8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, 128-bit.......256-bit?????

Vyse

I've been thinking about it lately and every console generation has been defined as XX-bit. I know it is a minor point but is this generation the same? I mean are the XBox 360 and PS3 classed as 256-bit machines?

I know this classification is rather pointless but this has been the norm up until now.

steviec

Nope not at all. 'Bits' is the number of 1s/0s the processor could hold in a registry at once. When it was only 8 bit and 16 bit the increase was very welcome, however beyond that it's not really too necessary. PCs have happily been 32 bit for a long time and even the 64 bit processors out today are running in 32 bit mode most of the time.

The PS2 is 128 bit and the xbox is 32 bit, which shows there's a lot more important ways of measuring things!

As far as I know the next gen consoles are 64 bit, I could be wrong though I'm just basing that on the fact their closely related to the 64-bit processors that power current Apple Macs.

tman

people stopped giving a crap soon after the nintendo 64 was released.
it means absolutely NOTHING

madrab

tman wrote:

people stopped giving a crap soon after the nintendo 64 was released.
it means absolutely NOTHING

it means EVERYTHING 4 1m t3h 1337 w1th m7 128 b1t ps2 & y0ur 32 81t x80x 5ux

astrofool

the bits referred to the memory bandwidth, not the cpu.

The dreamcast was the first 128bit console, and the original xbox was also 128bit.

The 360 has a 256bit link to main memory, afaik, but a much larger link to the embedded memory.

The ps2 uses rambus memory (as will the ps3), which generally uses lower bus width (bits), but higher frequency memory instead, someone can probably google to find out.

Its generally nothing at all to do with the type of code being executed.

Vyse

Yeah, I know the bit terminology is arbitary (to a certain extent) but it's strange when you're so use to console generations being defined as. Then again I suppose the Jaguar was 64-bit!!!

RotalicaV

You're all in bits

Cake Fiend

tman wrote:

it means absolutely NOTHING

That's just stupid, if the number is bigger, the console is obviously better.

Rolleyes at you sir.

The Bollox

RotalicaV wrote:

You're all in bits

byte me!

madrab

i tried to group them before but i never finished

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2054859282

AARRRGH

I remember thinking my neighbour was sad because he only had a 16 bit mastersystem and I had a 32 bit megadrive...!

Rollseyes at me!

The Bollox

the Megadrive is 16bit :rolleyes:

RotalicaV

There was a 32 bit version of the Mega Drive aswell.

Look who tried to be a Marty Pants and failed!

Balfa

Yeah, but the master system was definitely only 8bit :P

madrab

take that marty pants

Dont be at yourself

There wasn't really a 32bit megadrive. There was the 32X, which was an add-on for the megadrive, costing upwards of £100 at the time, which never took off. Seeing as it played all of about, ooh, 10 games.

flogen

My Amiga A500+ Rulez U all!!!!

I actually remember that my next door neighbour had an amiga A500, and we had an A500+, and I used to slag her saying mine was better and newer etc., and she would argue it made no difference.
We were both kind of right, because the A500+ was a more enhanced version of the A500, but in real terms it made no difference, in fact games wouldn't work on the 500+ that did work on the 500, due to the OS change.
The start up screen was much better on my one though.

Lord Oz

Was the Atari Jaguar 32bit or 64bit?

AARRRGH

Marts wrote:

the Megadrive is 16bit :rolleyes:

Whoa the nerd is upset I mistook 32/16 for 16/8.

Stephen

:rolleyes:

calling someone a nerd, on a thread about memory bus sizes, on an internet forum... does that strike you as even slightly ironic?

Laguna

Stephen wrote:

:rolleyes:

calling someone a nerd, on a thread about memory bus sizes, on an internet forum... does that strike you as even slightly ironic?

Pfft... no

Patricide

Stephen wrote:

:rolleyes:

calling someone a nerd, on a thread about memory bus sizes, on an internet forum... does that strike you as even slightly ironic?

For that my kind sir i take my hat off to, best comeback EVER!!

Retr0gamer

Lord Oz wrote:

Was the Atari Jaguar 32bit or 64bit?

By the time the Jaguar came out the line between a 32bit and 64bit consoles was already blurred but it is generally considered a 32bit console. Atari tried to pass it off as a 64bit machine because it had 2 32bit processors. There are other reasins that it could be considered 64bit but they are pushing it a bit and are too nerdy and boring to consider.

Today how many bits a console has doesn't make any difference to the power.

The Bollox

dublindude wrote:

Whoa the nerd is upset I mistook 32/16 for 16/8.

you're damn right I am! *pushes glasses up on bridge of nose* and the SNES is teh best invention in the gaming world ever!

sprinkles

NekkidBibleMan wrote:

There wasn't really a 32bit megadrive. There was the 32X, which was an add-on for the megadrive, costing upwards of £100 at the time, which never took off. Seeing as it played all of about, ooh, 10 games.

and most of them were fmv if I remember correctly..in fact most peeps at the time thought that was the direction that the gaming industry was heading towards....actors playing out parts in games. Proved far too costly to produce, making sets paying "proper" actors etc... In the end it all failed....and so nearly did the Ninty experiment with cd's, though we all know where that ended up.

Retr0gamer

32X was a cartridge based system. Not many decent games at all (in fact can't think of any classics) although notably it did have arguably the worst version of Doom ever (the Saturn version was a worse game but did have the third chapter). Even the Snes version is a better game. None of the games were FMV based. I think you are talking about the Mega CD which was a complete mess of a system. It was CD based but was a 16bit system. It added SNES like mode 7 effects and a small bit of extra processing power to the Mega drive. However it kept the mega drives disgracefully small colour palette meaning FMV appeared grainy and dull and ,due to a lack of processing power, usually in a quarter size screen. It did have some classics like Popful Mail, Lunar 1+2, the definitive english version of Hideo Kojimas Snatcher (really recommended to Lucasarts adventure fans and anyone who enjoyed Pheonix Wright, it's also easy to pick up on abandonware sites), Robo Aleste and Sonic CD (which I never liked, remeinds me of the soulless Sonic advance). It even had some decent FMV games which were few and far between. Ground Zero Texas is meant to be very good.

sprinkles

Your right, it was the combination of the 2 systems that I was thinking of.

Googling it I found a sega star wars game for it....looked ok.

Retr0gamer

Played it on an emulator and it's terrible.

Dont be at yourself

There was a Knuckles game too right? Supposed to be alright. Still a 2d side-scroller though.

The mind boggles with Sega.

Retr0gamer

Yep. Called chaotixs. Not great at all either. Feels like a tech demo idea that didn't work tacked on to a full game. Found a release list and the only good game on it is virtua racing which is supposed to be the best home conversion. I remember really wanting one just to play Doom when I didn't own a PC. Got a PC instead, thank god.

There were 5 32X Sega CD games released. All crap and all available on the Mega CD anyway. Everyone of them an 'interactive movie'.

The mind boggles with Sega as well. Got a Sega Saturn with action replay 4 in 1 and it's amazing how many stupidly good games they had for it but didn't release outside japan. However the Dreamcast really didn't deserve to fail.

Cuddlesworth

What did that cartridge at the front of the n64 do? And wasnt that supposed to have a dvd attached on the bottom.

Retr0gamer

The cartridge on the front could be replaced with an expansion pak of 4MB of Ram which was required by some games and increased resolution and made more modes available in other.

A disk drive attachment was released for the N64 in japan. It used disks quite like zip disks. It was really unpopular and didn't make it to the western markets. I've heard the F-zero game for it was fantastic. It had a track editor as well. Most games in development moved to the N64 again or the Gamecube.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64DD
http://www.planetnintendo.com/nindb/nus/nus_can.shtml

Bit of linkage for you.

Cuddlesworth

Thanks, i remember going out of my way to buy that for perfect dark.

Pretor

krazy_8s wrote:

Thanks, i remember going out of my way to buy that for perfect dark.

Yeah i remember looking at the back of the game box and then rushing out to buy the expansion pack before Smyths closed..... Good Times.....:rolleyes:

djmarkus

So, was the mega CD add on for a mega drive still 16 bit then? there where some good games for that...

madrab

[nerd]the sega cd fmv games (night trap & sewer shark) were originally created for hasbros ill-fated vhs gaming system the NEMO which i think was scrapped as it was way too big & expensive[/nerd]

po0k

ADuC812 >> *

Who said the 'bits' meant the width of the memory bus? And said it rather 'matter-of-factly'?

Because you weren't entirely correct, and looked rather the fool as the person you were trying to correct was as much on the button as you were.

Dabh, shush like a good sugar-filled young lad , Tom is right. Bits are an anachronistic performance metric, more to do with marketing than anything else. Today systems have gained chunkier, more discrete function blocks.
Memory data channel width, addressing space, issue size etc. all mean very different things, yet still use bits as a descriptor. Things get even more complicated when you've got multiple multi-issue cpu cores and a discrete GPU (and perhaps soon PPU).

Besides, my money's on the Revolution.

BlitzKrieg

Yep. Called chaotixs. Not great at all either. Feels like a tech demo idea that didn't work tacked on to a full game.

not great is an understatement, it is without a doubt the worse sonic franchise game in history. People can scream bloody murder about sonic heroes, shadow the hedgehog and the advance games. They can even drag up sonic drift and spinball.


Chaotix makes 3 mistakes

1. its mind numblingly boring (every level feels the same no heart at all)
2. Its mind numblingly long (5 acts to each level which all look and play the same)
3. Its mind numblingly easy. (Last Boss is a joke that can be killed with eyes closed.)



Doom may have sucked on the saturn. But the saturn version of quake is the best conversation of the single player i have played outside the PC. Dunno about the mutliplayer didnt know anyone else with a saturn (dadum dshh!) Same with the Saturn version of Duke Nukem.

gamer

Basically in theory the ps3 should be more powerful than xbox 360,but i think the games will be better on the 360 cos it it has 3 pc processors multithreading,but designed from standard pc architecture,the ps3 is a completed new design,using new cell cpu processors,needing a completely new programming language and tools,so it will be harder to program cos all prammers will have to start from scratch,any good pc designer will be able to program for 360 without too much difficulty.its like the apple pc,for every apple programmer theres 50 ibm pc programmers.so in this case i think the no of bits is irrevalant,although i think both systems are 64bit compatible.john carmack said the ps3 will be extremely dificult to program for.64 bit cpu means it can adress gigabytes of memory and run many threads or programs simultaenously,more than a 32bit cpu.i dont care if ps3 has 128bit core if its a dog to program for.

Dont be at yourself

Yawn.

sprinkles

Retr0gamer wrote:

However the Dreamcast really didn't deserve to fail.

Never a truer word spoken.....they did nearly everything right...except sponsoring Arsenal

gamer wrote:

Basically in theory the ps3 should be more powerful than xbox 360,but i think the games will be better on the 360 cos it it has 3 pc processors multithreading,but designed from standard pc architecture,the ps3 is a completed new design,using new cell cpu processors,needing a completely new programming language and tools,so it will be harder to program cos all prammers will have to start from scratch,any good pc designer will be able to program for 360 without too much difficulty.its like the apple pc,for every apple programmer theres 50 ibm pc programmers.so in this case i think the no of bits is irrevalant,although i think both systems are 64bit compatible.john carmack said the ps3 will be extremely dificult to program for.64 bit cpu means it can adress gigabytes of memory and run many threads or programs simultaenously,more than a 32bit cpu.i dont care if ps3 has 128bit core if its a dog to program for.

Wow..got to line 2....

madrab

sprinkles wrote:

Never a truer word spoken.....they did nearly everything right...except sponsoring Arsenal




Wow..got to line 2....

your bro got there first

Retr0gamer

BlitzKrieg wrote:

the saturn version of quake is the best conversation of the single player i have played outside the PC. Dunno about the mutliplayer didnt know anyone else with a saturn (dadum dshh!) Same with the Saturn version of Duke Nukem.

Too bloody right. Lobotamy were programming genii. They were probably the only company other than Sega themselves that got near the full potential of the saturn. Quake even had coloured lighting and other effects that were better than even in the OpenGL version. It was also playable online using the net adapter. There was no PS1 version of Quake 1 and no fps game playable online. Also it looks almost as good as Q2 on the PS1. Lobotamy may be no more but I think most of them were on the team that gave us Metroid Prime 1+2.

Zombrex

THe "Bits" referrs to the size of the CPUs internal registers. A 16 bit machine can hold in each register (there are normally about 8 general purpose registers) twice as much bits as a 8 bit machine. It doesn't mean its twice as fast, but it means some functions can be performed faster. For example if an 8bit CPU has to add two numbers larger than 256 it has to do a number of tasks, where as a 16 bit CPU can do it in one.

The larger the registery size the larger the amount of memory the machine can contain as well, as the addresses for memory locations are also stored in the internal registers. But this was more important in PCs than consoles, as consoles tend to have far less RAM than PCs.

But really the "Bits" of the CPU was just a marketing ploy when the SNES and MegaDrive came out. The ad boys needed something that sounded like it was a lot better, and both the Nintendo and Sega happened to have put 16 bit CPUs in their new machines.

16bit = twice as many as 8 bits = twice as fast/powerful/cool/better games

In reality the CPUs were faster, but the increase in bit size used in their registry was only a bit to a part of that. The CPUs would have probably been faster anyway. Your Intel Pentium 4 sitting in your games PC is 32bit. And that is a bit more powerful than your 1995 Playstation CPU

It was also more important when the CPU did most of the work. Things started getting blurry when consoles started introducing dedicated 3D processors into the mix (and yes before anyone says it, I know consoles have always had dedicated graphics processor), and the CPU got less important. Also consumers got more aware that the "bits" meant f**k all, so the marketting has moved to new buzz words. Currently "Cell Processors" is the NEXT BIG THING (tm), even if, just like back in the day, consumers don't really knows what that actually means

sprinkles

madrab wrote:

your bro got there first

Huh...must have him on ignore

BlitzKrieg

It was also playable online using the net adapter.

that i didnt know. Goddamnit the more i look at it the more it feels like everything microsoft did right (xbox live, internal hard drive etc) Sega 'tried' and fecked up. IF only Sega had more money behind them.

byte

Marts wrote:

byte me!

You have been byte'd

stevenmu

As a practical matter the number of bits has more to do with precision than speed or power. For most cases 32 bits provide more than enough precision, so it's far better to have a CPU that can churn out many 32 bit instructions than one that can churn out less 64 bit ones.

gamer wrote:

Basically in theory the ps3 should be more powerful than xbox 360,but i think the games will be better on the 360 cos it it has 3 pc processors multithreading,but designed from standard pc architecture,the ps3 is a completed new design,using new cell cpu processors,needing a completely new programming language and tools,so it will be harder to program cos all prammers will have to start from scratch,any good pc designer will be able to program for 360 without too much difficulty.its like the apple pc,for every apple programmer theres 50 ibm pc programmers.so in this case i think the no of bits is irrevalant,although i think both systems are 64bit compatible.john carmack said the ps3 will be extremely dificult to program for.64 bit cpu means it can adress gigabytes of memory and run many threads or programs simultaenously,more than a 32bit cpu.i dont care if ps3 has 128bit core if its a dog to program for.

I'm getting pretty sick or hearing this kind of uneducated uninformed crap. I don't care which system is 'better' or which has the better games but I'd at least like the arguments to make some kind of sense.

First of all, in most main stream games the biggest factor in their production is the resources i.e. the models, textures, sounds etc. All are almost completely irrelevant to the type of machine they're being run on, the only thing that makes a difference is making sure that the machine in question is capable of handling them.

Secondly, when it comes to the actual programming, again most mainstream games are made by teams of developers. This means that there is a lead developer(s)/architect(s)/designer(s) and then there are the dev team. The dev team are assigned tasks to do, such as write an AI routine. To do this they need to have very little idea of the overall system they're writing it for, they don't care if it's one x86 CPU, 3 powerpc CPUs or 8 of whatever the cell thingys are called. All they need to know is what goes in one end and what's expected out the other end, and from that they figure out the bit of code in the middle to do that. The only real difference to them is the language it's coded in, from what I've heard both platforms are mainly using C++ variants so no problems there. Any language difficulties after that are going to be down to the development teams themselves, not the platform/console.

Thirdly, the problems which do come with multi-core/muli-CPU systems are inherent to all multi-core/muli-CPU systems. It doesn't really matter if you have 2, 3 or 8 cores to worry about, the design problem is still the same. Altough really I should put the word 'problem' in inverted commas because it's not that big a problem, the solutions are well known, and it even solves other problems that they've had to work around all this time.

Fourthly, no one writes code for particular CPUs any more, it's all written for particular APIs and engines. Both systems actually share a lot of the same APIs and engines, for e.g. the AGEIA (sp?) physics API is available on both as is the Unreal 3 engine. The only slight edge the X360 has here is that it uses a new version of the DirectX API which'll already be familiar to PC devs, but all graphics APIs tend to be fairly similar because they're all based on the same principals. It's not very hard to switch from one graphics API to another, in fact remember when PC games used to give the option DirectX/OpenGL/Glide ? Game companys wouldn't have put that in if it was very hard to do.

I can't remember what John Carmack actually said, but iirc it was at the same time as announcing some MS exclusive deal and I think what he said was pretty vague and has been taken out of context and had way too much read into it ever since. ?

SouperComputer

back to the MegaDrive being 16 or 32 bit, the answer is that it was both!

As were many 68k machines, namely:

Commmodore Amiga
Atari ST
Certain Early Macs

The chip basically handles "internal" stuff in 32bit blocks and "external" stuff in 16bit blocks.

Motorola 680000

CiDeRmAn

I am lucky enough to own copies of both Quake and Duke Nukem on the Saturn and they are very very good, although my heart will always be with my copy of quake that ran on my old 200mhz PC with a rendition graphics card, a great patch made the game super scary, while most people were still playing it on software.

DEATH TANK FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I guess in this day and age its a description that no longer has any resonance with todays gamers, the whole 8/16/32 bit means nothing to them, given that they were still in nappies when the Snes was launched, figure it never really mattered anyway, the games were what it was all about, although, it has to be said, the console or computer you owned did seem to create a certain tribalism, akin to football team devotion amongst everyone. Are people putting this type of childish view aside, they are around here, but only because fanboys are reported and banned, as they should be!

SouperComputer

funny that doom/quake come into the conversation.

Only last night I installed Jdoom to bring back some memories. Doom + Megedeth, Im a happy bunny.

[edit] I then installed doom on my PDA, only for it now refuse to boot up, crapfork. [/edit]