LOL, a true next gen experience! :P

It all becomes so obvious now!

http://www.bitrebels.com/technology/microsoft-first-to-bring-us-360-degree-touchable-holograms/

http://blog.gadgethelpline.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Xbox-720-Fortaleza.jpg

" In an era where the likes of Naughty Dog and Sony Santa Monica have defined the graphical state-of-the-art with Uncharted and God of War, Xbox 360 finally has its own shot at the title - and it's a genuinely worthwhile, lavish and occasionally even breathtaking experience."

That statement is pretty powerful and should dispel the rumour PS3 was more powerful. Its all to do with the developers. And Finally after 7 years we get a studio from Microsoft who will push the console.

Results are breathtaking.

Gears of War Judgment should aswell look amazing and Forza Horizon already looks best than anything on Ps3 anyway.

While I really don't want to contribute to the PS3 vs 360 graphics war flame, as they both are pretty limited and even by todays standards, I do have to ask...

How did Sony screw up the PS3 performance like this? A year in R&D development is an eternity. A year is the difference between 3DO and PS1. Dreamcast and PS2. PS2 and Xbox... Even if we consider PS3 and 360 a graphical draw, which I think they are with their individual strenghts and weakneses, I have to see this as a failure on the Sony side. 

All they had to do is buy a 360 in 2005, and say to their engeneers..."Look at what this is capable doing, and make sure PS3 does it better."

Not going into techno-babble, but it's simple in my opinion:

Cell, only serves for great lighting in regards to game graphics, otherwise it's just not a suitable architecture for games, fortunately some devs have learned to cope well though, RAM is another key issue, they would have been better going with one 512mb stick than their two 256mb's. And well the GPU was never stellar and just implemented way too late when they figured two Cell CPU's just wasn't going to work.

Overall just a too exotic plan for a machine that didn't need to be.

I don't think it is that simple. R&D should take years from what manufacturers usually say.

Besides, they are both pretty different and it is doubtful if Sony's initial target was to just be better than xbox 360. They had blu-ray, cell all that stuff, they had different plans.

Not as simple as that.

90s - 2000s a lot changed in terms of graphics chips. Basically, producing a graphics chip in-house become too expensive and specialized - The PS2 isn't vastly more powerful than the Dreamcast in terms of graphics performance, it's just the CPU that is much faster when programmed correctly (much more effort needed though).

The same situation has occured with CPU technology now, there is no massive strides being made. Graphics chips are advancing becuase it's been determined that people really are willing to pay $1000 for a graphics card to make mass production viable.

We are still limited by the fabs in the far east though. nvidia and AMD essentially churn out the design to a company who makes the chip, these companies that produce chips based on other's desings aren't up the high standards and haven't been able to shrink the process as much as say Intel who do everything in-house....

Anyway, Xbox 360 and PS3 are based on same generation of graphics chip, just using competitors AMD = Xbox 360, nvidia = PS3. The desktop varients of the chips they were based on didn't see a proper generation upgrade and redesign until a couple of years after release, there wasn't really anything "better" for Sony to use, taking thermal and power requirements into account, this itself was never even a problem with the PS1 or Saturn of course.

If you go back to 2001 - 2002, there was a new Gefore full redesign every year.

....Bit of random gibbering there, but puts across the answer in a sense ;)

i dont think its sony fault, they basically spent too many time on Cell, time that wasnt worth the money.

Pretty much this, although it wasn't anything to do with R&D but more about being contracted to nvidia, who genuinely just didn't have anything better available that would fit a thermal model and power requirement for a closed box console. R&D wasn't the issue.

The 7xxx tech from nvidia was notably inferior to AMD/ATI, lacking in pixel and vertex shader performance. This wasn't rectified for 2 YEARS when the 8xxx series was released which blew AMD/ATI out the water.

Not slagging of the PS3, we all know the Cell when utilized to it's maximum if superior the CPU in the Xbox 360 and we all know the Xbox 360 has superior GPU and we all know PS3 exclusives look markedly better than Xbox 360 exclusives. (Except Halo 4...at last!)