Xbox 360 and PS3

This is at least what they seem to indicate in an article over at Anandtech, which was discussing the performance of the next generation of game consoles. What makes the article even more interesting is that the article was retracted as soon as it went online, which perhaps indicates that Anandtech received one or two angry letters/phone calls. The article can be found at Google Groups however and it’s not hard to get why some multinational companies may have reacted over the content. Anandtech has via conversations with game developers been able to get an overview of the processors performance and it ain’t pretty.

It seems both Microsoft and Sony have gone for multithreading a bit too early and sacrificed a lot of singlethread-performance, which we all know is the only thing that counts with today’s games. This will of course change as time progresses, but not even the game developers believe this will happen for another 3-5 years.

Both Xbox 360’s Xenon CPU and PS3’s Cell CPU seem to have more than a few weaknesses when it comes to singlethread-performance. Among others Xenon seems to be just about twice as powerful as the 733MHz processor that was used with the old Xbox, when singlethreading. This is a far from positive judgement, but Cell gets it share of the cuts as well since it focuses a lot on multithreading. The fact is more or less all game developers prefer Xenon over Cell.

It seems both consoles will do well though as they both have very good graphic circuits that hopefully will even things out. But those who claim consoles will take over the gaming from the PC are way off, according to Anandtech.

“While they will bring better quality games to market and will be better than their predecessors, it doesn’t look like they will be the end of PC gaming any more than the Xbox and PS2 were when they were launched. The two markets will continue to coexist, with consoles being much easier to deal with, and PCs offering some performance-derived advantages.”

We don’t know for sure why the article was removed from Anandtech and whether it will be put back online again. But it seems they hit more than a few tender spots and it’s going to be interesting to see what follows.

Source: Slashdot

:: Read the entire article at Google Groups