A 7800GT would match it on the nVidia side.
But go with the 7900 GT. Cheaper than XBOX 360 and much faster!
#1, the question that started this thread is pointless. A console uses a GPU completely different (e.g. draw calls on the Xbox 360 are way faster through the API than in DX9 because it is fixed hardware).
#2 the Xbox 360 GPU (Xenos) is much faster in most situations than a 7800GT!
"Most" being the key operative because Xenos only as 16 Texture Management Units @ 500MHz so the 7800 would do better on standard PC DX9 games with heavy texturing; but future looking at Shader Heavy SM3.0 style code Xenos is hands down much faster. Xenos is just a different chip--very console centric. It is NOT a PC chip. Check my post history, I did a lengthy post on how the Xbox 360 as a total design is targetted to alievate a number of PC bottlenecks. In the real world it is not a matter of the NV/ATI game of "My number is bigger than yours" but alieviating the choke points. So we can go down the line benchmark by benchmark, but they tell us little about (a) architectural effeciency and (b) features.
On Architecture, the 360 is way more effecient with unified shaders + eDRAM. The eDRAM means memory & fillrate are NEVER a bottleneck (well, if they are tiling and doing an early Z pass... something some early games did not do). On the shaders, long story short there is never a perfect balance between PS and VS. Although a superscalar design, dependancy means one waits on the other frequently. And games, game scenes, and even render phases on a single frame go from one extreme to the other. Unified Shaders mean smarter use of resources. e.g. Vertex Shaders tend to be very bursty--so dedicating all 48ALUs to vertex work means you can quickly push through it.
So on face value Xenos has more floating point performance than a 7800GTX 256MB (240GFLOPs to 199GFLOPs) but less than the 512MB version (255GFLOPs), Xenos is more effecient. ATI stated their own designs are only 50-70% effecient in regards to Shader utilization; Xenos closer to 95%. Other archectural advantages is the Xbox CPU can write directly to the GPU at an effective bandwidth of 20GB/s without touching the FSB or the Memory. So a lot of the effects you could do in DX10 Geometry Shaders can be done on the Xbox, but not a PC (PC CPUs have limited CPU-GPU bandwidth and x86 chips have poor floating performace; Xenon has better bandwidth and it can do 3B dotproducts per second per core with the beefy Vector units and has D3D compression for vertex data). And as we all know ATI's chips kill NV's chips in SM3.0. Xenos is not quite as good as the X1900XTX, but it is close (e.g. batch size is 64 in Xenos, 48 in the X1900).
As for Features, Xenos has some nice perks. Unified Shaders also means you can do vertex shader effects not really possible on a chip with 6-8 Vertex Shaders with weak texturing abilities. All 48 of Xenos' shaders can do VS tasks and have access to the Texture Units. From a superficial view features make it VERY hard to compare numbers 1-to-1. e.g. On the PC you need a lot of memory bandwidth to do FP16 blending for HDR. The 360 has a native FP10 blending format that allows HDR effects with no penalty (this is why almost every Xbox game has HDR). Ditto on AA which is a minor performance hit.
So we can say, "Hey, the PC GPU has more X, Y, Z" but the console does not necessarily need such if it has features that "cheat" and do intensive tasks for free.
Basically without a CONTEXT you cannot really say what is faster, etc. All we know right now is MS got dev kits out late and most games have been rushed and devs have struggled with the CPU (in order, small cache, weak branching). That said a number of titles have looked very good (PGR3, CoD2, Kameo, Fight Night, Oblivion, Ghost Recon).
Only the future will tell us how good it is--basically how many devs build Xbox specific games to use the hardware. As long as pubs keep putting PC ported titles that are texture heavy it will never stretch its legs. e.g. The X1900 is frequently no faster than the X1800 because games are NOT using the extra shaders. Ditto Xenos. Until games become shader heavy AND leverage SM3.0 features Xenos will keep performing like a 16 pipe (or even 8ROP!) GPU!
Anyhow, as others have said, I find it "surprising" someone would say the 7800
GT and not the 7800GTX. The only thing the GT has an advantage at is TMUs and it gets spanked in shader performance, SM3.0, memory bandwidthl, features (I didn't even mention the HOS and hardware tesselation support Xenos has), and so forth.
#3, the 7900GT was over $300 the last time I checked. The Xbox 360 is $299 in the states. How you claim it is cheaper/faster I am not sure...
The 7900GTX of course blows it away.
Is this the same 7900GTX that gets creamed in heavy dynamic branching tasks due to poor SM3.0?
But I'm not sure on what ATI chip is exactly in there, just going off common sense here.
Ahhh.... well, common sense is wrong. If you read up on Xenos (check out Beyond3d.com... article there called "Demistifying Xenos" on the front page) you will see that it is aimed at resolving a number of bottlenecks and is an elegent Console design. It is not meant to be a PC solution, some comparisons are difficult, but in the console world Xenos would cream a 7800GTX or X1800XT put into a console.
Funny at your comments considering you don't know what is in it! :lol: Almost like saying:
"A 3.2GHz P4 is faster than an Athlon64 at 2.0GHz... common sense says so". Or "2 cores is better than 1". Common sense does not tell us much about computers to be quite honest.
It's not apples to apples so it's possible to compare, but IMHO if you took the Xbox360 GPU and made a videocard out of it it'd be closer to an X1900 than a 7900.
Thanks Cleeve. Very hard to compare as you say, a lot comes down to game design in regards to what is better. There are real reasons why a game like D3 would fly on NV but a lot of DX9 games did better on ATI GPUs. The minor differences between the PC GPUs leads to pretty big differences at times... Xenos is completely divergent.
The best we can do is talk about architecture and how it aids development and cleans up bottlenecks. Only developers know how that impacts the final product; and truly the games--the end product--will be the FINAL authority about how good the hardware is. And the fact is most good games are decided by
- Dev skill
- Dev time
- Dev budget/staff size
- Art direction/quality
- Matching of technologies with art
This is why the GCN has RE4 and Metroid, the PS2 Shadow of the Collossus, GT4, etc. The Xbox, technically, was heads and shoulders above the GCN and PS2, yet the "weaker" 2 had some great looking games.
Hardware is only 1 part of the equation.
Actually, if memory serves the original Xbox was a Celeron, not a P3 (!).
I'm gonna stick by my original specs... I believe it was a full blown P3.
Hybrid technically
😉 You are both right/wrong
😀 It had a smaller cache and therefore was not a fullblown P3, but it had a number of P3 features. It was a Coppermine core with less cache. It has been so long, but I know it was a hybrid P3/Celeron. Google can resolve this one if we must >
Edit: Here we got =>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox#Hardware
32 kB L1 cache. 128 kB L2 Advanced Transfer Cache (256-bit). Same size as Celeron, but 8-way associative like Pentium III E.
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