PS3 and 360 graphic's capabilities. Explain the difference to me please.

[TheBigFatJ]

In every system and for every problem, there are a different set of bottlenecks. These are the areas of the system that are slow relative to the rest of the system in attempting to generate a solution.

The PS3, for example, has very little fill rate. It has approximately a Geforce 7600, and if you know anything about video cards, that's extremely slow these days. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, has a fair bit more fill rate (still, very, very slow compared to modern computers) which allow you to either:

(1) Fill a higher resolution
and/or
(2) Add more texture passes (lighting effects, bump mapping, other effects).

This can explain differences in games like Fight Night Round 3.

Another common bottleneck is memory, but the differences between the PS3 and the 360 are very small here, and it's a complicated discussion.

The Cell and the Xbox 360's Xenon processor cores are *much, much* harder to compare, as they're almost entirely different. The Cell has 1+7 processing units. It has the core, and seven extra processing units that can assisted with floating point calculations. This means that these seven aren't full processing units in the sense that they can do anything, but rather that they can solve a specific type of problem. Specifically, they're good at calculating values that need high precision, the type of which are quite common in games. Sony calls them SPEs.

However, the Cell's bottleneck is often its central / general purpose processor. When it has problems that can be solved entirely with the SPEs easily, such as folding @ home, it can generate huge performance. And developers can rewrite parts of their game engine to rely primarily on the SPEs. Things like physics translate well. Other areas don't translate as well, but they can still be farmed off to the SPEs at a performance penalty. This doesn't matter, however, because you have so many SPEs that you don't mind the performance penalty. Some problems, such as Artificial Intelligence, are not suited to be run on the SPEs and require the central processor in the Cell.

The Xbox 360's processor, on the other hand, is much simpler. It's a 3-core solution, effectively offering about 3 times the performance of the Cell's central processor and none of the benefits of the SPEs.

Direct comparisons here are nearly impossible. The Cell is very clearly better for some things, and very clearly worse for others. On paper, the Cell's numbers were phenomenal for the time when it was released.

Any reasons why the Xbox 360 version of GTA has more resolution and the PS3 version seems to look better offered here are most likely speculation, although some of it can be informed speculation. Frankly, I don't think the game looks good on either system. They're both video game consoles, and both woefully slow compared to modern PCs.

Since I don't look to video game consoles for amazing graphics (for obvious reasons: they suck at them), I don't care if there are slight differences between games.