MikeB on 07 July 2007
As has happened in the past, but even more so this time, these two systems will differentiate themselves by their software, not their hardware.
I think it will be both, the SPEs are truly something. BTW they all have access to super ultra fast dedicated local memory units and in addition to this the GPU and CPU don't only have access to the video RAM, but also to the ultra fast XDR memory which operates at 3.2 Ghz. You could compare this to Amigas nearly doubling in overall performance when upgraded with fastram, as the lowend models only came supplied with a much slower shared graphics/CPU memory model by default. Combine this with the sheer storage capacity of Blu-Ray for streaming high quality textures and 7.1 audio, I think we will soon see PS3 games differentiate themselves from XBox 360 games in terms of game complexity and performance.
IMO it's quite remarkable that many ported XBox 360 games perform so well without their game engines even tapping into the power of the SPEs (some early PS3-only games like the visually pretty Genji 2 did't use them neither), which provide by far the bulk of the PS3's performance potential.
