360 performance at $700 pc price point?

[Ken Chin]

Vista, AMD, UT3, and Crysis. Is it possible to obtain 360 performance at a budget pc price? As for a monitor, I will use one of my existing (17" crt, philips 30" ws tube, optoma hd72, or infocus 4805). So far the cheapest i've been able to come up with is a dell system with a few add ons.


dell e521 (vista home basic/160hdd/amd dc 3800/2gb/305w psu) $549
bfg 7600 gt 256mb $100
belkin n52 gamepad $29
g5 mouse $42
total $720

Thanks in advance!

[DrCrawn]

Buy off ebay and assemble your own PC, and it will be a lot cheaper. The deals on the video cards especially are insane. I've sold and bought numerous used video cards from ebay with no problems. I wouldn't get anything less than a 7900gt if I were you...the 7600 won't cut it if you want 360 like performance.

[taz291819]

For Crysis, I wouldn't get anything short of a X2800 or 8800 (for DX10).

You could probably do it for ~$1100. You're going to want 2GB of Ram and a Core2Duo for Crysis. (Just speculation)

[Ken Chin]

Ebay is great for used. As for new components I tend to follow newegg.com and some of the other discount sites. Being somewhat of a noob, I kinda want to stick to a pre-built system and then drop in a graphics card, maybe upgrade a psu, or add a 2nd hdd. I guess I could try to build a system from the ground up but I'm afraid i'll mess something up.

Regard Crysis, do you think an ati 1950 pro 256mb will work better? Could it provide the eye candy and comparable frame rates as a 360 reference game (GOW or RB6)?

[HeadRusch]

You can do a 360 for $800 if you make sure not to raise your resolution above 720p.

Core 2 duo, 2 gigs of ram, a MB and whatever is leftover for a videocard....8800GTS if you can afford it.

Keep the resolution locked to 1280x720 or 1366x768 and thats basically as good as the 360 can get.

[Ken Chin]

Thanks Headrush! 720p performance is all I need. I decided on the diy approach and came up with some pretty good stuff. To keep the price down i'll stick with xp versus vista for now. Any changes you think I should make? Any better ddr2 deals out there? Thanks!

amd dc 3800 $109
x1950 pro 256mb $161
n52 gamepad $30
g5 mouse $30
SAMSUNG 18X DVD $30
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB $80
Antec SONATA II case with 450w psu $66
MSI K9N Neo-F nForce 550 MCP ATX Motherboard $78
A-Data 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2-800MHz PC2-6400 $175
total $759

[HeadRusch]

You're golden with that setup, but make sure you shop around for the best bang for the buck.

There is a bell curve in every computer component that you have to look at, where is the best bang for your buck. In the case of processors, the sweet spot is usually around $200 bucks...that means, for $200 you can usually get yourself a processor that gives you the most performance per dollar. If you buy a processor that costs significantly less, you lose a disproportionate amount of performance. Same thing in the other direction, if you spend more than $200 the returns are usually less....

Note this isn't a law, its just usually for $200 you can get something thats still really good, not bleeding edge but not yesterdays-news either.

The X1950 is a good middle of the road 720p choice for sure, but its not a DX10 board so keep that in mind.

If you can bump that figure up to $1000 I'd consider a slightly ooomphier videocard and maybe whatever processor $200 buys you. Also, consider the overclockability of your motherboard choice....since its free performance just waiting to be tapped.

I haven't bought a non-oveclockable processor since my Pentium Pro 200 (that went to 210Mhz!)

See here how the 8800GTS at $300 destroys a high-end x1950Pro Overclocked card.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/02/12/the_amd_squeeze/page5.html

This card will buy you futureproofing even at 1280x720, is all.....the X1950 is a good card for today...but always try to buy for tomorrow if you can afford to.

[Fox5]

Build your own PC plus overclocking might.
Remember, most xbox 360 games run sub 720p resolution, whereas the standard pc resolution is 1280x1024, so yes you could do xbox 360 power for that price, but PCs require a higher resolution.

If you're feeling adventurous, go to newegg and put together a system with:
An Athlon X2 3800+
A good overclocking motherboard (to get the cpu performance up to better levels, though the 360's cpu is no speed demon at all, especially as evidenced by games like quake 4)
1GB system ram
X1950pro
And a 60GB harddrive

There ya go, you got yourself a relatively affordable PC that has xbox 360 level performance. (ps3 as well, unless cell turns out some spectacular results)
Remember, the 360's cpu was cheap and follows the typical console paradigm of just having something there to bring the system together, the focus is on the graphics. And honestly, besides being almost dx10 feature level (which ati's x19xx cards can claim to a similar extent, minus unified shaders, plus some other things), the performance of the 360's gpu isn't anything fantastic, it's main ace in the hole is the edram, which very few devs make use of, and it primarily provides free AA. The gpu only has 48 usable shaders, of less complexity than a normal pc gpu, and an x1950pro has 36 pixel shaders and 8 vertex shaders bringing it up to 44 total, plus it's clocked 15% higher, so sort of like having the equivalent of 41.4 ps and 9.2 vs (though not, but if you didn't want to think of clock speed differences). Not to mention a way higher fillrate (for higher resolutions) and faster memory access (excluding edram from the picture).

To price it out for you:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103733
X2 3800+ - $109
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813136015
DFI motherboard (good for overclocking) - $88.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820141187
1GB of ram - $53.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814127271
X1950pro $156.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822145082
80GB 7200RPM harddrive - $42.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811129012
Case with 380W power supply - $69.99
Vista Home Premium
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16832116202
$119.99

And you have something that can match and outdo an xbox 360 for
$641.49, assuming I didn't forget something major, even prior to overclocking. Well, you would need a dvd drive of some sort, so that's another $30, and you'd probably want a bigger harddrive. Of course, the PC is also $241.50 more expensive than an xbox 360 (prior to shipping costs as well) so that shouldn't be too surprising, now trying to make a pc that can match the xbox 360 at a $400 price point....don't think that'd be possible.

Edit:
Just an note, GPU matters more than anything else, so you could do what headrusch said and get a geforce 8800gts, but they're having some vista driver problems right now (no problems at all if you stick with xp, but then you don't get dx10, which means you'll be limiting the games you can play in the future, since it's likely the games will run on lower end hardware, but not on a lower level dx version, or at least that's how it always happened, games still run on a geforce4mx but not on a computer with only dx8), plus gpus evolve faster than anything else so it's not like you can't upgrade later (and sell the current card) if you need more performance.

[uzziah]

no, you can't get the performance for that little now; wait a couple years; the 360 has a triple-core cpu and a rather badass gpu solution, besting most if not all of what's on the market, at least non-SLI

couple years and you won't have a problem getting a pc for that much that will best the 360

but there's more to it than pure hardware performance; with consoles you have specific hardware and a developer can do a lot more to maximizing the hardware potential; for instance, think of why the lousy celeron xbox could still produce something as impressive as ninja gaiden; when it was being outpaced hugely by pc's

there's more to it; especially what games you want to play; there'll always be games only for xbox, ps3, wii, pc

[Fox5]

no, you can't get the performance for that little now; wait a couple years; the 360 has a triple-core cpu and a rather badass gpu solution, besting most if not all of what's on the market, at least non-SLI

couple years and you won't have a problem getting a pc for that much that will best the 360

but there's more to it than pure hardware performance; with consoles you have specific hardware and a developer can do a lot more to maximizing the hardware potential; for instance, think of why the lousy celeron xbox could still produce something as impressive as ninja gaiden; when it was being outpaced hugely by pc's

there's more to it; especially what games you want to play; there'll always be games only for xbox, ps3, wii, pc

The 360 has a triple core cpu, but each core is far less complex than a standard PC cpu = weaker than a standard pc cpu. Additionally, multithreading makes it very difficult to fully utilize the cpu, and ahmdal's law alone guarantees that even 3 cores won't perform twice as good as a single core of that same cpu.
A single 360 core is estimated at the performance of between a 2ghz to 2.4ghz pentium 4 (which is pretty good, considering how much less complex each core is), and even in the pentium 4 line up, there's a dual core 3.6ghz cpu, and pentium 4's/d's are easily eclipsed in performance by athlon x2s, which are in turn eclipsed in performance by core 2 duos.
As further evidence that the 360's cpu isn't all that, there is some correlation between work done, power used, and heat emitted, and yet the 360, despite 3 cores, is under many 90nm dual core processors in power consumption and heat emission.

There is a better correlation between transistor count and performance (though once again, the correlation isn't that great) and an even better correlation between die size (on the same fab process) and performance and the 360's cpu only has 165 million transistors across all 3 cores and a die size of 168 mm^2. An athlon x2 is 233 million transistors and 199 mm^2 for the higher end versions, and 154 million transistors and 183 mm^2, ie, within the same hardware levels.
A Core 2 Duo has 291Million transistors, but isn't produced on the 90nm process so die size can't be compared directly.

There are of course anomolies in this, such as the Pentium D with 376Million transistors but performing far worse than smaller designs, but that's due to a flawed design. While the pentium 4 architecture is capable of reaching ghz higher (people have cooled a pentium 4 to low enough temperatures to reach 8ghz, and even water cooling can reach 5ghz), the architecture generated way too much heat (due to a design flaw and current leakage, rather than actual work done) to be air cooled. The transistor count was spent on trying to get the chip to clock high, but was wasted because of the heat problems.
Probably not good to compare the Intel chips to the Xenon though, just stick to AMD and IBM chips as they're on the same manufacturing process and technology as Xenon, so the only differences will result from differences in the architecture design.
The 970mp, the dual core version of IBM's g5 chips, has 183million transistors and is 153.8 mm^2.
Now, the xenon cpu isn't that radical of a departure from the PC space (unlike cell), it is essentially 3 simpler pc-like cpus in place of 2 more complex cpus. The entire package viewed as a whole is on a hardware level similar to AMD's Athlon X2's and IBM's 970MP (similar cost to produce, similar design philosophy), so it's not going to blow either of these processors away, certainly not the top end models. And most games don't take advantage of multithreading to any significant extent anyway, and if you take 1 athlon or 970 core against a Xenon core...not pretty results for the Xenon core. So yeah, triple core sounds impressive, that's one more core than a dual core! Too bad each individual core is far less complex. Also too bad that any dual core PC cpu at the time of the 360's launch cost nearly as much as the entire 360 for a cheap model.

As for the 'badass' gpu, well I can guarantee you it doesn't 'best' a Geforce 8800, which is fully dx10 unlike the partial solution in the 360.

As for specs on the 360's Xenos gpu...
232 million transistors + 100 million transistor for edram + associated logic (332 total)
Die size: Approximately 174 mm^2 for main gpu, 67 mm^2 for edram (241 mm^2 if you want to add it)
48 shader processors total, unified
500mhz gpu, 22.4GB/s bandwidth to main ram, 256GB/s edram bandwidth (for antialiasing only, I believe 64GB/s otherwise)
4GPixel fillrate

Now, ATI's radeon x19xx cards are on a similar technology level to Xenos, better in some ways worse in others, notably they lack unified shaders.
The R580 (x1900xt, the 1900pro is the same thing but partially defective so subtract 25% off functional hardware for it)
384 Million transistors
352mm^2
48 pixel shader processors, plus 8 vertex shaders, not unified, but who needs unified when you have enough pixel shaders to match xenos, and then left over vertex shaders (unless a game was made with an unusually heavy vertex load, in which case xenos wins, but no games like that have been made yet...officially both actually have about the same polygon performance except that the x1900xt doesn't give up pixel shader performance for it, but the x1900xt doesn't have the memory bandwidth to reach the polygon numbers 360 could)
650Mhz gpu, 46.4GB/s bandwidth to vram, 8GB/s bandwidth to system ram (half up, half down)
10GPixel fillrate

Once again, a similar level of hardware thrown at both, but with a noticeable amount more for the x1900xt than xenos. In terms of processing power both have available, the x1900xt blows away Xenos, with over twice the fillrate and exceeding the 360 in available pixel shader and vertex shader performance simultaneously to what the 360 could do with its shaders dedicated to either function.
Not that the 360 doesn't have advantages, the edram of the 360 attacks a very difficult problem to overcome on the pc, only made possible with the low resolution + closed dev environment of a console. Realistically, the 360 can push more polygons than the pc counterpart (if a dev so wished to dedicate a 360 to doing so), probably come close in achieved fillrate (not while outperforming in polygon count), and outperform with anti aliasing...if a dev custom developed for the 360. Multiplatform games and middleware make that a rare situation, not to mention that edram limits the resolution of the game OR requires a performance hit in order to use.

Ok, conclusively I've proved nothing, but since the 360 has less hardware for its cpu and gpu than can be found in similar PC designs, it's unlikely the 360 will have any sort of major performance advantage over the PC designs, and imo, will probably not exceed the performance of a decent speed athlon x2 and an x1950pro.

[uzziah]

good points indeed; none the less i still contest that the optimization available to developers on a console is an enormous adavantage, as opposed to designing for a myriad of hardware possibilities on a pc, but yeah i overstated the 360's power a bit; the components are definitely stripped down to lower cost


but yeah, pc's are and will totally eclipse this console or any other, and quickly


consoles are always an item of cost and convenience, not greatest power possible



though it's totally off topic, in the end i find it an issue of games; and alas pc games are becoming more rare, at least for the TIME BEING; none the less, strangely enough i'm actually going to sell my 360 as i'm anticipating the next version and also want to catch up on some lovely pc games i've missed

[Fox5]

good points indeed; none the less i still contest that the optimization available to developers on a console is an enormous adavantage, as opposed to designing for a myriad of hardware possibilities on a pc, but yeah i overstated the 360's power a bit; the components are definitely stripped down to lower cost


but yeah, pc's are and will totally eclipse this console or any other, and quickly


consoles are always an item of cost and convenience, not greatest power possible



though it's totally off topic, in the end i find it an issue of games; and alas pc games are becoming more rare, at least for the TIME BEING; none the less, strangely enough i'm actually going to sell my 360 as i'm anticipating the next version and also want to catch up on some lovely pc games i've missed

Well, I wouldn't say the 360's components are quite stripped down. They are a bit simpler in some ways than PC parts, but remember, 360 came out in 2005, and some sacrifices had to be made to get it out that early, but it would compare very favorably to a top end pc at the time. Nvidia had their 7800gt out, which though similar to the chip in the ps3, just isn't as forward thinking as the 360's gpu (or later PC ati gpus). Ati had their x1800xt, but like the 7800gt, it doesn't really come close to matching the 360's shader performance (not that it matters, even now no games come close to maxing out the shader performance of the 7800gt with shaders full of dynamic branching).

And I think you overestimate the level of optimization developers will attempt, it's the era of multiplatform games and middleware, when very few games even implement 360's essentially free anti aliasing, and that's one of its simpler features to implement, I doubt you can count on very many games treating it as anything other than a mid-range gpu with a low to mid-range cpu, depending on if the developer is truly lazy or just not willing to spend millions more just to gain another 30% performance.

PC games aren't really that rare, quite a few of the 360's big games are available on PC afterall. True, some big titles aren't, but the PC has strategy titles and such that will never see the light of day on xbox 360. Oblivion, Condemned, Prey, and Fear all come to mind as major games on both.

[HeadRusch]

The problem is that the console market is huge, the PC Games market isn't as big as it once was...and its shrinking more and more as developers offer their wares on the consoles, and only port to PC if there's an easy path and a shot at some revenue there....its kind of a sad state.

Granted the PC isn't the abandoned platform that some want it to be, I mean we're not we're not like those poor Mac apes yet :D But its definately gone through a phase, we had a high from a few years back when the GPU really took off and DX8 and 9 finally offered us new high quality visuals. But now there's been a bit of a lull.....the games that are coming out seem to be requiring a level of hardware that we haven't even seen yet.

For awhile there you could get a $250 Radeon 9800 Pro and game at high rez with eyecandy on for like YEARS. Now a days if you want to game at even medium rez with the eyecandy turned on, you need a $500 part :P And the next batch of DX10 games promises to be even more brutal...so we're in that "The games need more GPU than is out there right now" phase.

When the 7900's were released we'd kinda gone the other way, where almost all games (before FEAR) could be destroyed by a single 7900GTX at any resolution.

Games take exponentionally longer to create now, but they are over just as quickly once they are released. Instead of a fancy game engine coming out and then companies licensing the tools to make their own warez, as soon as a game engine comes out now its immediately declared "obsolete" and the new version that takes another 4 years to release starts getting worked on. :P

So in between that time, Console releases are coming out fast and furious......and people are spending less and less time gaming on the PC.

[HorrorScope]

Core Duo 6400 $220
NVidia 8600 $275
2 Gig Ram $170
MB $125

Sub Tot: $790

HD $100
Case $50
O/S $100

GT: $1040

[bigpow]

no way!

I've both PC & console, and guess which one I play the most?
Xbox 360 hands down!

I'd probably fire up the PC when Spores hit the stores this year, but other than that - what else to play on PC??

[HeadRusch]

I have to admit the games I am playing through on the PC are all at least 1+ years old......

I havent bought a new PC game since Battlefield 2.

[Fox5]

no way!

I've both PC & console, and guess which one I play the most?
Xbox 360 hands down!

I'd probably fire up the PC when Spores hit the stores this year, but other than that - what else to play on PC??

Strategy games or console ports, that's really about all there is.

[ChrisFB]

I have to admit the games I am playing through on the PC are all at least 1+ years old......

I havent bought a new PC game since Battlefield 2.

Games on the PC seem to last a lot longer. Maybe it's the mods or online community stuff. Honestly, with Half-Life it carried the original multiplayer (which I thought was great) then CS then DoD. BF2 has been carrying a long time too. Personally I don't really want to play through a game and be done with it. I've never really had a lot of PC game churn. I tend to find a select few games and play the living hell out of them until something better comes along.

[HeadRusch]

Yeah, I mean I have my "stable" of games....some I've gone through and moved on with. Examples include the early 3D FPS's...but some I keep forever, just because there was something about them.

I still have Total Annihilation as my sole RTS, its the only one I'll re-load and play...all other FPS's pale in comparison, IMHO....I think I might have Homeworld here somewhere....just as a different type of RTS....but I don tneed every RTS under the sun. Someone once offered me Starcraft, but I really didn't like the whole "tiny buildings, giant creatures" gameplay of WarCraft so.....these ones do it for me.
I'm pretty sure I have that game Moon Project around here somewhere, another RTS I bought but never even tried....I heard it was kinda deep, custimize your own units and build em...but no time to get into another game that will take days to learn.

I have a ton of FPS's...but alot of them I've given away because the technology just got too out dated. Yet some I still keep. Why do I keep the Redneck Rampage, Blood and Shadow Warrior discs? No idea, those games look like super ASS by todays standards...and yet...I can't get rid of em :D They were just so much fun back in the Pentium 120Mhz days.....so much fun.

Why do I keep the discs for Terminator: Future Shock...a game that doesn't even support 3D accelelration? I dunno, because it did so many things right the first time around......

my stable of FPS's includes games like Red Faction, the ALIEN vs Predator games, etc, etc. Crude by todays standards? Perhaps, but still oh-so fun to play. ....only now I can play them at 1080p with all sorts of eyecandy....

I spent the last 1/2 hour or so benchmarking my rig with the Half Life Lost Coast stress test. 1080p, 6xAA, 16xAF, full HDR...the worst I could do was 54fps. 1080p, 2xaa, 4xaf, full HDR...I got like 65fps.

Even dropping the resolution down didn't seem to get my any improvement in framerate....so I guess my P4 is holding me back here.

I keep looking at dual cores and dual 8800GTX's......but I keep reminding myself "not yet...wait...WAIT until you NEED to...".

[kenny_dope]

I have to admit the games I am playing through on the PC are all at least 1+ years old......

I havent bought a new PC game since Battlefield 2.


You should pick up Company Of Heroes for sure -its by far the best RTS game I've played in years

[Lawguy]

I have been gaming on the PC for over 20 years. For a long time, it was the best gaming platform. It no longer is, in my opinion. It may be again one day, just not right now.

I got a 360 for Christmas. It was my first console since the Atari 5200.

The amount of performance packed into the 360 for the price is pretty amazing and I don't thing that PCs can beat it right now. Also, there have been no good PC games released for a pretty long time. This is really what drove me to the 360.

I am looking forward to Stalker and especially Crysis, but I am taking a wait and see approach. I will never again spend $600 on a videocard and be plagued with bad drivers and things not working right. There really is no need.

I would never buy anything other than a DirectX 10 videocdard, if I was inclined to buy anything. DirectX 9 cards won't get you Crysis as it was meant to look. Still, $600 for a videocard is insane.

[PatrickB101]

The 360 has a triple core cpu, but each core is far less complex than a standard PC cpu = weaker than a standard pc cpu. Additionally, multithreading makes it very difficult to fully utilize the cpu, and ahmdal's law alone guarantees that even 3 cores won't perform twice as good as a single core of that same cpu.
A single 360 core is estimated at the performance of between a 2ghz to 2.4ghz pentium 4 (which is pretty good, considering how much less complex each core is), and even in the pentium 4 line up, there's a dual core 3.6ghz cpu, and pentium 4's/d's are easily eclipsed in performance by athlon x2s, which are in turn eclipsed in performance by core 2 duos.
As further evidence that the 360's cpu isn't all that, there is some correlation between work done, power used, and heat emitted, and yet the 360, despite 3 cores, is under many 90nm dual core processors in power consumption and heat emission.

There is a better correlation between transistor count and performance (though once again, the correlation isn't that great) and an even better correlation between die size (on the same fab process) and performance and the 360's cpu only has 165 million transistors across all 3 cores and a die size of 168 mm^2. An athlon x2 is 233 million transistors and 199 mm^2 for the higher end versions, and 154 million transistors and 183 mm^2, ie, within the same hardware levels.
A Core 2 Duo has 291Million transistors, but isn't produced on the 90nm process so die size can't be compared directly.

There are of course anomolies in this, such as the Pentium D with 376Million transistors but performing far worse than smaller designs, but that's due to a flawed design. While the pentium 4 architecture is capable of reaching ghz higher (people have cooled a pentium 4 to low enough temperatures to reach 8ghz, and even water cooling can reach 5ghz), the architecture generated way too much heat (due to a design flaw and current leakage, rather than actual work done) to be air cooled. The transistor count was spent on trying to get the chip to clock high, but was wasted because of the heat problems.
Probably not good to compare the Intel chips to the Xenon though, just stick to AMD and IBM chips as they're on the same manufacturing process and technology as Xenon, so the only differences will result from differences in the architecture design.
The 970mp, the dual core version of IBM's g5 chips, has 183million transistors and is 153.8 mm^2.
Now, the xenon cpu isn't that radical of a departure from the PC space (unlike cell), it is essentially 3 simpler pc-like cpus in place of 2 more complex cpus. The entire package viewed as a whole is on a hardware level similar to AMD's Athlon X2's and IBM's 970MP (similar cost to produce, similar design philosophy), so it's not going to blow either of these processors away, certainly not the top end models. And most games don't take advantage of multithreading to any significant extent anyway, and if you take 1 athlon or 970 core against a Xenon core...not pretty results for the Xenon core. So yeah, triple core sounds impressive, that's one more core than a dual core! Too bad each individual core is far less complex. Also too bad that any dual core PC cpu at the time of the 360's launch cost nearly as much as the entire 360 for a cheap model.

As for the 'badass' gpu, well I can guarantee you it doesn't 'best' a Geforce 8800, which is fully dx10 unlike the partial solution in the 360.

As for specs on the 360's Xenos gpu...
232 million transistors + 100 million transistor for edram + associated logic (332 total)
Die size: Approximately 174 mm^2 for main gpu, 67 mm^2 for edram (241 mm^2 if you want to add it)
48 shader processors total, unified
500mhz gpu, 22.4GB/s bandwidth to main ram, 256GB/s edram bandwidth (for antialiasing only, I believe 64GB/s otherwise)
4GPixel fillrate

Now, ATI's radeon x19xx cards are on a similar technology level to Xenos, better in some ways worse in others, notably they lack unified shaders.
The R580 (x1900xt, the 1900pro is the same thing but partially defective so subtract 25% off functional hardware for it)
384 Million transistors
352mm^2
48 pixel shader processors, plus 8 vertex shaders, not unified, but who needs unified when you have enough pixel shaders to match xenos, and then left over vertex shaders (unless a game was made with an unusually heavy vertex load, in which case xenos wins, but no games like that have been made yet...officially both actually have about the same polygon performance except that the x1900xt doesn't give up pixel shader performance for it, but the x1900xt doesn't have the memory bandwidth to reach the polygon numbers 360 could)
650Mhz gpu, 46.4GB/s bandwidth to vram, 8GB/s bandwidth to system ram (half up, half down)
10GPixel fillrate

Once again, a similar level of hardware thrown at both, but with a noticeable amount more for the x1900xt than xenos. In terms of processing power both have available, the x1900xt blows away Xenos, with over twice the fillrate and exceeding the 360 in available pixel shader and vertex shader performance simultaneously to what the 360 could do with its shaders dedicated to either function.
Not that the 360 doesn't have advantages, the edram of the 360 attacks a very difficult problem to overcome on the pc, only made possible with the low resolution + closed dev environment of a console. Realistically, the 360 can push more polygons than the pc counterpart (if a dev so wished to dedicate a 360 to doing so), probably come close in achieved fillrate (not while outperforming in polygon count), and outperform with anti aliasing...if a dev custom developed for the 360. Multiplatform games and middleware make that a rare situation, not to mention that edram limits the resolution of the game OR requires a performance hit in order to use.

Ok, conclusively I've proved nothing, but since the 360 has less hardware for its cpu and gpu than can be found in similar PC designs, it's unlikely the 360 will have any sort of major performance advantage over the PC designs, and imo, will probably not exceed the performance of a decent speed athlon x2 and an x1950pro.


its performance will be greater since applications will be written hardware specific. all while your pc will have to do needlees calculations and run through drivers and a XP core to execute commands. the 360 is a much more effective gaming machine then anything we can build on the market today.

[Fox5]

ts performance will be greater since applications will be written hardware specific. all while your pc will have to do needlees calculations and run through drivers and a XP core to execute commands. the 360 is a much more effective gaming machine then anything we can build on the market today.

Not so much true anymore. Machines are too powerful nowadays, dev times too long, and hardware manufactuers too concerned of security now for much low level code to be written.

Most games now made are made with middleware not emphasizing the strengths of any platform. Additionally, even hardware exclusives barely go beyond the high level .NET/DirectX style APIs and dev environments. And it's not like the 360 doesn't have an OS, it certainly does, and in terms of code management, it does most of the things Windows does behind the scenes.

The overhead from a full blown OS on PCs is minimal, especially now that all consoles have similar environments in place, PC cpus have a lot more raw power than console cpus so the extra cpu cycles they have to burn don't have a noticable effect on performance (someone on another forum posted that when compiling multithreaded code through Microsoft's XNA framework on the xbox 360 and an athlon x2, the 360 scores about half the performance of the x2), the only real impact on the PC comes from memory. In fact, if anything the PC could gain an additional speedup from more memory. The 360 is memory limited and has to run aggressive cleanup routines to free up memory, whereas the PC can afford to be a lot more inefficient with memory and waste a few extra hundred megabytes and not worry about cleaning up the mess until later.

As for effective, you might be right, but only if you mean cost per performance. Certainly the 360 couldn't touch one of intel's new quad core xeons with 4GB of ram, a full sized harddrive (at up to 10k rpm), and a Geforce 8800 GTX. I'd say the power of the 360 is somewhere within the range of top end PCs available at the time of its release, based on how the games look and run, as well as theoretical specs. Really, it gets crushed everywhere by PCs available in late 2005 except:
Theoretical CPU FLOPs (not so relevent)

Polygon thoroughput, thanks to its unified shading architecture

and its eDram bandwidth, 64GB/s is a large bit over what PC gpus had at the time and essentially free 4x AA at low resolutions are nice, but due to its small size it can't use the same bandwidth saving techniques PC gpus do and its effective memory bandwidth is probably more on par with top end pc gpus of the time, plus it takes large performance hits/development constraints when it exceeds the size of its edram (meaning it can't even do 1280x720 with 2xAA before it loses its biggest advantage over PC gpus of the time)

[football76]

I'm no PC guru or anything, but I know there is nothing you can build (short of stealing parts) for $400 that can touch the 360 visually at 720p.

3800+ X2 $100
7600GT $100
MOBO $70
HD $50
CD/DVD $40
Case + PSU $60
KB/M $10
OS $80
$500 and your not even close. You can throw all the specs and numbers at me but when it comes down to it, what you see on the screen from a $400 xbox is untouchable.

Back to the original post:

If I were you, I would buy a 360, and a $300 emachines at best buy for your internet, e-mail, music and office docs. :D

[ChrisFB]

I'm no PC guru or anything, but I know there is nothing you can build (short of stealing parts) for $400 that can touch the 360 visually at 720p.

Totally agree unless someone is salvaging a number of useful (important distinction) parts from previous builds.


Back to the original post:

If I were you, I would buy a 360, and a $300 emachines at best buy for your internet, e-mail, music and office docs. :D

Well, now you are at $400 for the 360 and $300 for the emachine. That's $700 and for that you can best the 360 by a good margin. ;)

[football76]

I would disagree that you can create a better gaming experience on a $700 PC than a 360. The 360 has an expansive library and solid online support through xbox live and on and on. The only reason to stick with a gaming PC is if you like KB/M controls. -And maybe for the big Crysis, alan wake titles coming later on, but for a $700 PC whats the point if your not going to use up the potential of those games, you might as well pick up a 360 and enjoy the big titles here and now. Not to mention the upcoming Assassins Creed, Bioshock, Forza 2, Halo 3... you get the point (all of which will render beautifully on the 360). The console gaming industry is looking bright while the PC industry, which will always have its role as the cutting edge of technology, is not so hopeful if your not going to buy a new $300 graphics card every year.

***If you don't agree with me it's fine this is just my opinion, I realize this is the PC Forum and I do not wish to argue :) .


The best I can do:

C2D $200
8800 $300
MOBO $90
2GB Memory $150
HD $80
CD/DVD $40
Decent CASE $70
Decent PSU $70
KB/M $25

$1025

OR:

360 $400
Live Gold $50
emachines $300

$750 :D

Just so you know, I own both what I consider a high end PC (for now, who knows what it'll be in 6 months), and a 360.

[kenny_dope]

The best I can do:

C2D $200
8800 $300
MOBO $90
HD $80
CD/DVD $40
Decent CASE $70
Decent PSU $70
KB/M $25

$875

Just so you know, I own both what I consider a high end PC (for now, who knows what it'll be in 6 months), and a 360.


No brainer for me -I have a 360 as well but to be honest I don't really play it much unless I have friends over, and even then its a toss up between that and the Wii. I'd much rather take the DX10 rig...

[Ryguy]

i've been a PC gamer since the Doom days and just picked up a 360 (w/ HDDVD drive) over christmas so i could watch HDDVD movies. after playing Call of Duty 3 and Gears Of War on the home theater setup, I gotta say I'm pretty damn impressed and dont think I could go back to the little screen. seems most PC games are being ported over to 360 anyway. it's a shame that I love playing RTS games and consoles arent so hot in that department. i wonder how a newer RTS like Supreme Commander would handle on the 360...

[SpeedyHTPC]

I just got Supreme Commander and nothing beats KBM for this game or any RTS game. How can you use a gamepad to move the pieces? Yes you can group them but you gotta move them quick and precisely.

Perhaps the 360 is also for me in my future gaming but only with a KBM adapter that works. No 360 in sight for me for now.

[krimson]

i've been a PC gamer since the Doom days and just picked up a 360 (w/ HDDVD drive) over christmas so i could watch HDDVD movies. after playing Call of Duty 3 and Gears Of War on the home theater setup, I gotta say I'm pretty damn impressed and dont think I could go back to the little screen. seems most PC games are being ported over to 360 anyway. it's a shame that I love playing RTS games and consoles arent so hot in that department. i wonder how a newer RTS like Supreme Commander would handle on the 360...
Who said you have to play your PC games on a PC monitor?