| curl-6 said: So with GPU advantage on 360's side, just how much more capable was Cell than Xenon in practical gaming applications? How much of an actual edge did Sony's expensive and developer-unfriendly historical solution buy them in the CPU department? |
Significant. But only if developers leveraged the Cell fully.
Most developers would leverage the Cell to do post-process effects like Morphological Anti-Aliasing, texture decompression and so forth in real time... Everything that would normally be done on the GPU on the Xbox 360.
It did mean that more cycles on the GPU were available for other tasks on the Playstation 3.
But let's be realistic here, it didn't give the Playstation 3 a generational advantage, far from it... But it did mean that some games exhibited some impressive visuals, like Uncharted and The Last of Us, even if they relied heavily on baked details like Halo 4.
The Xbox 360 GPU was more programmable than the nVidia alternative, it was actually ATI's first efforts into GPU compute and the PC variant of that GPU (X1800) had Folding@Home and Seti compute support so it made up for the CPU shortfall in the end.
It's just the Cell made up for that.
Either way, both consoles were extremely DRAM limited by the end of the generation, which was an issue compounded more on the Playstation 3 due to it's non-flexible split DRAM pools.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
