Playstation 3 GPU "slightly less powerful than GeForce 7800"
Here's the techy math
By Aaron McKenna: Wednesday 31 August 2005, 15:14
SOME INTERESTING SPINOLA has been spouting from the PlayStation 3 camp today after an nVidia spokesperson was quoted in PlayStation Magazine saying that the RSX GPU is basically a slightly less powerful GeForce 7800.
So says Evil Avatar, having seen the magazine.*
This puts paid to the rumours that the RSX was basically an off-the-shelf 7800 chipset, though the big news is in the "RSX is slightly less powerful" part of the statement. If one was to do some quick graphics card math, this would mean that the RSX chip powering the PlayStation 3 is less powerful than two GeForce 6800's running in SLI mode – as the 7800 is – and according to Microsoft and ATi, the Xbox 360 GPU is more powerful than the same SLI combo.
However, we reported a while back that a headline graphical title for the PS3, Fight Night: Round Three, is going to look exactly the same on the two next-gen consoles. How could this be so if the PS3 is technically inferior?
Well, doing some math we’ve worked out that the GeForce 7800 GTX flavour, the high-end of nVidia’s high-end chipset, is almost equivalent of two GeForce 6800 Ultras. So technically there could be nothing in it, presuming that the RSX chip is based off of the GTX flavour of the 7800.
It's all awfully confusing we know, though it is an interesting tech mystery to try and get to the bottom of. Of course Microsoft and Sony engineers all know exactly what's in the difference between the two consoles, but the marketing people want to tell us that their console is twenty times better than everyone elses, so we must wait until someone rips the two boxes open and benchmarks them, at which point we can search through our archives and head off to get the "Well what we really meant..." speeches from the PR folks. µ
* APOLOGIES. Evil Avatar link originally omitted.
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