There have been arguments about this. I have warned some about my review being 99% sure to prove some X-Box person wrong, but they failed to recognize my warning, so I bring you my review.
This is a beautifully described review written by Trainman about how the GCN is very superior to the X-Box. Take a look! If there are any spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes, please report them to me. Thank you!
GameCube vs. X-Box-a clash between two titans; who will win? The Nintendo crafted GameCube, or the oversize conglomerate's X-Box? These debates have sprung up on message boards across the web, lunch table conflicts, and many websites abroad. But still many are claiming X-Box the winner of it all. Well, if that’s your mindset you couldn’t be any further from the truth.
Let's start with what most people are thrown off by. Now, when you look at X-Box’s specs just about everything looks better, from RAM, MHz, and Memory Bus Bandwidth, exceeding the GameCube. You may say, "Wow! X-Box looks a lot more powerful than GameCube," but that’s where the line is drawn; it just looks better. X-Box has a lot of power that’s given, but it’s nothing without control.
GameCube has hardware that’s a little dated when compared to X-Box, but that’s okay. GameCube is one finely tweaked machine. The system architecture was designed to let the CPU/MPU, GPU, DSP, and RAM communicate, and interact with one another in total un-adulterated harmony.
Knowing most people won’t take my word with so little information, let’s start off with each consoles hardware development cycle, shall we?
GameCube:
From what we know Nintendo has been developing GCN since maybe late '98-'99. From there, Nintendo has partnered up with many of the industries finest corporations. From the $1,000,000,000 agreement with IBM, sound chip development to Factor5, GPU design to ArtX, memory to MoSys, and the list goes on and on. Now, by letting companies who specialize in certain areas of the industry you can build a finer product. Not to mention your taking billions of dollars of costs and spreading them amongst many companies which is why GCN is expected to sell under $200.
X-Box:
Actual X-Box hardware development probably began a little later than GCN, but with couple extra billion dollars to help them. So this gave Microsoft the advantage of more advanced hardware. Now from what we know X-Box is just collaboration between Microsoft (duh), Intel, and nVidia (Oh wow, there’s a lot of console experience in that bunch). Intel’s providing the off the shelve PIII (which Microsoft said would be a "modified" chip, but probably only has a few new instruction sets to interact with the rest of the system). nVidia’s making the GPU, which is pretty much based off the GeForce 3’s chip architecture (which like the PIII, only had a few more sets of instruction code for communication). Microsoft is basically getting off the shelf PC components from other manufacturers, from the 64MB’s of DDR RAM, the 10GB HDD, and the DVD-ROM. So basically, all Microsoft is doing are controller designs, legal deals, system packaging, and sending boxes full of unmarked bills to anonymous sources.
Which company has the most experience, and the proper materials to build a console specifically geared, and enhanced for gaming? I’m hoping you said Nintendo. The only thing Microsoft has in their arsenal is a steady flow of cash, and their ever-ominous presence to their competitors. Nintendo has the one and only Shigeru Miyamoto conferring with everybody from controller design, to the people at ArtX making the GPU for what developers/gamers want, and should expect from GCN.
Now, with all of that, GCN has the power where it counts. Here’s a good example: X-box has 64MB’s of shared DDR RAM, while the GameCube has 24MB’s of unified stand-alone 1T-SRAM, along with 3MB’s on-chip, and a supplemental 16MB’s of SDRAM, aka. A-RAM ("A" for Auxiliary), for a total of 43MB’s. But there’s a huge flaw with X-Box; DDR RAM is some of the slowest, chunkiest RAM around. It’s double-data-rate, but that only boosts memory bus bandwidth… (I'll get to that later).
The designers at Nintendo knew that to get the maximum performance of the high-speed chipsets, they would need high speed RAM to boot., so with a call to MoSys, Nintendo was able to get a deal to use the fastest RAM on the planet: MoSys 1T-SRAM. Calling it fast is basically an understatement. Its maximum latency has been clocked at only 10 nanoseconds! The texture RAM has been clocked at half the speed which, is 5 nanoseconds! (Nanosecond= 1 billionth of a second.) This means that GCN will be able to stream textures in and out requiring less memory, and putting less strain on the CPU/GPU/MPU whose main job is to do calculations, and work with special effects instead of crunching numbers.
Memory Bus Bandwidth (MBB) is how fast the RAM will be able to communicate with other parts of the system that use it. GameCube has 3.2GB/s, while X-Box has a maximum of 6.4GB/s of it, but X-Box’s is shared. Shared you say? X-Box has 64MB’s of DDR RAM, and the developer can ration it for whatever they need. For a very simple example, a developer can set aside 20MB’s as VRAM, 16 for sound, 20 for textures, 15 for animation, and 9 for the frame buffer. (This is far simpler than what is actually done. Most developers will need over 20 portions.) Now each of those portions will greedily take their share of the MBB, thus reducing transfer speeds to less than 1GB/s (if you’re lucky). What does this mean to games? Well for the memory to be rationed the CPU’s going to need to manage each of those. So instead of working with artificial intelligence (AI), physics, and special effects, the CPU is crunching numbers. This can lead to slowdown, and since the developers can’t stream enough data in, more RAM will need to be used taking away from textures, sound, animation, and the list goes on.
Ok, ok, I AM NOT sorry for blabbering on the technical side now. If you don't understand this, learn some vocab and lingo.
I’ll make a simpler point. X-Box is sort of the "blaster" of the console world, GCN being the "lightsaber.†X-Box uses superfluous amounts of unnecessary resources to accomplish a task. GCN is tweaked, accurate, and not a clumsy tool of justice. Get what I’m saying?
Polygons you say? Aah, yet another mercifully fought debate that has enraged for ages. Now let’s go compare figures from both companies…
X-Box: 125M/sec
GameCube: 6 million to 12 million polygons/second (Display capability assuming actual game with complexity model, texture, etc.)
(Ripped from the official sites)
Note how on the official X-Box site, there is no disclaimer attached to it. It’s obviously the maximum performance rating which means absolutely nothing. It does not compensate for player interaction; the polygons are dull, flat shaded, similarly shaped, textureless, and no special effects engaged.
GameCube’s polygon performance figures are a bit low, but in typical Nintendo fashion, Yamauchi wanted to keep the hype down, and made sure the polygon performance wasn’t over the top. EA of Canada got their hands on some development kits, and in February of this year, they had announced performance figures of 22M/sec@60 FPS. Now cut the FPS rating in half, and you’ve doubled the polygon count. With 30FPS, with 44M polygons on the screen, that’s nothing short of awe-inspiring.
X-Box hasn’t exactly been seen running off final production hardware yet (which is supposedly in production as we speak). In fact it hasn’t even been shown running off a development kit. So far, the only thing we have seen are what X-Box developers can do with PC’s with a little more power than an X-Box. From what I’ve seen from developers, they have done on PC’s more powerful than GCN, and X-Box (with 9 extra months of time). Microsoft funding hasn’t been the lightyears ahead of what was shown off at Space World 2000, where developers at the most had 2 months to put something together, (Rogue Squadron Cube demo being done in 20 days!) All of those demos ran off actual units, which have the possibility of becoming inferior, as there are still some specifications to be released at E3 this May. So X-Box’s polygon figures are in league if not inferior to GCN’s performance rating.
Then finally another big issue: sound. Just recently, Microsoft announced that X-Box would feature Dolby Digital 5.1 in game with no hit to performance. GameCube features the not-much-talked-about Factor 5 MusyX sound chip (AKA DSP). From what has been released by the ever so quiet Nintendo is that the MusyX chip is the most advanced sound processor of its kind. It has been said to react to how you react in the game, and the overall visual atmosphere your in.
That was all about sound output. Well, I basically gave an overview of the MusyX chip, but that’s all there is to talk about. X-Box doesn’t even have a DSP. Just like older consoles before it, X-Box will only do pre-rendered repetitive scores of music. Not much innovation there (something Nintendo believes is key in this new era).
Well I hope I was able to sum up the bulk of your concerns with 1,660 words. Simply put, GCN isn’t going to be a technical push over for X-Box. GameCube most definitely has a fighting chance equal to if not better than the X-Box juggernaut. I know battles will still be fought, but I just wanted to calm the concerns of fellow Nintendoids; GameCube lives!
"Oh, I''m such and idiot." "I don''t wanna live to see the day the Earth screws up." ~Trainman
Edited by - Trainman on 11/15/2003 9:37:14 AM
