PS3 games and the lack of 1080p

[MikeB]

Entroper said:

MikeB said:
@ Entroper

There is always an advantage to unified shaders.

Unified shaders is an advantage, but not an advantage over the PS3. If you have 50 people who can either be a doctor or a dentist, does not mean there's advantage over having 100 people, 50 of them only being able to be a doctor and 50 people only able to be a dentist. You get more work done in the latter case. The RSX/Cell vs Xenos/Xenon is like such a situation.

Except it isn't 50+50 vs. 50, it's 48+8 vs. 48.  :P  And I never claimed Xenos was faster!  I claimed the difference is less than the specs would indicate at face value.

And then there's also the Cell. The SPEs are way more flexible compared to current vertex shader engines. A SPE can create or destroy vertices, assemble primitives, and so on. Cell + RSX (bandwidth, etc) > Xenon + Xenos

From an older study: 

"This paper studies a deferred pixel shading algorithm implemented on a Cell-based computer entertainment system. The pixel shader runs on the Synergistic Processing Units (SPUs) of the Cell and works concurrently with the GPU to render images. The system's unified memory architecture allows the Cell and GPU to exchange data through shared textures. The SPUs use the Cell DMA list capability to gather irregular fine-grained fragments of texture data generated by the GPU. They return resultant shadow textures the same way. The shading computation ran at up to 85 Hz at HDTV 720p resolution on 5 SPUs and generated 30.72 gigaops of performance. This is comparable to the performance of the algorithm running on a state of the art high end GPU. These results indicate that a hybrid solution in which the Cell and GPU work together can produce higher performance than either device working alone."