Whats your point on the video card? The video card is dedicated. The ram isnt but developers can still use both pools of ram if needed.

As for weaknesses, the forced shaders is a major issue with the Xenon. There is reasons why the RSX even though its slower can produce better shadows. Its because ATI's unified shader pipeline doesnt have stable drivers to alloweven and balanced transfers of light and dark. Overall yes the Xenon is a stronger video card but only slightly.

Another issue is that the Xenos (CPU) doesnt have enough power in a single core to be dedicated to assist with shading. With the CELL developers have 6 micro-processors to dedicate to different areas so a single SPE to assist with the overlaying of shaders in an environment. 

Now to shock most people. The basic concept of a tri-core processer like the Xenos is quite brilliant. I'll commend Microsoft for managing to get the piece of hardware in before any chip designer thought of it. AMD has yet to release their tri-core's which will basically be their quad-core with a disabled core. Sadly core vs SPE, an SPE wins due to raw number crunching power. .

Well, the PS3 is extraordinarily good at some kinds of processing, which is probably where a lot of these people get these claims. It's basically a server chip, after all. Unfortunately, it's damned near impossible to utilize the SPEs to anything close to their maximum for gaming purposes. There is bound to be idle time because not everything in a game will be processing to its max at any given moment and it's not like you can just turn one SPE off for one function and have it do something else in the meantime (unlike server computing) because at any time, that first thread may be needed again and there may not be an available SPE to process the information. It also doesn't help that the bottle neck of a single core SPU hinders the overall design (which is why it was originally intended to be a dual core SPU).

Hell, I doubt that most people here know that the Xenon and the Cell are based on the same damn architecture. While the 360 went tri-core, the PS3 has SPEs instead. I even think they're the same clock speed (though I'm not sure about L1 or L2 cache levels for each, those could be different).

I brought up the video card because it's an integral part of the PS3 design. It's pointless to bring up a gaming machine without talking about the GPU; it's too important.

Good point about using an SPE for shading; that is a good way to use the power of the PS3 for something that requires constant use.

The maps for R&C aren't that huge. Look at Halo 3. Some of the environments in that game are massive and Bungie fit it all on one DVD. Claiming that the game would need 3 DVDs is ludicrous and if you have any sort of data that backs you up, I would love to see it. You're also ignoring the advances in compression technology over the past few years. I'm willing to concede that the game might require two DVDs but even that is a stretch in my eyes and hardly makes it impossible to put the game on the 360.

http://www.mc.com/uploadedFiles/Cell-Perf-Simple.pdf

I have no company Bias. Both systems offer something the other does not. I own both. But when it comes to the power of the Cell, anyone who says it's not much faster than what's in the 360 has for a CPU is just uneducated, or biased based on branding.
For FFT, the CELL screams, based on the type of math it does well (the linked article will show you what I mean). People will learn how to harness that for games.

@RocketPig
I don’t think the Distribution medium has anything to do with the game, I think where the CELL adds value to the visuals, is in the animations and lighting. The Video card on the PS3 is lacking, but if you take advantage of the Cell to do most of your pre rendering, you can greatly offload what the GPU needs to do.

So for example to others (I am sure RocketPig gets this), Most games will define the geometry in the CPU, and load it into the GPU, it will load up all the textures, lighting, positions, and many other things into the GPU. The GPU will then figure out what needs to be displayed on the screen. It removes all the polygons that people don’t see, applies lighting to the textures, and does a thousand other things.

The SPU’s of the Cell can do a lot of this for you, before you ever get to the video card. This means less bandwidth is needed between the CPU and the GPU (which is lacking on the PS3 compared to the 360), and the overall graphical capabilities of the system is much better (even though the PS3’s GPU is a little slower on its own compared to the 360’s). The issue today is in order to take advantage of this, you need to code the methods yourself. It’s never been done before (well, now it has, but last year, it was new). As these tools develop and get distributed, games will improve in leaps and bounds. The 360’s development paradigm is well known, and while optimization will continue as time goes on, the effective results will be less. (this last line was for Omac, not you RocketPig)

The character models, and lighting effects on R&C take a lot more CPU+GPU power to produce then the 360 has. I hate to bring it up, as the game sucked balls, but Lair is another great example of offloading a lot of what traditionally is done with the GPU to the Cell. That game could never be done on the 360 either (and thank god for all 360 owners for that).

x360 don`t have more powerfull GPU, it`s a MYTH (listen to burnout 5 team podcast).

If you think, that x360 is on PAIR with PS3, then show me games with better graphics in such genres:

Uncharted - tps.
Ratchet - 3D platformer.
GT5 - driving game.
KZ2/R2 - FPS.
FFXIII - jrpg.

on x360.

Thank you.

If after MGS4, FFXIII, KZ2, GT5, R2, LBP, GoW3 Wii will outsell PS3 by 2x times WW monthly, then i give up.

@ MrMaffo:

Hahah on the Lair comments. As time progresses, I will be interested to see if developers can produce the scale of a game like Lair on the PS3 while actually rendering the entire thing (which Lair did not, hence the "sprite problem" if you approached an enemy too quickly) and with an acceptable framerate.

I agree about the maximum potential of the 360 vs. the PS3. IMO, the 360 will top off sooner than the PS3, partially because of its simpler architecture, its age (devs are now well into their second games with the system), and by most reports, its superior developer tools.

The PS3 has its radically different architecture going against it, though in the end, it is probably marginally more powerful than the 360. A lot depends on how effectively developers find the platform to be and whether their budgets can/will take advantage of the power in the Cell (which will need to make up a little ground because of the RSX's disadvantages), whether Sony improves their development tools to be on par with Microsoft's, and most importantly, whether the system starts selling well enough to last long enough for developers to get the experience needed with the Cell architecture to take advantage of the system's potential.

Overall, there are a lot of "ifs" in these statements and unless the PS3 takes off soon, I doubt we'll see any games that will outclass 360 games, excepting a few of Sony's own first party "showcase" titles where budget isn't as much of a concern. Even then, it's hard to say if we'll ever see anything more substantial than what we saw with the PS2/Xbox.

well said MS have no interest in the consumer with all the extras you have to buy

Its not beating the PS3 and the only reason its making money is because they make it so cheaply even the Wii has disc sucking thingy

and the 360 has a crappy disc tray 

 Sorry it's just false. 

Sorry the SPE's don't come with magic.  Also please never use Lair in any example.  That game ran like crap, so does that mean the CPU ran like crap?

 Another thing I have to bring up is about disk space.  How big is a game for PC?  They are not really restricted in terms of space because of HD install. They can have a wide range of system specs, and use high res textures and sound.  The biggest game I have on my HD is 8.2GB, which a DVD can handle with no problem.

 So I don't understand about people saying Xbox360 is so restricted because they use a DVD.

Just calculated it out. PS3 will pass the 360 in 558 weeks at the current pace.