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In a recent interview with bit-tech.net, ATI developer liaison, Huddy, spoke out, claiming the Xbox 360 would have the edge over the PlayStation 3 thanks to the ATI Xenos chipset used in the 360.
On paper the RSX inside the PlayStation 3 is 50MHz faster than the Xenos, but this does not tell the whole story. Huddy claims that the unified shader architecture of the Xenos will give Xbox 360 a graphical edge over the PlayStation 3.
“That mere 10 per cent clock speed that RSX has on Xenos is easily countered by the unified shader architecture that we’ve implemented,” claimed Huddy. “Rather than separate pixel and vertex pipelines, we’ve created a single unified pipeline that can do both.“
“Providing developers throw instructions at our architecture in the right way, Xenos can run at 100 per cent efficiency all the time, rather than having some pipeline instructions waiting for others,” said Huddy. “For comparison, most high-end PC chips run at 50-60% typical efficiency. The super cool point is that ‘in the right way’ just means ‘give us plenty of work to do’. The hardware manages itself.“
Claims of 100% efficiency are very bold and NVIDIA has already played down the role of unified shader architecture, believing that this is not the route to improved graphical performance.
Huddy believes that Nvidia know their part is less powerful and therefore what they say is just marketing talk.
“This time around, they don’t have the architecture and we do, so they have to knock it and say it isn’t worthwhile,” he said. “But in the future, they’ll market themselves out of this corner, claiming that they’ve cracked how to do it best. But RSX isn’t unified, and this is why I think PS3 will almost certainly be slower and less powerful.“
If this interview is to be believed the power of the Xbox 360 may have been underestimated, but until developers get their hands on final hardware it will be hard to know which console has the edge.
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