Has the 360 reached it's limit?

[NJ5]

MikeB said:

IMO there's still headroom, but game engine design is about optimal. You can still perform assembler optimisations, a launch game like Kameo already used up 85% of CPU cycles. PS3 games will grow much faster and further, there are still a lot of game engine design gains to be made on the PS3 (moving PPE and RSX workload onto the Cell's SPUs). The PS3 just has a lot more horse power under the hood.

Also DVD is getting way too small (texture, audio quality sacrifices and/or game length/diversity sacrifices) and if your game has to run without a harddrive that's also limits some potential (I am thinking about caching rather than install).

I thought Halo 3 would push the 360 near to its limits, but that was clearly not the case. I think Gears of War 2 will be that game.

The number of used cycles is completely irrelevant for console games. Since developers know all hardware is uniform, there's no incentive to perform unnecessary optimizations to keep the cycle usage down. They could put the GPU rendering fairies outside the screen, and no one would notice a difference.