance at something like 2.5 million polys per second. Then a few months after the consoles release games were pushing 3 million and eventually a couple hit 3.25 million. PS2 (at least the game for the first year and a half) could only push about 3 million polys to the screen. I think by now they may have gotten as far as 4.5-5 million. I can't say anything about Xbox or GC since I haven't kept up with their info (or any other for that matter.)

Well, the SH-4 can in theory calculate around ~10 million polys per second, and the PVR2DC's setup engine can do around ~7 million per second, but in the real world the SH-4 isn't very efficient. Nintendo's doing the same thing with the GameCube - 6 million per second is not what real games have been doing on GCN... Rogue Leader pushes around 10 million and Rebel Strike surely more.

Oh, and official PS2 numbers have it that quite a few games are over the 10M mark.

But Xbox wins - ERP over at Beyond3D says his engine was capable of around 30M/sec. Gods, that guy did so many performance tests for us... I'm surprised he managed to avoid breaking NDA.

 

[it290]

s'more Sony news....

Nobody says it's possible to draw that many.

The 75 million per second figure is for raw computation only. Hell, that figure doesn't even include a single static light, which would make the theoretical output impossible to see anyway.

That's not entirely true... since the figures are for unlit polygons, you could display them by drawing them in single colors only, you don't need a light to do it. I know the figure is supposed to be for computation, but the term 'peak drawing capacity' certainly implies drawing the polygons; it should have been stated otherwise if that was not the case.

So, Sony says the PlayStation2 can draw up to 20Million polygons per second, Microsoft says their Xbox can move 125Million polygons per second, and Sony is "hyping-up" their system? Especially considering that you state that no game has come close to the 20Million pps figure.

AM2 has been able to go over 10Million pps with Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution, on PlayStation2, which is an extremely complex hardware to develop for, I believe that Dead or Alive 3 dislpays the same quantity of polygons per second (probably even more), and on a standard DirectX8.1 platform.

Okay, you're proving my point. Sony says 20 million POLYGONS, MS says 125 million VERTICES, I don't know what the figures are for how many vertices have actually been output on MS's console, but you just stated yourself that games have only been able to reach roughly HALF of Sony's figure. You wouldn't consider it hype to list figures for your console which have not been achieved several years after its release? (and right now is probably the peak; it's debatable if much more performance will be gained out of the PS2 in the next couple years.) And don't give me that 'extremely complex hardware ' crap- if a manufacturer makes their console harder to get peak performance out of, that should count against them, not be weighed as a point in their favor.

 

[cww80]

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Originally posted by Tagrineth@Nov 9, 2003 @ 10:20 AM

Not defending Microsoft or anything here, but IIRC that original 300 million claim was vertices, not polygons.

http://xbox.ign.com/articles/076/076378p1.html?fromint=1

 

[cww80]

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I think by now they may have gotten as far as 4.5-5 million.

Jak and Daxter, (a 2nd generation PS2 title) pushes over 10Million...

 

[Cloud121]

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VF4 and VF Evolution push upwards to 15 million. I might've even read close to 20 million.

 

[gameboy900]

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Yes yes yes...I probably should have mentioned my 4.5-5 million numbers were for games that were released in the first 6-8 months of the console (as a comparison to the DC directly) and not what current games years later achieve.

 

[Alexvrb]

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DC pushed more than that in later times. Its hard to actually say how many polys because the PVR2 does deferred rendering. Even today the quality produced by the system is pretty good on a lot of its titles.

Tagrineth: You still didn't answer my question. Which is more powerful, the Gekko or the XCPU? If the Xbox's CPU is underpowered, what does that make the GCN's CPU?

BTW, the EE only pushes ~450 MIPS, but a whopping 6.2 GFLOPS. Still, if you want to talk about unbalanced, the Xbox may not have a super-fast CPU, but as others have mentioned that isn't as important for a gaming rig. The PS2 on the other hand, is unbalanced the other way around. It needed a more powerful video chip, and/or more VRAM/better compression. The Gamecube strikes a good balance and it is a good system. But I couldn't let you pin the Xbox as having weak hardware compared to GCN.

 

[Des-ROW]

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Originally posted by gameboy900@Nov 9, 2003 @ 06:22 PM

I think by now they may have gotten as far as 4.5-5 million.

Yes yes yes...I probably should have mentioned my 4.5-5 million numbers were for games that were released in the first 6-8 months of the console (as a comparison to the DC directly) and not what current games years later achieve.

Hmm... sure...

 

[gameboy900]

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Will you stop nitpicking every little tiny detail already. I made a mistake for not mentioning what time frame I was talking about. Just get over it already.

 

[Tagrineth]

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Originally posted by it290@Nov 9, 2003 @ 07:11 PM

That's not entirely true... since the figures are for unlit polygons, you could display them by drawing them in single colors only, you don't need a light to do it. I know the figure is supposed to be for computation, but the term 'peak drawing capacity' certainly implies drawing the polygons; it should have been stated otherwise if that was not the case.

I was being facetious with the 'no light' comment. =)

And no, it was raw computing power, not actual drawing power. "Fan"sites like IGN like to restate things so people can understand better - most people don't equate 'raw computing power' to what they see on the screen. Read early Sony press releases.

VF4 and VF Evolution push upwards to 15 million. I might've even read close to 20 million.

Really? Wow, that's amazing, I've never heard that.

Actually it's closer to 7-10 million.

DC pushed more than that in later times. Its hard to actually say how many polys because the PVR2 does deferred rendering. Even today the quality produced by the system is pretty good on a lot of its titles.

PowerVR's architecture eliminates pixel overdraw. You're still transforming all the polys in the scene.

Tagrineth: You still didn't answer my question. Which is more powerful, the Gekko or the XCPU? If the Xbox's CPU is underpowered, what does that make the GCN's CPU?

I meant Xbox's CPU was underpowered compared to the rest of the system. GCN's CPU is very well balanced, and works well with Flipper (rather than being an accessory like XCPU).

I haven't seen any real performance comparisons with optimisations, but I'd guess with full SSE vs. full paired computation it's a close race... though keep in mind paired singles can be used more often than SSE optimisations.

Will you stop nitpicking every little tiny detail already. I made a mistake for not mentioning what time frame I was talking about. Just get over it already.

Des-ROW showed that you did give a time frame, "by now" which generally means by NOW, not by two years ago.

 

[gameboy900]

s'more Sony news....

And after others pointed it out for the first post, I replied and corrected myself. Even after that she wouldn't drop it and had to get all "look at the me I'm the god of knowledge and all perfect" with her comment.