| HappySqurriel said: I would say trading ease of development for theoritical processing power which may never be obtained is a poor trade-off ... Developers have been working with both processors long enough that they're approaching the maximum performance that they will ever see, and both processors are performing in a similar range. |
No, as research documents show the real world performance of the cell can be very close to its theoretical peak. Developers are not yet done with moving their code which runs on the PPE over to the SPEs, this will yield good performance boosts and when done there's still a lot of headroom.
The Xenon is reaching levels you can't expect more major gains. Gears of War 2 will be just about as good as it gets, Gears 3 will have to find other ways to impress other than processing potential, maybe like tapping into a harddrive more efficiently to move data around quicker.
The burden of extra work on the Cell is an advantage to the 360, by developing for the SPEs developers will achieve better performance from the Xenon's 3 cores using their game engine, however the Cell has 8 processors, so there's just more potential when developers decide to fuly tap more processors than there are available on the 360.
