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Is a Playstation2 really more powerful than a computer?

K

kabunaru

Guest
Original poster
Jan 28, 2008
3,226
5
I was reading something on MacRumors and came upon this..
asphyxiafeeling said:
he meant modern computer technology. the PS2 technical specs are still ahead of anything a computer could put out. thing is, game consoles are made solely to play GAMES~ wereas computers are much more complicated. if you COULD take the processor and everything else from a PS2 and put into a computer- you'd have a very, very fast computer on your hands. thing is, we can't- yet.

furthermore, yes, the 360 is superior to the PS2. but the same thing still applies. if you could take a 360 processor and put it into a computer it'd be far ahead ahead of a current top-of-the-line computer. but, it's not that simple, unfortunately.
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iToaster said:
The processors that game consoles use are very specialized at multithreading and are able to process a lot very quickly, though they aren't as suited for conventional computing as the processors used in a MacBook Pro, for example. Modern technology is still unable to rival the processing power of a PS2, so emulators for consoles are released many many years after it has become more or less obsolete. The game consoles of today are insanely powerful, but they are too hot and power hungry for practical use in computers, therefore to answer your question, PS3 > Xbox 360 > MacBook Pro.
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I would be really surprised if my PS2 is more powerful than my MacBook and iMac. :rolleyes:
 
LOL! Wow, are people really this errr... :D

Sure, a PS2 is faster than a Pentium 2 or a 386. Anyways, on average, today's PCs are way more powerful than any game console. <PERIOD>

The advantage of a console, is that it's a dedicated gaming rig and they do have less overhead, so they can do more with less. But on the other hand today's PCs in general have so much more power at their disposal, that the loss in performance to the OS is negligible.

If you were to run OS X, or even XP on a PS2, it would be slower than dirt. There's also the lack of memory. The PS2 only has 32 megs of ram, that's just not enough. General computing on any console is just too slow, even if a console is faster than a PC.

The best part about their ignorance, is how they're glorifying the weakest console if its generation. A GameCube had way more power at its disposal than a PS2. These are probably the same guys/kids, that assume a PS2 is better off than a Wii.

Where do you find these people? I'm guess they're kids?

A MacBook Pro with a 8600 GT is more powerful than a PS3 or 360 across the board. Recall how the PS3 was being praised as being so powerful, because it could fold like a maniac? Anyways, the 8600 in a MBPro, if set up for folding, is way faster than a PS3's cell. The same is also true for the 7800 varient in the PS3.

Morons! I have yet to eat, so my tact restraints aren't in place. :eek:

<]=)
 
HAHAHA *cough* *hack*

OMG those have to be some of the funniest, most stupidly ignorant posts I've read all week. That's not a personal insult, I don't know who these members are, just reading the text is cracking me up.

No, the reason we don't have a good PS2 emulator is because:
A) The PS2's processor had an overlycomplex design that makes it hard to write an emulator
and
B) You usually need 10x the power to emulate something. For example, a 1.4 GHz G4 could usually only emulate maybe a 300 MHz Pentium 3.

These people have no clue what they are talking about. Gaming systems usually have fairly poor CPU's but the hardware is dedicated to gaming and nothing but gaming and the games are coded for that exact set of hardware and optimized. That's why the GameCube, with a 400 MHz PowerPC G3, can play games far better than any 400 MHz iMac ever could.


Any modern Mac has more processing power than an XBox 360. The 360 just has heavily optimized games. Regardless, a Mac Pro will still beat it if you put a Geforce 8800 in it.

EDIT: I just replied in the thread. It was just too much though, I probably came across as condescending because there was just so much to correct, hopefully the mods won't get mad at me for it.
 
Oh my gosh I just lost it when I read this one:
God why would you even ask this? I can understand you being curious or something but are you that much of an apple fanboy to even think that a laptop can rival the power of the PS3?
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Specifically, the Cell in the PS3 can do a (theoretical) maximum of ~2TFLOPS. The lowest ranked computer on the top 500 supercomputers list does a little less than 6TFLOPS, so the PS3 comes close.
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....oh man, I should drag out that old post I made a few months back last time someone asked this question, where I made up a lengthy explanation that was completely wrong and deliberately misused big words and contradicted myself repeatedly and wrote it in such an official way that everyone believed me. :D
 
Isn't the Sega Saturn also incredible hard to emulate as well? Heck my PSP can barely run an Amiga emulator. That's a 333mhz modern CPU trying to emulate a 7mhz 68000 yet I somehow doubt the Amiga is more powerful than a PSP.

As for PS3. Well I'm still waiting for the supergame that makes complete use of the RSX and Cell to bring us a game that looks better than a mid-range PC. That goes for the 360 too.
 
Yeah, the Sega Saturn had 9 different processors. It's not that it was fast, it's just that it's so ridiculously complex no one can figure out how to emulate it well.

* Two Hitachi SuperH-2 7604 32-Bit RISC processors at 28.63 MHz (50-MIPS) – each has 4 KB on-chip cache, of which 2 KB can alternatively be used as directly addressable Scratchpad RAM
* SH-1 32-bit RISC processor (controlling the CD-ROM)
* Custom VDP 1 32-bit video display processor (running at 7.1590 MHz on NTSC Systems, 6.7116 MHz for PAL Systems)
* Custom VDP 2 32-bit video display processor (running at 7.1590 MHz on NTSC Systems, 6.7116 MHz for PAL Systems)
* Custom Saturn Control Unit (SCU) with DSP for geometry processing and DMA controller (running at 14.3 MHz)
* Motorola 68EC000 sound controller (running at 11.3 MHz / 1,5 MIPS)
* Yamaha FH1 DSP sound processor, "Sega Custom Sound Processor" (SCSP), running at 22.6 MHz
* Hitachi 4-bit MCU, "System Manager & Peripheral Control" (SMPC)
 
There are PS2 emulators, and some games work pretty well at 60fps. The biggest issue is graphical glitches rather than speed. Theres also Dreamcast emulators that are really fast.

The problem is that these people have to create the emulators from scratch, they need to reverse engineer the console with no documentation. Most emulators have to emulate through brute force, they are not optimized to make use of your hardware because they cant figure out how to do it, so to get playable framerates you need a really fast computer which can chug through tons of really bad code. What a PC emulator has to go through is much harder than what the console had to go through, because the console was optimized and didnt have nearly as many instructions to calculate. Its similair to a processor running a 3d game completely on its own without the help of the GPU, its a propular way to benchmark processors because it has to be done through brute force.

Sony could easily make a perfectly fast emulator for PC, but only Sony could do it since the hardware information required for a good emulator is kept so secret.
 
I used to get asked this question alot when I managed a game store.

I view it like this.

A console's processor is going to be like Rainman. A PC/Mac processor is going to be like a normal person.

Ask Rainman to count cards or do some specialzed task, you get great results. Ask Rainman to go into a bar and start a conversation with a lady, disaster strikes.

Specialized processing vs general processing. There is a big difference.

Additionally take into consideration that console processors are massively updated when new consoles come out. Mac/PC processors are incrementally updated every few months. Another poor comparison. Its not fair to either platforms hardware since the goals are completely different when they are engineered.
 
hegor said:
Additionally take into consideration that console processors are massively updated when new consoles come out.
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There are big leaps between each console generation yes, but the same could be said if you only updated your computer once every 5 years.

Good analogy though! It's also worth taking into consideration that PC's have to run full blown operating systems in the background whereas consoles just have a few security checks and (in most current gen systems) little UI's too. I'm amazed at how well optimised PC gaming can be to say there isn't a specific set of hardware. Or more rather I'm let down by these giant console numbers that don't reflect performance as well as it should.
 
lol this is the wierdest thread..

from what i understand, the consoles are solely for creating graphical images at the best/most constant amounts as possible... they create triangles/squares/whatever working with the formulas they are given.

PC's (personal computers) are not made for this purpose, they are made to perform calculations of small numbers as fast as possible.

its completely not even feasible to contrast the two in terms of power, however, i dare say that because of the 7 (8) cores of a ps3 and the 3 cores of an xbox 360 the FLOP rankage would be a lot higher in a console than a single GPU'd core of a computer..
 
Well it was marginally faster than a

Ad_Spectrum1.JPG


;)














marginally :D
 
its completely not even feasible to contrast the two in terms of power, however, i dare say that because of the 7 (8) cores of a ps3 and the 3 cores of an xbox 360 the FLOP rankage would be a lot higher in a console than a single GPU'd core of a computer..
Click to expand...

:D Dude, don't join in their silliness! :D


This is simply not true. GPUs are mathematical beasts and can easily best any current CPU or Cell for specific tasks. GPUs have been doing the FLOP thing since the ninties.

The X1900 from a few years, back, a weak card by today's standards, out folds a PS3's cell by 5x.

Here's a link;
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070326-why-the-playstation-3-owns-the-pc-in-fh.html


A 360's 3 core proc is quite weak when you factor in its high clock speed. It's maybe in the range of a single G5 1.8, if that, and for tasks that take advantage of Altivec, the G5 would wipe the floor. But for a game machine, it rocks.

A PS3's cell can outperform any available CPU for "certain" tasks, BUT, these tasks are usually better handled by a GPU. When benchmarked under Linux, the PS3's cell was found to be in the same range as a single G5 1.6 when running non GPU-isk tasks. Sony's laughable claims of 2 teraFLOP, factored in the GPU also. In real world their console is considerably less capable than promised, but none the less still impressive for key areas.

The future is in GPUs, this is why AMD and Intel are heading towards new chips which are a hybrid of both, so CPUs with GPUs on board. Even the Cell shares some characteristics of a GPU, which is of course why it has a few tricks up its sleeve.

Anyways, what I want, is a PCI-X card containing an array of Cells and support from my rendering program. There are already some solutions available, but the Cell being mass produced would be the most affordable solution.

Blah.

<]=)
 
JackAxe said:
:D Dude, don't join in their silliness! :D


<]=)
Click to expand...

yea yea ok i was wrong, i had nfi what i was talking about ha

that study isnt really all that accurate but, the PS3's power can be correctly calculated, but the PC's cannot. so its kinda not a perfect identifyer and probably gives the PC's a worse(er) image.
 
I view the Cell like a DSP, but not as dumb, it can at least do more than one really fast task. :)

Yeah, PC benchmarks can be harder to gauge with every component contributing to the overall system's performance.

<]=)
 
Thanks for the replies guys. :
Maybe a PS4 will be more powerful than today's computers. :p
 
For a few months. Or maybe not in gaming results, since the PS3 produces visuals on par with the 360. By the time the PS3 came to market the PC had DirectX10 and more powerful graphics cards.
Times are changing!
 
hegor said:
I used to get asked this question alot when I managed a game store.

I view it like this.

A console's processor is going to be like Rainman. A PC/Mac processor is going to be like a normal person.

Ask Rainman to count cards or do some specialzed task, you get great results. Ask Rainman to go into a bar and start a conversation with a lady, disaster strikes.

Specialized processing vs general processing. There is a big difference.

Additionally take into consideration that console processors are massively updated when new consoles come out. Mac/PC processors are incrementally updated every few months. Another poor comparison. Its not fair to either platforms hardware since the goals are completely different when they are engineered.
Click to expand...

I like this explanation!
 
The PS2 is more powerful than any modern PC because it has the Emotion Engine. While modern computers are great at logic based tasks, the PS2 pulls far ahead thanks to it's abstract awareness and ability to "feel." No PC has that revolutionary component...The Emotion Engine. Hence, the PS2 is uber.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3)

Antares said:
The PS2 is more powerful than any modern PC because it has the Emotion Engine. While modern computers are great at logic based tasks, the PS2 pulls far ahead thanks to it's abstract awareness and ability to "feel." No PC has that revolutionary component...The Emotion Engine. Hence, the PS2 is uber.
Click to expand...

Antares...that's sarcasm, right?
 
Antares said:
The PS2 is more powerful than any modern PC because it has the Emotion Engine. While modern computers are great at logic based tasks, the PS2 pulls far ahead thanks to it's abstract awareness and ability to "feel." No PC has that revolutionary component...The Emotion Engine. Hence, the PS2 is uber.
Click to expand...

I would like to believe that my PS2 is more powerful than the MacBook and iMac at games... :rolleyes:
Games do have a better feeling with the PS2 than the computer to me.
 
GFLPraxis said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3)



Antares...that's sarcasm, right?
Click to expand...


It's a 1949 Buick Roadmaster. Straight 8. Fireball 8. Only 8,985 production models. Dad let's me drive slow on the driveway. But not on Monday. Definitely not on Monday.
 
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