Since when did PCs start using tripple core Power PC processors with a unified memory architecture? Beyond that, back in 2005 and 2006 Epic was talking about how the Unreal Engine 3 was being designed to take advantage of the PS3 ...

The truth is that their is a massive gap between the theoritical and real world performance of the PS3, that gap is smaller for the XBox 360, and (to date) there has been nothing released on either platform which really shows it to be dramatically more powerful than the other platform.

I guess because they all think the 360 was maxed out with Gears 1.

Again a storm in a glass of water? They seem virtually identical to me despite the extra development time:

http://www.videogamer.com/videos/player.html?vid=2219

As expected, some improvements Sony made to the engine are universal (better cache hits for example), so this benefits other platforms as well. But the Unreal engine is more a 360 focused game engine like I said in the past, Epic made statements which seems to indicate it's unlikely they will bother to get the most out of the PS3 architecture through PS3 orientated game engine enhancements. So their games and likely games based on their engine will probably remain roughly on par, as expected.

Is anyone honestly surprised by this o.O? UT3 wasn't all that great looking on the PS3 in my opinion, AND they talked about how they just managed to get UE3 working on the PS3 >_>;;; Fact remains that most UE3 games run better on the 360, and now UT3 comes out, a year later I might add, and it looks better than the PS3 version? Is this seriously news? And they're still saying it's got "hiccups" on the 360? Pathetic if you ask me -_-; I think today's going to be a sloooow day on VGC xD

That's actually what Epic claimed when they released Gears of War, but IMO their claims should be taken with a grain of salt. They also claimed Gears couldn't be done on the PS3, we all know that's not very honest for them to claim.

as happy pointed out real world performance vs theoretical, is something both consoles are having to deal with, the bigger problem for both outside of optimization is the reativly small amount of ram, the cell chip design lends itself to needing efficent and fast instruction transfer for peak performance, if they had more ram, or a unified memory arch, it would show performance gains.

really though this gen the winner was IBM, having had all three contribute to the development of diffrent chip designs to help ibm further their control on the server powerpc/power line chips.

You're right it wasn't very honest.  As you would say, "they could do it but they'd have to make sacrifices."

What sort of sacrifices and why? Note they also stated UT3 looks better and runs better on the PS3 than Gears of War did on the 360 depite bigger worlds, being faster paced and providing more freedom of movement. More likely with the state of the game engine right now they could do improvements.

LOL @ Eurogamer.

Tim Sweeney, the lead programmer for the Unreal technology and one of the best 3D engine programmers in history, has stated that there are some things that can be done efficiently on the Cell's SPEs and some things that can't efficiently be done on the Cell's SPEs.

When GPUs first came out, he talked about the usefulness of a good general purpose CPU.  For game engines, general purpose time is a necessity, and the 360 has more than the PS3.  That the main reason why most games look and run better on the 360.