I actually love the Cell, and I was so glad to have the opportunity to work with it during my last semester at college.  It's an awesome piece of hardware engineering -- the only things I mock are Sony's advertisements and fanboys who overstate its usefulness.  The Cell is certainly much better at raytracing than most other CPUs, but that really doesn't say much (if anything) about its usefulness in terms of improving graphics in games.

I don't think it really needs much to proof its usefuness in terms of improving graphics.  The beautiful games that have already been released speak for themselves.  As for the other stuff, that's pure fun.  People get too worked up over it though.

The Cell seems to be great for scientific applications, folding@home and other scientifical developers got great performance out of it in a short time. However, it seems to hamper game developers.

I don't think we'll see many developers proving (or disproving) that the Cell is good for programming games unless PS3 sales take off. Until then, multiplatform will remain the norm and not much effort will go into using the Cell's potential advantages.

Think about it - PS2's architecture sucked, developers agree on that. However, they had to learn it because the console was so damn successful. It doesn't seem like Sony will be so lucky this time, not many developers want to mess with the beast they created.

 Ummm ... WTF ? Nobody cares . Who will win the next-gen format war is at this time the biggest issue . Will it be HDDVD or BRD ? Nobody knows .

No body cares about graphics ... well hello Gears of Wars , Call of Duty 4 , Ratchet & Clank Future ... most of this game if wouldent have the best graphics yet , they wouldent sell far as well ... so you should try again ... with a new statement of course ... 

for a console it doesn't matter if the other one can handle a little bit more, the difference has to be significant. nobody cared the ps2 had the worst graphics. I believe this generation the differnce is even less between the 360 and ps3 than the difference was between the ps2 and xbox.

Another what the PS3 hardware can "potentially" in "theory" do thread? Oye... Call me when you put this into practical use in a game longer than five hours and developed within a reasonable price range.

 Ahhh another post just oosing with usefullness :) oh well heres you call! Ratchet and Clank futures, using a good ol updated version of the resistance engine :) putting in easilly over 10 hours ^_^

Did you watch the video?  It's a technical demonstration.  There's nothing theoretical about it.

Thanks for the unnecessary insults.

Please don't come again.

I take it no one watched the video with Half Life 2 ray traced using an 8 core Intel system? At least that was all done inside one box.

The graphics shown on the car in this video were not that impressive.

There is a newer video, about 3 months old.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKqZKXwop5E