The Cell's unique architecture ensures it won't be utilized very much by multiplatform developers. Just look at God of War III. Sony Santa Monica have somehow managed to get even anti-aliasing running on the Cell. This is pretty much impossible with a multiplatform engine.
The Cell is just fine, if not great, for game development, so long as developers can focus entirely on its strengths.
The issue is that only first parties will actually do this. Even when FFXIII was still exclusive, and they were developing it with exclusivity in mind, they were still developing it on an engine that was designed to be multiplatform. Crazy ideas like running AA entirely on the CPU (or the entire lighting engine, as is the case with Killzone 2) just aren't going to work.
So long as third parties are unable to make use of the ps3's biggest asset, multiplatform games will continue to look equal on both platforms at best, save a few certain areas (and aside from the rare exceptions like FFXIII).
Btw, here's a quote from Sony Santa Monica's Tim Moss on the God of War forums:
For GoW3 we are not using screen space ambient occlusion. We are using a couple other versions of AO including baked for environments, AO texture maps and a pixel calculation that creates better shading on normal maps in indirect lit areas.
Number of dynamic lights - ALOT! that is one of the big features of our engine. We built it around being able to use up to 20 dynamic lights per game object. The light can be big or small, it doesn't matter. In the end, i believe we support up to 50 dynamic lights per game object. We are not using a differed lighting scheme. Our lead programmer Vassily came up with this amazing system during pre-production, us artists love it!!! We can place lights in Maya and have them update in realtime in the game on the PS3, its like being able to paint with lights. Lighting is fast and a very enjoyable artistic process.
Off the top of my head i don't remember exactly poly count numbers for the character. We use as many polys as it takes. My guess for Zues, Kratos and Hades is 25-30,000k triangles. Again, off the top of my head, texture sizes for these character is quite big. I think we are using 2048's for the lower, upper body and head. Each character gets a normal, diffuse, specular, gloss(power map), AO, and skin shader map. We also use can layer textures to create more tiling, and use environment maps were needed, etc.
Yes we will be using Hollywood actors. I believe on another forum thread it includes the names.
Yes we will be referencing GoW1 and GoW2 in the game - i won't give away what it is, just hope you guys dig :smileyhappy:
And one from his twitter:
Essay Pro