Your technical opinion on Blu-Ray and the Cell as found in the PS3

[KBG29]

@haxxiy
Thank you.

@slowmo

As I said, and haxxiy put more clearly, RSX has more raw power than the 360. The biggest advantage the Xenos has is the 10MB of super fast RAM on chip. That allows it to cut down a lot of badwidth needed when accessing the system RAM. This is very necisary in the 360 because the system shares its memory between the CPU, and GPU which gives both chips less badwidth to work with. Good devs had remedied the lack of on chip memory in the PS3 by using the Cell to perform the frame buffering which the Xenos does in its super fast RAM. This leaves the RSX to focus on doing more of the things it is good at, making the chip much more effective.

Another advantage of the Xenos is the pipeline tech. It is not split like the RSX between shader, and geometry pipes. The Xenos pipes can do both, and depending on the needs you could run 40/8, or 8/40 ratios. This type of tech is much easier to program for and, it in turn is much easier to pull close to peak performance. In PC's this is great because devs can't dedicate to one exact GPU, but on consoles this becomes less of an advantage. Since devs are getting to spend years on the RSX, they are able to reach deeper and deeper into it and pull out the porformance the chip is capable of.

One more thing I have to mention, because many people don't realize it, is that RSX has access to as much memory in the PS3 as it wants. Many people think it only can access its 256MB, but it has direct access to the 256MB of XDR also. This gives the RSX about three times the external bandwidth of the Xenos. The Cell can not access the RSX's memory though.