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Sharky54 on 19 March 2010
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Garcian Smith said:
Booh! said:
  1. Those examples are not incidental, IBM sells cell-based supercomputers (the ibm roadrunner it's the second fastest and the fourth most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world). Cell was mainly developed for such tasks, not just for the ps3.
  2. The cell is a specialized processor, it's not a processor for pc, where you have lots of low demanding tasks running in background. It's very good at doing a few hard tasks, not at doing many simple tasks.
  3. People needs software on their pc and there isn't much software designed for the cell (besides physics simulator and mathematical libraries), nor fancy OS's like MacOSX or Windows.

It's point (2) that I'm getting at. Gigaflops are not a useful or accurate measure of a CPU's capability, and including the Cell in the PS3 rather than a traditional CPU was clearly a gimmick on Sony's part. Many games on PS3 struggle to even reach a steady framerate at 1280x720: BioShock, Modern Warfare 2, Ghostbusters, GTA4, Guitar Hero 5, Marvel UA2, MGS4, Prototype, every PS3 Ratchet & Clank game, Saint's Row 2, Star Ocean 4, and Tekken 6, among others, actually have to render at a lower resolution and upscale to 720p. Many of these games have PC ports that can swing 30+, and in some cases 60+ FPS at true 1080p on a modern mid-range gaming system, with graphical effects and AA that the PS3 could never dream of. And these are games developed on an open hardware platform, as opposed to the PS3's closed, proprietary system that the developers are free to optimize to their heart's content.

To those saying that the PS3 is more powerful than a modern gaming PC: Tell me why, for example, Modern Warfare 2 needs to run at an upscaled 1024x600 w/2x AA on the PS3, while a system sporting a $200 Core i5-750 (linked benchmarks use an i7-920, but there's no practical difference between the two for gaming) plus a Radeon 5770 (a mid-range card that can be had for about $150) can pull a steady 60 FPS on the same game at 1920x1200 w/4X AA and max settings? Keep in mind that this is affordable, mid-range hardware too - I'm not even touching what, say, a Radeon 5870 could do for the same game.

I am pretty sure RAM has a huge thing to do with that. a HUGE thing. Also video card effects the FPS then the processor. I have an I7 quad core and I can't get more then 40 FPS out of crysis on high settings. Because my graphics card is meh. Who knows how well the PS3 would perform with 4 gigs of ram and a graphics card that is on level with that.