Has the Cell peaked? If no, would it work for next gen? - More questions inside

[HoloDust]

Gilgamesh said:

drkohler said:

The best you can throw at an A10 APU is a second HD7760, you get about 150% performance of the single A10 (on PCs).  You will fall waaay short of a high end PC. Most game benchmarks I've seen can't reach the targeted 1080p/60Hz goal, sometimes considerably. It is the old problem of crossfiring two GPUs. Usually you are better off buying the better single GPU than Xfiring two weaker GPUs (and pseudo-xfiring is not nearly as good as "true" xfiring). This all applies to PCs, of course. Direct drivers on the register level will considerably improve speeds on A10 consoles, but high quality 1080p/60Hz games.. I just don't see it.

But like all CPU's and GPU's that go into gaming consoles (and now APU's), they're all modified slightly somehow to benifit the console. So a modified A10 and modified HD7760 should provide us with graphics we have yet to see on a PC right?

No (and BTW it's 7670, not 7760) - combined performance of that combo (A10-5700 with 7660D@760MHz) is 12.5GPixels/s; 37.4GTexels/s; and 1352GFLOPS. No amount of "modification" can put that to level of 7970 with 33.6GPixels/s; 134.4GTexels/s and 4300GFLOPS (which is, if we take a look at ATI GPU history and recent rumours, almost what will 8870 will be pushing when it launches probalby early next year). Check out Superchunk's thread, I posted table there several days ago for quick referencing:

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=136756&page=87

I'm afraid all next-gen consoles will be vastly inferior to high-end PCs, even at launch, not to mention few years from now. Which for PC crowd could be either very bad or very good thing, depending on what approach (some) developers take.