Why are the 9400M and the 9600M GT not equal or better than the 3 year old graphics found in an Xbox 360?
Well, this is where nvidia's confusing naming scheme comes into play. ATI is no better.
Their names would suggest that a 9400M is more powerful than an 8600M. But thats not true.
The names can be broken down into 4 parts. The first number, the 9, designates the series. A 9400M is part of the 9th generation of GeForce cards. The 4 means its part of the mainstream line, the 6 means its part of the midrange line. The higher the number the more powerful the card. And newer generations generally don't always mean more powerful. The 9000 series is basically a die shrink and optimization of the 8000 series, leading into the much more powerful 200 series.
Still with me? haha.
So because of the naming scheme, things get messy.
But, a GeForce 7950GTX is going to be more powerful than an 8600GT. Probably in the neighborhood of twice as much.
Now, the Xbox360 GPU was actually more powerful than the fastest card at the time of release, the 7950GTX. The Xbox360 GPU also has some DirectX10 features. Thats why, even though the 9600M GT is two generations newer, the Xbox360 GPU is still more powerful. By an incredibly large margin.
Also why are the PS3 graphics not better than the Xbox 360 graphics?
Well, Sony themselves stated that the "RSX" is somewhere between the 7800 and 7900. Many major 3rd party developers have come out and said its well below that spec, and some people have said that its about the equivalent of two GeForce 5200 FX cards.
Plus the games show it. Every game that runs worse on the PS3 is not due to a "bad port" or "developers not taking advantage of the Cell" as some like to say. It boils down to the GPU not being able to keep up. Look at GTA4 as a perfect example. It was built from the ground up on both the Xbox360 and PS3 using an in-house engine developed for both platforms natively. The PS3 version runs at 1024x640 while the Xbox360 version runs at 1280x720. Thats an overall pixel difference of 266,240. On top of that, the PS3 version had lower resolution textures, lower overall onscreen detail, and a lower frame-rate. That has nothing to do with the Cell or a "bad port" and everything to do with the GPU just not being able to keep up. It's the same thing with Fallout 3. Lower overall onscreen detail, lower resolution textures, and the PS3 version doesn't have full world water reflections like the Xbox360 and PS3 versions do. The only game that looks better on the PS3 compared to the Xbox360 is Oblivion. But they accomplished that by going back, in that extra year of development time, and replacing every single texture with new ones. The one game that stands out on the PS3 is Gran Turismo 5. But look how they accomplish those great looking car models. They sacrifice environment detail. The trees are still cardboard cutouts, and you can still literally count the polygons in hills and other geographical variations. Not to mention there are far more games on the PS3 that run at at that "640p" resolution than the Xbox360.
