Digital Foundry takes a closer look at Breath of the Wild

[Pemalite]

Azuren said:

Iirc, didn't the Cell Processor help with the workload of the RSX? I could have swore I read that somewhere.

Allow me to repeat.

Pemalite said:

the CPU was mostly used for basic framebuffer/overlay effects.

It wasn't involved in setting up triangles, it wasn't performing complex shaders, heck it wasn't even involved in any texturing. (Unless you count texture decrompression with Megatexturing, but that happened on every platform.)

So what was it used for? Well. Anti-Aliasing. It was a post-processing effect that would blur the edges of geometry and it was used to great effect, otherwise known as Morphological Anti-Aliasing, it was cheap.
It would also apply colour filters, possibly do some blur effects, but mostly that was all simple post processing stuff.

People are under the impression the Cell could render entire game worlds, well. It can't. Not unless you want PS1/N64 levels of graphics, it's simply not fast enough for heavy duty graphics rendering, never was.

And you know what? Despite the Cell having "crazy" levels of theoretical performance, that theoretical performance advantage was never truly realised in the real world, in games. - Halo 4 and Gears 3 showed the 360 could compete with the best the PS3 could offer.