Happy Squirrel: Sega pushed their first party stuff a lot harder than Sony did, creating the same kind of problem Nintendo creates for developers, they have to compete with a console designed by a company that exclusively makes games. Nintendo's first party games significantly outsell the 3rd party ones, as is the case with the Saturn and the Dreamcast. In a sense their is a "conflict of interests" since the first party who cannot survive if they run a deficit must not be outperformed by the 3rd party. Microsoft has gotten their shit together this generation by expanding their portfolio beyond FPS's and PC ports, so they could be a potentially benevolent "ruler" this generation. The PS1 generation would not have been as smooth if Sega would have been in charge.

The only platformer I like of Sony's is Crash Bandicoot. Spyro is childish... Sly is a theif who lives in a van, and hangs out with a fat hippo and a handicapped turtle. Ratchet is okay. Kiind of gets boring after a while. Jak and Daxter was good, but a little too childish. Jak 2 and Jak 3 are insults to the genre. They could have been much better. Oh, and the characters couldn't be any uglier in Jak 2 and Jak 3. Even Jak looks hidious in Jak 2. Kind of looks like Aquaman in Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis for the Xbox.

HappySqurriel, haven't you posted enough? LOL. That's insane! Write a post in my "Post if you have 900 posts!" thread. You deserve it!

It would have been even worse if Nintendo was in charge.

The PS3 is too bloated in my opinion. Other companies tried to make multimedia center consoles in the past, all have struggled.

Anyway, whether the PS3 is superior to the 360 in hardware remains to be seen. But honestly from what I have seen, game quality seems pretty much the same. For games that look better on the PS3, they run faster on the 360... seems to me like they are equal in power or close to it. This doesnt surprise me really given that MS has a better grasp computer software and hardware since that is all they actually do. Not that sony is bad mind you, but ive had Sony computer products before and they generally werent that great.

I have to correct at least one thing in the OP: selling at a $200 loss does not necessarily mean you actually get $800 worth of product. It could also mean that the system costs more to make than it needs to be, either due to improper engineering or over-engineering, or bad contracts. That last part is how the Xbox lost so much money.

i will write here some facts:

1) about POWER of RSX:

RSX
5 shader ALU operations per pipeline per cycle (2 vector4 and 2 scalar (dual/co-issue) and fog ALU)
27 FLOPS per pipeline per cycle
68 billion shader operations per second theoretical maximum ( ((5 ALU x 24 pixel pipelines) + (2 ALU x 8 vetrex pipelines)) x 500 MHz )
364 GFLOPS ( ((27 FLOPS x 24 pixel pipelines) + (10 FLOPS x 8 vertex pipelines)) x 500 MHz )
24 filtered and 32 unfiltered texture samples per clock
Maximum polygon count: 333.3 million polygons per second (in HS RSX _alone_ 3MT = 90MT/s)

Xenos
2 shader ALU operations per pipeline per cycle (1 vector4 and 1 scalar, co-issued)
10 FLOPS per pipeline per cycle
48 billion shader operations per second theoretical maximum (2 ALU x 48 shader pipelines x 500 MHz)
240 GFLOPS (10 FLOPS x 48 shader pipelines x 500 MHz)
16 filtered and 16 unfiltered texture samples per clock
Maximum polygon count: 500 million triangles per second (in DR _with cpu_ only 4MT per frame with 30fps = ~120MT/s, 4 times less)
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=31532&page=3

2) Aand about RSX and Cell:

Taken from beyond3d:

Capcom Developer:
In Lost Planet, each character is 10-20K polys. A VS robot is 30-40K polys. A background is about 500K. With shadows and other hidden rendering cost, it's about 3 million polys per frame.

Heavenly sword developer:
Different platforms require different care, would not be surprised if ppl working on 360 and suddenly dropping their datasets onto RSX would not observe good numbers (and viceversa)
Now..I can't see how RSX, if used in the right way, should be so limited at vertex processing: in HS we easily render 2-2.5 MTriangles per frame at 30 fps without being VS limited and without making any use of CELL to speed up vertex shading and I know for sure that being more clever we could even go faster..(just using the GPU)

The numbers quoted about HS are slighty wrong..cause a few days a go I realized there's a bug in the code that computes the triangle count: in some cases it's more close to 3M triangles per frame mark than 2M.

Regarding cpu, yes its totally different arguments. The 360's is a very standard setup, a bunch of cores that can all see main memory. The advantage to this is that lots of thread coded written over the years can be ported to it easily. For example, Valve (the Half Life guys) are writing an entirely threaded engine for the PC. When it's done, porting it to the 360 will be easy. How about porting it to the PS3? Nope, won't work, it's a totally different setup. The PS3's main core is basically the same, but its spu's can't see main memory. Each one has 256k that it can work with, so you need to rewrite your code to pack things into 256k chunks, feed it to the spu's to process it, then copy it all back to main memory. In other words, you've gotta rewrite your code.

Now before I get jumped on here let me briefly mention the downsides. The 360's cpu setup is painfully easy to code for. But, they really aren't all that fast. Worse yet, all three cores use the same memory controller so the three cores are not three times the power of the one core on the PS3 due to some overhead. The PS3's spu's on the other hand are monstrously fast. You need to setup your data correctly to work with them, but once thats done then yes, the 360's cpu setup is crap compared to fully working spu's. I say fully working because most current games out there barely even touch on them, it will take time to re-write everything. I haven't done spu coding....yet. I will be though in 2007 which will be pretty cool.

dude, as of right now ps3 isnt underrated, it blows. lol

buzz off with the stupid specs geez

go play games on your ps3..
oh..wait..

Did i hurt your feelings ? Oh, i am very sorry. =)))

And why this specs are stupid? just because you don`t like them? LOL.

Here, something more about ps3 - http://www.beyond3d.com/content/interviews/38/1 :

Scott Kirkland: During the development of MotorStorm our team learned a great deal about PlayStation3 exploitation and production process refinement. While much of this knowledge fed directly into our systems, some items had to be put on hold due to their more radical nature. As we progress, these areas will be subjected to some serious re-factoring to provide increased performance both at runtime and during development.

SPU usage is a good example. The progressive development of corresponding debugging and profiling tools made thorough exploitation of this powerful resource quite challenging for the less technically biased members of the team. In the aftermath of MotorStorm, with mature tools at our disposal, we’ve been developing mechanisms to make the PPU and SPU’s power and parallelism far more accessible to our entire team, re-thinking data organization and algorithms in the process. MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we’re aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!

B3D: Cell's ability to assist RSX in rendering operations has been a topic of much debate and speculation of late.  Was Cell used in Motorstorm to perform any lighting, vertex, or other transform work?

Scott Kirkland: We don’t use the Cell’s SPUs in this way at the moment.  All of our lighting and transformation work is done in the RSX’s pixel and vertex shaders.