Dre
04-23-2002, 01:12 PM
Hi everyone, well.. one of my buddies is a hardcore PC gamer and non-believer in the Xbox. I finally took it upon myself to sift through the internet and do a comparaison of top-end PC and Xbox. I sent him this in an email, but thought a couple of you might like to see the info I gathered so here's his email to me first, and then my reply
-----------------------
The max res. may be 1920x1080 but by no means does this mean the games will run at that level. The Xbox's 750mghz + geforce 3 card will NOT be able to handle these resolutions. Show me that the Xbox can smoothly (100 fps +) run games at that res. and I will suck Bill Gates' pen*s.
A PC/console's max resolution tells nothing about performance. If your graph card/monitor can handle 1600+1200 it does not mean that it can your pc can actually perform at that level; just like the Xbox. You need some nasty horsepower to back that up. How exactly can the Xbox function at such high resolutions? Does this adapter include 1ghz of CPU and geforce4????????
-----------------------
And here's my response to my somewhat ignorant little friend... :)
Well, dude.. I truly thought you to be more knowledgeable than this ... You need to learn a bit more how computers work :-) hehehe.. just a low-blow..sorry..
First I would like to know why you require 100+ FPS when you can only discern 26-30?
Second, a console is not the same as a computer. Optimization of hardware improves performance beyond whatever you seem to imagine. Knowing EXACTLY which registers to read and write from, exact assembly code instructions, etc. allow for extremely optimized compilers.
If you want a comparaison between different aspects of the systems, I shall give them to you as you seem to enjoy making unfounded and biased claims
(and you know.. its a way to procrastinate studying):
Geforce 4 Ti4600 (the best card out there now right?) can do a whopping 4.8 billion AA samples per second. The GF4 Ti4200 does 4.0 billion AA samples/sec. The NX (lets call that the Xbox chip) also does 4.0 billion AA samples/sec. Memory bandwith is in the 8 GB/sec range for the Geforce4's, and 6.4-8 GB/sec for the GF3's. The NX has a memory bandwith of 6.4 GB/sec.
There is obviously hardware supported fullscreen anti-aliasing on both.
For the rest of the comparaisons, I'll just use the top end Geforce 4 Ti 4600 and Geforce 3 Ti500 (the highest geforce 3 card available) video cards so you can see how they rate:
Core clock: GF4=300 Mhz, GF3=240, NX=250
Peak fill rate (Mega Pixels): GF4=1200, GF3=960, NX=1000
Peak fill rate (Mega Texels): GF4=2400, GF3=1920, NX=2000
Peak fill rate (Mega Texels): GF4=2400, NX=2000
So, as you can see.. the NX chip lies around the middle of the high-end GF4 and high-end GF3. Very capable of holding its own with the GF4's (so far anyways...)
As for processing power.. you have MORE than enough. Its a customed design GAMING ONLY cpu from Intel that runs at 733 MHz. Now, what does the fact that its customed designed have to do with anything you might ask? Well, it comes back to the point I made earlier about assembly instructions. When you design a CPU, you have to give it an instruction set right? Now,
remember a couple of years back when MMX started out and how "cool" everything was if it said "Uses MMX technology" or 3dnow but thats AMD. Anyhoo, MMX is a set of assembly instructions specifically designed for multimedia operations. For the CPU on the Xbox, Intel went one step further and designed a few more Xbox specific instructions to make things even speedier.
As for sound.., well.. Xbox obviously has the advantage over PC. With Dolby digital 5.1 REAL-TIME ENCODING it kicks ass. You might say that the newer sound cards also have this, but they don't really have games supporting true 5.1 (or sounds cards!)yet on PC. I don't think until DVD-ROM's are widely accepted as a standard and games ship on them will this be truly supported in PC games. Its just too big to fit all the information required on a cd. Also, the 5.1 capable cards do not perform real-time encoding of dolby digital 5.1, they simply "support it".. most likely for DVD movies, etc.
So, to answer your question " Does this adapter include 1ghz of CPU and geforce4?". The answer is no. But its extremely close, and because of its specific instruction set it is more than able to perform at settings of which we have spoken at length.
You just need to realize, that right now.. Xbox is completely on par with PC. However, that won't be the case anymore once the newer video cards come out again. I totally know that.. and it sucks, but there are LOTS of kickass games for the Xbox coming that are Xbox exclusive.. so I'll have the best of both worlds.
In case you are wondering, I got most of my info from here:
http://wwww.pcvsconsole.com/features/consoles/
www.nvidia.com
There were also some quick little google searches to see if any other sound cards could perform DD 5.1 (and no.. the Audigy can't even do it :-))
Anyhoo, I guess I should get back to my studying.. hope this cleared things up a bit for you!
Lates,
Dre
-----------------------
The max res. may be 1920x1080 but by no means does this mean the games will run at that level. The Xbox's 750mghz + geforce 3 card will NOT be able to handle these resolutions. Show me that the Xbox can smoothly (100 fps +) run games at that res. and I will suck Bill Gates' pen*s.
A PC/console's max resolution tells nothing about performance. If your graph card/monitor can handle 1600+1200 it does not mean that it can your pc can actually perform at that level; just like the Xbox. You need some nasty horsepower to back that up. How exactly can the Xbox function at such high resolutions? Does this adapter include 1ghz of CPU and geforce4????????
-----------------------
And here's my response to my somewhat ignorant little friend... :)
Well, dude.. I truly thought you to be more knowledgeable than this ... You need to learn a bit more how computers work :-) hehehe.. just a low-blow..sorry..
First I would like to know why you require 100+ FPS when you can only discern 26-30?
Second, a console is not the same as a computer. Optimization of hardware improves performance beyond whatever you seem to imagine. Knowing EXACTLY which registers to read and write from, exact assembly code instructions, etc. allow for extremely optimized compilers.
If you want a comparaison between different aspects of the systems, I shall give them to you as you seem to enjoy making unfounded and biased claims
(and you know.. its a way to procrastinate studying):
Geforce 4 Ti4600 (the best card out there now right?) can do a whopping 4.8 billion AA samples per second. The GF4 Ti4200 does 4.0 billion AA samples/sec. The NX (lets call that the Xbox chip) also does 4.0 billion AA samples/sec. Memory bandwith is in the 8 GB/sec range for the Geforce4's, and 6.4-8 GB/sec for the GF3's. The NX has a memory bandwith of 6.4 GB/sec.
There is obviously hardware supported fullscreen anti-aliasing on both.
For the rest of the comparaisons, I'll just use the top end Geforce 4 Ti 4600 and Geforce 3 Ti500 (the highest geforce 3 card available) video cards so you can see how they rate:
Core clock: GF4=300 Mhz, GF3=240, NX=250
Peak fill rate (Mega Pixels): GF4=1200, GF3=960, NX=1000
Peak fill rate (Mega Texels): GF4=2400, GF3=1920, NX=2000
Peak fill rate (Mega Texels): GF4=2400, NX=2000
So, as you can see.. the NX chip lies around the middle of the high-end GF4 and high-end GF3. Very capable of holding its own with the GF4's (so far anyways...)
As for processing power.. you have MORE than enough. Its a customed design GAMING ONLY cpu from Intel that runs at 733 MHz. Now, what does the fact that its customed designed have to do with anything you might ask? Well, it comes back to the point I made earlier about assembly instructions. When you design a CPU, you have to give it an instruction set right? Now,
remember a couple of years back when MMX started out and how "cool" everything was if it said "Uses MMX technology" or 3dnow but thats AMD. Anyhoo, MMX is a set of assembly instructions specifically designed for multimedia operations. For the CPU on the Xbox, Intel went one step further and designed a few more Xbox specific instructions to make things even speedier.
As for sound.., well.. Xbox obviously has the advantage over PC. With Dolby digital 5.1 REAL-TIME ENCODING it kicks ass. You might say that the newer sound cards also have this, but they don't really have games supporting true 5.1 (or sounds cards!)yet on PC. I don't think until DVD-ROM's are widely accepted as a standard and games ship on them will this be truly supported in PC games. Its just too big to fit all the information required on a cd. Also, the 5.1 capable cards do not perform real-time encoding of dolby digital 5.1, they simply "support it".. most likely for DVD movies, etc.
So, to answer your question " Does this adapter include 1ghz of CPU and geforce4?". The answer is no. But its extremely close, and because of its specific instruction set it is more than able to perform at settings of which we have spoken at length.
You just need to realize, that right now.. Xbox is completely on par with PC. However, that won't be the case anymore once the newer video cards come out again. I totally know that.. and it sucks, but there are LOTS of kickass games for the Xbox coming that are Xbox exclusive.. so I'll have the best of both worlds.
In case you are wondering, I got most of my info from here:
http://wwww.pcvsconsole.com/features/consoles/
www.nvidia.com
There were also some quick little google searches to see if any other sound cards could perform DD 5.1 (and no.. the Audigy can't even do it :-))
Anyhoo, I guess I should get back to my studying.. hope this cleared things up a bit for you!
Lates,
Dre