what? did you really read my post?

1. i only said it closes the gap. never said on par. do you really know what you are arguing?

2. heck, i used dx and openGL in quite a number of projects. you call me not understanding them? lol.

3. that's what i read and it makes sense as xbox is made by ms. it  makes sense also becasue 360 uses ati card which has unified shaders. so what's wrong with that? so i really have to say xbox sdk is based on dx?

4. again, i never said console can run the same lighting model. i said i couldn't tell much difference in game presentation, though i admit i never compared the two side by side.

While GPU's on a pc are far beyond the console GPU's

The cell cpu can still theoretically calculate more GFLOPs than any consumer available CPU.

By boosting the GPU with Cell (uncharted 2, killzone 2, GOW3)  Very special things can happen...

Unfortunately only 3 companies have really stepped out of their comfort zone to develop an engine utilizing the cell properly..

While a PC will always be a bigger beast of a machine, ps3 still has a lot of life in it... xbox... not so much in my opinion.

And flops are fine and dandy for blade servers, NASA, ect, but its not very useful when you're trying to run a game engine on it. Plus add in multiple threads, memory read/writes, the OS sucking up one SPU, ect and that nice round 2tflops number is something you'll never see outside of synthetic benchmarks. But that doesn't really matter, game developers care more about integer performance.

For example, the PS2 could hit 6 gflops or so on its CPU, but the xbox could only do 1.5 gflops. Yet which system had better looking games?

actually if you look at official numbers for the top of the line CELL (better than the PS3 CELL especially at double precision)  you would see that it is capable of  102.4 GFLOPS double precision the top of the line i7s can do 107.55 GFLOPS (Intel Core i7 980 XE) in double precision calculations, so the CELL isn't actually on top any more. 

and for CPUs floating points aren't that important anyway where they are important is GPUs and modern GPUs offer over 250 GFLOPS double precision and will only get better as GPU designers focus more on double precision.

Oh I see, pulling one of those. I can do that too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4YpF9-mggo

GOW2 on PS2.

However you should know that the whole point about the CELL was scalability. Actually the 2TFlops of the benchmarks are very close to the real performance peak (unlike x86_64 personal computers).

HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

Good one bro.

After finally playing the game for a bit I can honestly say the game looks great, however, I hate the load times (I know they aren't long load times like MNR) but after that - what was it, 8 gig install.. I wanted no load times :P

LOL, it looks like Cobra 11 stunts...   

I'd like to personally say that the shots in the OP and many other screenshots in this thread are very misleading, it appears the brightness is turned up too high and the resolution and quality of the shots have been messed with. (I also like how everyone posts pics of the tracks that have no scenery because they don't have scenery in real life, and then complain about the lack of scenery)

I play on a 46" 1080P Sony Bravia LED HDTV and the game looks amazing much more rich and vibrant than shots being posted here.

Like any game it's not perfect, the shadows are a little rough, the crowds are sad (to be expected in any racing game) there's a bit of screen tearing. You can probably take any element of the game and find fault in it. HOWEVER, if you stand back and take a look at everything going on at the SAME time it is actually very impressive what they were able to accomplish. The reflections on the cars, even the standard cars are fantastic. The tracks in city enviroments are the most impressive. They are very vibrant environments, and simply astounding.

Finally, anyone can take a screenshot and find everything wrong with it, however when you're playing the game driving at 100mph you don't have the time to sit there and pic out imperfections because the screen is constantly changing. It's when you're actually playing that you see how beautiful this game is. I haven't gotten to the damage or premium cars yet and I'm impressed.

Honestly, if you don't own the game and a good HDTV then don't bother posting because you have no idea what you're talking about.