Call of Duty 4: Larger burden on Sony PS3 than Xbox 360
By: Daniel Chubb | July 5, 2008
Games like Call of Duty 4 run at a framerate of 60 frames per second on both systems. But Call of Duty 4 is a game that experienced technical problems with various bottlenecks due to the varying levels of action that occur on the screen. The game was originally designed to run at 60 frames per second at 720p, but it caused drops in the framerate.
The proof of this is the fact that Call of Duty 4 runs at a resolution of only 640p on both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. This may be “equal” in terms of what is displayed on the screen, but the FACT is that Call of Duty 4 is putting a much larger burden on the PS3 than it is the Xbox 360.
Confirmation of this can be seen in the large number of games that “run smoothly at 60 frames per second on the Xbox 360, but struggle to run at 30 frames per second on the Playstation 3.” That was a quote from Gamespot.
It’s simple math: The Xbox 360 can display approximately 500,000,000 polygons per second, compared to 275,000,000 polygons per second for the Playstation 3.
Multi-platform games use what is called a “Lowest Common Denominator” form of programming.
Basically, what this means is the developers start out by saying to themselves, “We need to develop a game for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3.”
Then, the developers put limits on how many polygons they are going to put on the screen, and they determine what framerate the game will run at as a result of that number.
When the developers multiply the number of polygons displayed on the screen by the number of frames being displayed each second, they examine what that number is. Multi-platform games can NEVER display more than 275,000,000 polygons per second, or else they can’t be released for the Playstation 3, since the PS3 cannot display more than 275,000,000 polygons per second.
As a result, developers are often conservative with the number of polygons being displayed with multi-platform games, especially with the poor reputation of inconsistent framerates that the Playstation 3 has acquired over time.
It basically comes down to these THREE factors:
If a multi-platform game running at 30 frames per second on the Playstation 3 uses 250,000,000 polygons or less, it gives the developers the ability to allow the Xbox 360 version to run at 60 frames per second, since 500,000,000 is double the number of 250,000,000.
If a multi-platform game running at 30 frames per second on the Playstation 3 uses over 250,000,000 polygons per second, it means the Xbox 360 version is also forced to run at only 30 frames per second. This is an unfortunate situation, because it means the Playstation 3 will be using 90-100% of its power by displaying somewhere between 250,000,000 to 275,000,000 polygons per second, while the Xbox 360 will only be using 60% of its power, since the Xbox 360 has so much more polygon power.
If a multi-platform game is intended to run at 60 frames per second on the Playstation 3, the Xbox 360 version will also run at 60 frames per second. The Playstation 3 version will be limited to 275,000,000 polygons per second. The Xbox 360 will also be limited to 275,000,000 polygons per second, due to the fact that 275,000,000 is the Lowest Common Denominator. This is unfortunate, because it means the Playstation 3 version will be using between 90% to 100% of the systems power, while the Xbox 360 will be using only 60% of the systems power. Call of Duty 4 is an excellent example of this situation.
The Playstation 3 only transfers data at a rate of 54MB per second as a Blu-ray player being used for movies. When it comes to gaming, there are hardware “bottlenecks” that the Playstation 3 faces, which allows the PS3 to transfer data at a rate of only 9MB per second. The Xbox 360 transfers data at a rate of 16MB per second.
The Official Playstation Magazine wrote an article about the longer load times of PS3 games shortly after the Playstation 3 was launched. The only time the PS3 does not have to deal with either noticeably or significantly longer load times is when the game is placed on the PS3 hard drive. Sadly, it often takes over TWENTY long minutes to write the game onto the PS3 hard drive. Even when a PS3 game is written onto a hard drive, the load times between Xbox 360 games and PS3 games is virtually identical, as we saw in Devil May Cry 4 and Grand Theft Auto 4.
Gamespot has conducted a Graphics Comparison between the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 each year since the Playstation 3 has been available. Xbox 360 has been declared the winner of the Graphics Comparison each of the three years: 2006, 2007, 2008.
2008 shows that the gap in performance continues to get bigger, in favor of the Xbox 360. Here is the hyperlink that shows the newest comparison–one the Xbox 360 easily defeats the Playstation.
Also, the Xbox 360 uses 10MB of eDRAM. This new form of RAM technology is something that even Windows Vista-based PCs do not yet take advantage of. The next release of Direct-X on the PC will start to take advantage of eDRAM technology for gaming, but it still hasn’t happened yet.
This just goes to show you how incredibly far ahead of its time the Xbox 360 Unified-Shader GPU/Multi-Core CPU design is.
Thanks to Mike Zoran
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Call of Duty 4 also runs at 60FPS with full AA on PS3: Same as 360
ok, couple of things u need to do:
1. research
2. buy a ps3
3. play ps3 exclusives like mgs4
4. research
5. visit other sites other than gamespot
6. did i already mention research??
The main mistake of the author is his/her “simple” math.
Author forgot that XBox 360 is capable to display half a billion poligons per secon using ALL ITS 48 universal pixel shaders. That means that if someone deside to putput all those pixels on a screen he would have no GPU power left for other tasks like texturizing, shaders effects (like moire, volumetric smoke, parictles), anizotropic filtering etc. Yes, RSX is capable to display only 350 (not 250) million polygons per second but it hasn’t unified archetecture like Xenos has. It means that RSX is actually capable to output that number of polygons, and still has additional shader pipelines for shader effects, textures etc because RSX has specific pipelines for different tasks of 3D rendering .
Thus, 500 000 of Xenos’s polygons is a synthetic number, that reflects only theoretical maximum power of Xenos, that is not accessible in real life. Substituting from this number the power needed to provide other 3D rendering tasks, we will get a much smaller number…
It is simple math ppl
This article actually made me stupider as I read it. I think that means your disease is communicable.
this is the lamest article I have ever read. The numbers you use, the specs, where in the blue hell did you get this #’s from?. Why dont you compare Gt5: Prologue to Forza or PGR, your precious box cant save you there. Explain Metal Gear Solid 4, Uncharted, hell even Ratchet and Clank. Explain the second generaton titles that are coming out on PS3 with the ones that came out for your box. Compare Killzone and Uncahrted with Gear of War and…ahh….oh yea your 640p”nexGen” Halo experience. Its funny how you xbots praise GearsOfWar as your savior, yet its not even a first party title. Microsoft Studios cant even do what Epic is doing with the box. Lol
How come Grand Theft Auto 4 streams better on PS3Oh and if your going to use numbers to make comparisions, the be aware that the PS3 will actually win:
More preprocessing power 204 GFLOPS single precision float, 15 GFLOPS double precision, the PS3 has 256 MB of Rambus XDR DRAM, clocked at CPU die speed(XDR)which clocks at 650MHZ, True 1080P out put(not upscaled), HDMI 1.3, BluTooth EDR 2.0, 6 3.2 GHz cores, 1 3.2 GHz PPU and 1 3.2 SPU for the OS and security,512 total memory(256mbx2), user-friendly upgradeable HDD, integrated Wi-Fi. Oh and it doesn’t require brick size A/C Adapter, or Strap-on HD DVD drive.
“Its funny how you xbots praise GearsOfWar as your savior”
whats even funnier is that gears of war creaters Midway, they almost made multiplatform title Unreal Tournament 3 – which is exactly same graphics as GOW if not better!
This article is full of fanboyism and false info. BTW it contains a lack of links and texts to proof the article claimings
stuffs mention in the article is OLD as hell and proven BS a long time ago
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/top-developers-slam-ps3-broken-allegations
Wow, PS3 fanboys are kinda sensitive! Anyways, the article doesn’t feel too authentic. All that I have experienced so far points to PS3 being a powerhouse (especially MGS4). However, the truth of the matter is that some third party common games DO look better on the 360 (i’ll take Madden for the 360 anyday). But that’s only cause developers are yet to learn to take full advantage of the cell (i’ll blame SONY for this one… juding from what i have read so far, the SONY dev kits are not exactly joy to work on).
And to the guy comparing GOW and Resistance, have you really played these two games? I really doubt it, mebbe you have played one of them tops. Anyways, Resistance is way behind GOW in terms of overall game play (if I owned only a 360, I wouldn’t really miss Resistance…and surely not Killzone). MGS4 is totally a different story… the 360 surely cannot pull off MGS4 with its MASSIVE content (kudos to Kojima). But then the 360 has HALO, which is right up there as one of the most exciting games ever to grace the console world. Final score, tie!
And please, stop the fanboyism… you are misleading people just to make two super-rich corporates richer!
Hello Daniel,
There are number of presumptions, inaccuracies, and false statements in your article.
1. Call of Duty 4 is rendered at 600p (1024by600) at 60fps on both consoles, not 640p. The framerate is also relatively solid on both the PS3 and Xbox 360, but does fluctuate on both.
It’s no secret the resolution was dropped to achieve 60fps at the graphical fidelity Infinity Ward were aiming for http://www.ripten.com/2007/11/22/infinity-ward-asked-about-cod4-sub-hd-resolution/.
There are few signs that the PS3 is the “weakest link” at Infinity Ward, though it can be presumed that they had more trouble on this platform due to a number of reasons – mainly that it’s harder to “get into” the system due to Cell and Split Memory.
2. “p” does not stand for Polygons, but for pixels – the resolution a console can render at has little to do with how many polygons it can render (what makes up objects and characters in the game world), though of course as consoles increase in power the resolution they produce will grow as will the number of polygons. Both consoles are pushing many polygons, and due to Cell, it has been reported that the PS3 may be able to push just a few more.
3. You are making a hell of a lot of assumptions (when translating “polygons” into “pixels”) based on a 600p (you say 640p) resolution on COD4 – presuming the PS3 is the weaker console….and then presuming that the PS3 can only render 720p at 30fps, as opposed to the Xbox 360 720p at 60fps.
First off, you’re adding naughts, this would be 27,648,000 pps (approx 27.5million) and 55,296,000 pps (approx 55million) respectively – not 275million and 550million respectively.
Secondly, aren’t you ignoring 720p games running at 60fps on the PS3? Like Burnout Paradise? Ninja Gaiden Sigma? Devil May Cry 4? How about higher than 720p games that run at 60fps? Like Virtua Fighter 5 (1024by1024), GT5p (1280by1080), NBA07/08 (1920by1080), Super Stardust HD (1280by1080)…the list goes on.
That means the PS3 can render the maximum 1080p at 60fps…that is 124,416,000 (or approx 125million pixels). Your evidence and premise fail badly to reach any conclusive conclusion.
Due to these major errors – all of your inferences are false.
4. I won’t go into details but your reports on Blu-ray read times is also false, perhaps misled by Mike Zoran. Moreover, the advantage of a HDD needn’t be met with a large install – Uncharted Drakes Fortune performs no install, but caches through the PS3’s HDD to achieve zero loading during the game.
5. The PS2 had eDRAM. And you’ve failed to make a point of what its actual advantage is. Sounds as bad as “The PS3 has Teh Cell, that means it’s the bestest”. Xenon’s eDRAM is meant to allow for “free anti-aliasing” – which so far has not proved itself. Moreover, to get through this 10mb of eDRAM means you have to perform tiling…and to tile through this eDRAM your resolution has to be lower than 720p.
I would be happy to publish my rebuttal of your article, but I will give you time to respond – or more intelligently, to pull your article completely.